eXtra For Every Publisher

For many people, it is not the blog that brings about a change in the person’s life, but instead the secondary benefits of blogging.

Secondary benefits include book deals, invitations to speak at conferences, free products to review, and even employment opportunities.

I haven’t yet experienced most of the above list, but I have watched as the bloggers that I enjoy have continued to climb the social ladder and gain access to some of those great benefits.

I have, however, been given products, and access to services due to my standing in the blogging community, which was really exciting. I was able to give my opinion to my readers allowing them to make an informed decision. It also allowed me to “geek out”, which is something I don’t get to do often enough.

Why does blogging bring about such things? Blogs can allow a person interested in you, what you do, or what you have to say in a very quick, and focused way. Most blogs will give an overview of the writer’s work ethic, writing ability, and most importantly, your personality.

So, don’t think that just because you don’t know how to monetize a blog, that nothing will come from your efforts. From what I have read, more people are able to gain access to the secondary benefits of blogging than living off the money they make directly from their blog. Either way, it sounds like a good deal to me.

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One of the things that happens to bloggers far too often is writer’s block. People run out of ideas, and almost always it is because they did not plan ahead.

Once you select a niche, you need to spend some time mapping out your ideas, goals, and things you need to do. For this site, I spent about two weeks creating a long to-do list of the things I needed to do to launch the site, as well as writing up around thirty sections, and hundreds of post ideas.

Some post ideas are just subjects, or titles, and others have a few sentences or bullet points to make sure I remember what I wanted to say.

Why did it take me so long?

I wanted to make sure I had enough source material to really make a go at this site. I didn’t want to be all dried up in a week, and leave you all hanging until I found something new or interesting to say.

So many bloggers skip this step and get right into producing content, and they eventually have huge gaps in their publishing, or close down their blog, and neither route will bring you closer to becoming a reasonably paid blogger.

How do you come up with ideas?

The simplest way to come up with ideas is to create a list of twenty or thirty keywords to describe what you want to cover.

Say you picked shoes as your niche. Well, brand names would be a keyword, manufacturing would be another, and you could keep expanding into sub-keywords. Some of these will become your categories, and others will just be articles within your site.

Another step that you can take is to look at competing sites. Many times you will see something your competition has missed, or their information is so old that it isn’t relevant. I have come up with dozens of posts thanks to my competition.

How many ideas do I need?

Well, this is definitely personal, but I would say that you should have enough post ideas to last you three months of posting, whatever your post schedule may be. So if you are going to do thirty posts a month, you might want to write out a list of ninety items that you want to touch on.

You don’t have to systematically go through the list you’ve created; in fact, you would be better off to only use list items when you can’t think of anything better to write about. This will mean that you will have a much longer lasting site with an idea well to come to.

I also recommend adding new ideas when you have less than a months worth left, as you never know when you will come across writers block, or a super dead news week.

Summary

So if you are going to start a site, and you want it to be successful, planning is the key, and a list of post ideas will bring you much closer to your goals as a blogger, and set you apart from your competition.

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Copyblogger’s, Muhammad Saleem, has put up a great post on how you can reword sentences and remove extraneous words in order to shorten posts, and since pretty much everyone that reads blogs has no attention span, this should be required reading.

Is it worth the extra effort to ruthlessly edit? Well, if we take the time to omit needless words, sentences and paragraphs from an article or landing page, we communicate more concepts in less time and space. The point of brevity is not to say less, it’s to say what needs to be said effectively and concisely.

Editing, cutting out words, or even rewording sentences to reduce their length is something I still have to work on, but it is nice to see some easy to understand guides being written on the issue.

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Getting an idea, product or blog noticed can be quite difficult, and things like Digg, Del.icio.us, and others might help you get some attention, but one of the sources I have found to be the best way to launch something is good old fashioned word of mouth.

I keep a pretty extensive friends list on my various e-mail accounts, and instant messaging clients. I also try to keep a few lists of people that I think will like what I am working on, or cover a similar niche.

How you can say things, and the methods you can use to contact various people depend on how developed your relationship is, but from my experience, people respond better to personal messages, than mass e-mailing or putting together a professional sounding press release. Don’t get me wrong, a press release works great if you have little to no relationship with someone you want to inform, but don’t expect a response from those people, no matter how great your release is in your mind.

