How Your Blog Can Score You Free Travel

This guest post is written by Anthony from The Travel Tart.

When I first started my travel website in 2009, I just wanted to get my travel writing out there, because I was frustrated with the way traditional media worked. Little did I know that having an online presence would lead to opportunities for press trips to all corners of the globe, and I did this from scratch!

In 2010 alone, I went on press trips to Fiji, the United Kingdom and South Africa. I have also recently become partners with a major adventure travel company that will provide more opportunities for press trips in the coming year.

When I talk about press trips, I mean trips where all expenses such as flights, meals, accommodation, and activities are covered. Considering I only started my blog in 2009 with virtually zero knowledge of how the Internet worked, that’s pretty good!

Would you like to use your travel blog to travel the world? This is what I’ve learned from my experiences.

Blogging has advantages over traditional media

Traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and television have a scattergun approach: they broadcast all sorts of information to everyone, but this information isn’t relevant or interesting to all of these eyeballs.

However, being a blogger with an online presence means that one can use multimedia such as writing, photography and video for the website. These media can be used to portray the same story in different ways.

The blog media offer numerous benefits over traditional media:

• Speed: bloggers can post something about an experience on the day, and start attracting traffic immediately. Traditional media people have to write the story, submit it to an editor, wait for approval, and then have the piece published—a process that can often take weeks or even months
• Using photography and video footage can show an experience, instead of telling it. Newspapers and magazines can’t do this. For example, try writing about an experience such as bungee jumping off a perfectly stable rock ledge for a 70 metre freefall. This video communicates the experience much more effectively.
• You can create multiple articles from one trip. I normally do a blogging campaign for these press trips by producing numerous posts, with each one focusing on something different from the trip. The number of posts per trip varies depending on what I experience. As an example, I’ve created 15-20 posts for a two-week press trip, and scheduled these to publish over time.
• The biggest benefit of being a blogger is that you can attract targeted, long-term Internet traffic that has an indefinite shelf life. For example, if someone is Googling “South African Adventure Travel”, you can be sure they’re specifically looking for information on that topic. Also, because people are specifically searching keywords via search engines, this means the traffic consists of people who are interested in these topics, and are therefore more likely to take notice of the information you provide. It’s laser-focusing for your content!

Now I’m going to assume you already have a travel-related blog, or a blog with a strong focus, so I’m not going to tell you how to write travel posts. Instead, I want to explain the techniques I’ve used to build my profile as a travel blogger with the organizations I’ve approached and had sponsor my trips.

Get started

I sell the above benefits of having an online presence, and promote what I can do for a company or tourist commission—and back it up with evidence.

For example, I’ve turned up to travel exhibitions in my town because there are usually tourism commission and other travel industry stands there. Then I start talking to someone at the stand, as they’re usually a public relations employee. This is how I scored one of my press trips.

Also, I use business cards and hand them out as they’re relatively cheap, and I’ve found they’re a great icebreaker.

On the press trip itself

I’ve often been the only travel blogger for most of the press trips I’ve been on—and that means I can be a writer, photographer, and video production person all at the same time!

However, the trips provide exposure to other travel-related contacts, which expands my network and opens up more opportunities—ironically—in traditional media! I’ve also received great feedback from these guys about how video can capture a travel experience so well.

Be proactive and follow up

I have followed up all of these press trips with a report that details the Internet traffic my reports have attracted, video views achieved, and Google Keyword positions for the organization that paid for my trip. Along with this information I include traffic strategies the organization might like to consider, such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc.), and so on. This all builds up a body of evidence for my clients, and an even strong track record for me.

Your blog is your advantage

Having an online presence can give you a number of huge advantages over traditional media.

I feel that the biggest advantage is that the Internet is quantifiable. You can provide clients or trip sponsors with traffic statistics, information on where traffic comes from, and even data on how long visitors stay on your site.

Getting on the first press trip is the hardest. But if you can demonstrate a track record of attracting targeted Internet traffic beforehand, your chances of scoring that first one will be much higher. And once you have that track record, you’ll be invited on more press trips! This is how your blog can create opportunities that lead to free travel.

If you’ve managed to score free travel thanks to your blog, what other tips can you add?

Anthony writes about the funny, offbeat and downright weird aspects of world travel today. For more information, you can visit his Facebook Page or

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How to Instantly Kill Laziness and Boost Blogging Productivity

Something terrible happened.

I got lazy and stopped attending to my daily writing and reading duties as an online entrepreneur.