Conversation

The first people I talk to are family and friends. These are people I see here and there who might know someone that would be interested in the product, service or blog I am working on. I try not to make it the focus of a conversation, but I do bring it up for as long as possible near the end of the conversation. People seem to remember the last few things talked about much better than the first things talked about. I guess we all have pretty spotty memories.

Instant Messaging

For my second round, I like to tell people via an instant message client. I don’t pressure them into going right that second to check out what I am releasing, but instead I only explain the concept and ask them for feedback. People love to give their opinion on things, even if it is something they know nothing about, and they will be more likely to really look at what you have put out if you ask for their feedback.

E-mail

After I have done that with as many people as possible, I move onto e-mailing various people. I write about three different e-mails, each with their own level of formality and tone. I want to make sure I am sending e-mails that have a business tone to people I don’t know well, and e-mails that are friendlier to my friends. I then try to personalize each e-mail with a sentence or two. This takes a fair bit of time, but much less than writing a custom e-mail for every person, but will most likely garner a much better response than mass e-mailing them all.

Blog

The fourth and final step is writing about it on my blog. This is really the least personal step of the whole process as I am just broadcasting. Any feedback I get, I try to respond to, and create a dialog, anything to spread the word of what I am doing farther and faster. This step usually brings back the least feedback, but sometimes the most traffic to whatever I am doing. This step also requires that your blog be a platform for your projects. If you skip this step, try to make sure someone else blogs about what you are doing. A broadcast like this can really help spread your idea, product or blog.

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Early on in my blogging career, I was planning on starting my own blog network. I thought that I knew better, and could do much the same as what Darren Rowse had done by making some niche sites, and writing on them. I was so naive that I thought I could turn a profit on the sites in less than half a year.

I named the network Digital Life News. I set up a bunch of blogs under different sub-domains all with the same main design. I was planning on targeting the Canadian market, a group that hadn’t seen much attention in the blogging world, and I thought I had what it takes. I was quickly proven wrong. I had ideas, a great domain and passion, so what was missing?

Patience

It seems like such an easy thing, but I didn’t think about the long term, and I didn’t have the patience and really the persistence to make something like this work.

Had I really sat down, and thought about each step of the process in greater detail, I would have seen that it could take me a year, maybe more before the network was making more than the cost of hosting the sites, and even then it might take a long time before the network was recognized in the community as worthy of attention. I would have also seen that I should have focused on a few niches, rather than casting a wide net.

Help

I was planning on doing it alone, and as I mentioned before in Starting a Blog Network, no one is an expert at every skill that starting and managing a blog network requires.

I couldn’t write on all the niches I had planned, at least not at the quality level that would help grow the network. I wasn’t very good at monetization nor at managing others. I actually hired a friend of mine that was tech savvy at one point, but I couldn’t pay him enough, nor was he really interested in writing about the news and information that he found, and thus, he stopped after only a month or two.

I should have found great people that were interested in blogging to help me, which leads me to my next two points.

Networking

I didn’t really know anyone in the blogging community. I knew Darren, and a few others, but I wasn’t constantly talking with them, nor was I someone they came to talk to. I didn’t have anyone that could help me get the word out about what I was doing, and without being able to properly network, I could tell early on, that I was quickly losing momentum.

I have learned this skill more and more over the last two years, but I am still no expert. I shift between being someone that likes to stay quiet by myself, to wanting to be the center of attention. This has been something I have always struggled with.

I knew people that were amazing at networking, and I should have found ways to network with them. They could have passed around my name, and what I was doing, making my network much more of a success.

Money

One thing that some networks need is seed money. It was something my blog network needed badly as more than anything else, I needed money to hire writers to create content. I also needed money to create buzz through contests, or advertising on other sites. All of the things I needed to bring my network to the masses required money, and that was something I didn’t have.

Had I more friends interested in writing, or maybe more of a celebrity clout, I could have forgone the money required on writers for the starting phase, and if I had better networking skills, I could have maybe secured some advertising or items to run a contest from other sites or businesses, but alas that wasn’t the case.

Closed Up Shop

So after a few months of running it, and doing the best I could, I closed Digital Life News, as a blog network. I currently use the name as my business name. I learned a lot through the process, and found out that I belonged more as someone one or two steps from the top of the blog network hierarchy, rather than top dog.

I still believe that anyone can start a blog network, and I think that most can be successful at it, but if you don’t have the proper skills, talents, or friends, then you better have the money to find people that do.

Hopefully, a few of tidbits from my experience will help you avoid your blog network failing.

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