On one of my blogs I haven’t written a single post since December 2nd.

To say I’ve dropped the ball is a massive understatement.

What the hell do you do when you have a few sites going that have tons of potential and are even gaining momentum, but suddenly, a mad scientist injects you with the lazy bug?

Do you just sit there and watch it all go down?

If you want to ensure your online properties have any hope for the future you can’t allow yourself to be sucked down the whirlpool of complacency and indifference. Doing so is guaranteed to make anything you’ve worked hard on go absolutely nowhere.

But that’s NOT what we’re in the game for, right? We’re not doing this for our health. Let’s be honest here, we’re writing post after post, reading books and blogs and all the rest of it so that we can gains tons of readers and make the bloody mula.

You with me on this?

Laziness can hit anyone

We may enjoy what we do. But that’s not enough. Let me tell you something… the lazy bug can infect any and all people regardless of passion. And if you let it, it can destroy your dreams.

I wish I could say this laziness and complacency that overcame me was a result of my busy schedule, but the reality is, it was due to my lack of will.

To be perfectly honest, I hit rock bottom. Not on drugs or alcohol mind you. But on incessantly watching YouTube videos, reading tweets, and in general, wasting time like my life depended on it.

Hopefully you’ll never get as bad as I was. And luckily there’s a technique that can get you out of laziness and into productivity even if you haven’t reached rock bottom.

Overcome resistance to work with this technique

The solution to inertia is putting yourself in jail.

Not the kind of jail you go to when you steal a Twix bar from the local 7-Eleven, of course.

What I’m talking about is called the ‘jail of productivity’. This jail, my friend, will guarantee that you get serious work done.

And the best part is, it won’t let you out until you’ve actually accomplished something.

All you need to do to put yourself in the jail of productivity is simply set a timer and work non-stop until it sounds. This technique permits no excuses and leaves you with nothing in its wake except hardcore productivity.

How setting a timer saved me from laziness

Realizing I was letting days go by without getting much work done, I committed myself to setting a timer every day and working non-stop until it sounded.

By doing the above, I eliminated all outs available to me. I couldn’t watch another YouTube video, I was on the clock! I couldn’t check twitter; that’s not allowed while the timer’s running.

Using a timer took me from rock bottom laziness to becoming a diligent worker.

I began my laziness recovery program with setting a timer and reading important blogs for 20 minutes each day and writing 30 minutes each day. The timer guaranteed I got 50 minutes of focused work in every day. That may seem small to you, but it’s a testimony that I’m on my way to full and complete recovery from my laziness addiction.

Why setting a timer is the best way to get you to work

If you’re in the planning stage of getting to work, this can last for hours. “Preparation” can consist of watching YouTube videos, reading the news, eating, TV, almost anything.

But we all know the truth… the “preparation stage” to getting to work is nothing more than procrastination disguised as necessity.

Setting a timer, on the other hand, kills preparation. Setting a timer gets you right to work!

It also makes the work you do concrete. If you merely say you’re going to work on something, you have no idea how much time you’ll be investing into working. When work time is undertermined, your mind gets discouraged because it begins wondering how long and dreadful it’ll end up being which leads to procrastination.

But when you set a timer, committed to working for an allotted time, you’ve created a time frame that’s absolutely concrete. There’s a glorious light at the end of the tunnel which continuously entices you toward completion of your goal.

Where to find an effective online timer

I’ve actually created an online timer called Tick Tock Timer.

It’s specifically designed to kill your procrastination and get you to work without all the nonsense.

I know it’s ironic that the very creator of a tool to beat procrastination fell into a whirlpool of non-productivity.

But it just goes to show you, any tool at your disposal, no matter how effective, is useless when you’re not using it.

If you’ve contracted the lazy bug, putting yourself in the jail of productivity (setting a timer) just might be the solution.

Give it a try.

About the Author: Bamboo Forest created Tick Tock Timer, an online timer that helps you stop procrastinating, get to work, and stay focused.

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Effective Free Link Building Strategies

Backlinks are one of the most important factors to consider when you are trying to get a good rank in search engines for your blog or website. Backlinks are often called Seo fuel and they are the most important off site optimization methods. In this article I will tell you some effective methods which can be used to build backlinks fast and easy.

Content

If you have unique and quality content then people will probably link to you. If you are looking for websites related to Technology News, the first web site that probably comes into our mind is Techcrunch. Almost every Tech websites links to Techcrunch why is that? The answer is simple, because Techcrunch delivers quality and unique content. The TechCrunch website has a massive amount of content published on an hourly and daily basis.

Commenting

Leaving comments on relevant blogs could get few backlinks but don’t leave spammy comments or the moderator will delete it and you will be banned from leaving future comments. Instead leave thoughtful and meaningful comment. Not only will this contribute to the overall blog experience, but it will also help in getting people to read your comment, thus encouraging them to visit your site.

There is also a wordpress plugin called comment luv which automatically places a link to the commentators last blog post. Many blogs are currently using this plugin to increase comment activity. All you have to do is look for blogs with comment luv plugin and leave meaningful comments. Personally I don’t use this method because it’s very time taking and instead I invest time in making quality content for my guest posts.

Link Exchange

Exchanging links is one of the most common methods to gain backlinks. While link exchanges are beneficial, search engines pay more attention to one way links. Another alternative is to do a three way link exchange which is more beneficial and the most importantly search engine gives more importance to it rather then a reciprocal link.

A Word on Do follow

If a blog has a “no follow” attribute, it means that search engines will not follow the links off this individual site, which means that even if you manage to get backlinks from a website/blog, you won’t receive any link juice. Search for the websites with Do follow attribute and ask them for a link exchange instead. There is a Firefox Addon called Do follow 1.1 which tells you what links are Do Follow or no Follow.

Buying Links

If you are too busy to invest the necessary time and effort to build quality backlinks, there are many services out there that can provide the service for a price. One of the popular place to buy backlinks is Text Link Ads where you can find tons of websites selling links, though these types of methods are usually frowned upon by search engines.

Guest Posts

Writing guest posts on website and blogs can gain a lot of quality backlinks, and most importantly, they are free. All you need to do is to find a good website related to your niche and send a quality guest post. Some blogs offer a single backlink if their page rank is very high and while other blogs with lower page rank may offer two or more backlinks. If you have not written any guest posts as of yet, and are writing first time I suggest you go after smaller blogs rather than the larger blogs because they may be more accepting of your post. However, in the end it comes down to the quality of your guest post content.

Article Marketing

There is no doubt that article marketing is one of the most effective ways to get one way backlinks. Article marketing is just like a free advertisement that’s lasts for life time. The easiest way to get started is by submitting original content to article marketing directories, which I have listed below. Many of these article directories have very high page rank and alexa rankings, which may cause your articles to rank very high in the search results.

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
SearchWarp.com
ArticlesBase.com
iSnare.com
selfGrowth.com
Buzzle.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Web-Source.net
SelfSEO.com

Top Commenter

There are lots of blogs using the Top Commentator widget and if you are one of the top commentators you will get a backlink from all pages on the blog, or how many pages are displaying the widget. High PR websites such as Quicksprout.com and Johnchow.com also use these kinds of widgets.

What are your preferred methods for free link building? Please leave a comment with your resources, comments and experience.

This guest post was written by Rafay Baloch, an Ethical hacker, Web entrepreneur and Internet marketer blogs at Techlotips and also the author of the book A Beginners Guide To Ethical Hacking.

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8 Tips To Launch Successful Challenges at Your Blog

This guest post is by Celestine Chua of The Personal Excellence Blog.

Earlier this year, I launched a challenge called 30 Days To Live a Better Life (30DLBL) on my blog. This is a 30-day challenge where participants complete one task a day, for 30 days in the month, that will help them live a better life. When I created 30DLBL, it was breath of fresh air—I’d not seen any such personal development challenges around at the time, and it was fun to do something different rather than just write articles every week. I was very excited about my challenge, and thought I’d probably get about 100 people joining in, or 200 people max.

I was proven wrong. The minute the post went live, there were already a handful of participants. By the end of the day, there were over 100 participants. The number slowly exploded to 200, 300, 500, 800 … to over 1,200 excited participants all over the world, all ready to transform their lives in the next 30 days! Not only that, but people were tweeting about 30DLBL, blogging about it, sharing it on Facebook, and telling all their friends about it. Some readers even specially created new blogs just to blog about their 30DLBL experience. Needless to say, the response totally blew me away!

The 30-day challenge was extremely successful, and many participants’ lives changed in unimaginable ways that month. Many of them rediscovered themselves on a whole new level, set new goals, and created new plans for their future. It was so successful that I later launched a guidebook and a workbook on the upgraded version of 30DLBL. The book sold over 200 copies in less than two weeks of launch, and last month I did a second run of the challenge, with many more runs planned in the future.

Some bloggers have also been inspired by the success of 30DLBL and are launching their own 30/31-day challenges, and it’s great to see them getting down to engage their communities.

Why run a challenge?

First off, you might wonder, why run a challenge? There are four key reasons:

1. Create a breath of fresh air: At that time I launched the challenge, I’d already been running The Personal Excellence Blog for about 1.5 years. After 1.5 years of writing article after article, I wanted to have a 30-day challenge as a breath of fresh air, as Darren did with his challenge, 31 Days To Build a Better Blog. The challenge was designed to complement what I write at the site. It was very much welcomed by the readers.
2. Help readers apply what you teach: Even while we may be writing down the most important insights in our articles, it’s a whole different thing altogether to apply that advice to real life. Some readers may not fully comprehend what you’re writing, while some readers may not know how to apply your insights. A challenge helps them take action.
3. Engage readers: A challenge lets readers become involved. It makes them feel like they’re a part of your site. Launching 30DLBL helped me get up close and personal with my readers in a completely new way. At the end of the 30 days, I’d developed a very close bond with many of my readers.
4. Form a community: With the launch of 30DLBL, I saw the first signs of a true community forming around my blog—a community where readers interact with each other, care for one another, and really help each other grow. This made me very excited about what’s ahead.

Eight tips for running a successful challenge

Here, I’ll share with you eight tips to help you run a successful challenge on your blog.

1. Evaluate the role of a challenge in your blog

Some bloggers may prefer to write articles, which is totally fine. Challenges are not necessarily for everyone. Figure out whether you do want to run challenges as part of your blog, and how regularly you want to do them. It can be a once-in-a-while project—for example, Darren runs 31DBBB at Problogger about once every few years. Or it can be a regular affair, which is what I’m planning for my blog.

I love interacting with my readers, getting up close and personal with them, and growing side-by-side with them, and I see a challenge as the perfect platform for me to know them better. Last month I finished a second run of 30DLBL with great success, and it’s now part of my plan to have three 30DLBL challenges every year. On the other hand, I launched a new 21 Days To a Healthier Me challenge in January ’11, where people all around the world get together to live a healthier life for 21 days. I’m planning more new challenges in the months ahead, to get more readers to join in and participate. Through these challenges, I’ve gotten to know my readers on a much personal level than I had previously with just writing articles.

2. Ensure you have a sizable reader base

Before you kick off a challenge, you’ve to ensure that you have a sizable reader base. The last thing you want to do is to have a challenge that no one’s participating in! Bear in mind that there’ll always be dropouts throughout the challenge, so if you have 100 people signing up, you might very well end up with only ten people towards the last week, and that will pull down the momentum. So the more participants you can get starting the challenge on Day 1, the better.

When I kicked off 30DLBL, I had almost 10,000 subscribers. I believe you’re good to go if you have at least 5,000 active subscribers, though I’ve seen people launch challenges with only 500 subscribers and they went well. In those cases,  the outreach was smaller by comparison, and the community, while small, was tight-knit.

3. Offer a tangible, compelling benefit

Your challenge should have a tangible, compelling benefit that draws people to participate. Since people have to dedicate time to the challenge, the benefit has to be something attractive. For 30DLBL, the benefit is about living a better life, and that’s something which was very compelling to many. After all, as growth-oriented people, we’re always looking for ways to grow and improve our lives.

Your challenge should be relevant to the topic of your site. It’s going to be quite strange if your blog’s about cooking and you run a challenge that’s on making money! Since I run a personal development blog, 30DLBL was a great complement to what I’d been writing at the blog. It was a great way to reinforce the ideas and concepts I’ve been sharing since the blog started.

Besides it being a direct complement, your benefit can be a subset of your site’s offering. Think about what your site is about, then brainstorm on the various sub categories that fall under the theme of your site. Are there any noteworthy topics worth starting a challenge on? The Live a Healthier Life in 21 Days challenge I just ran this month has been a great success. While some may think that health and personal development are unrelated, it works as healthy living is part of living a better life. People who are interested in personal development are the same people who want to pay attention to their health and fitness too.

4. Allow enough time for people to join

I posted the announcement post for 30DLBL five days before it started, which provided enough lead time for people to find out about the challenge, share with their friends, and join in. At the same time, I think it would have been better if I posted it earlier. Overall, one week should be more than enough time for you to promote the challenge and spread the word.

5. Set a proper duration: 30 days, 21 days—whatever suits

It’s up to you to design your challenge the way you want. I recommend making it a daily challenge, since it’ll be easier to follow. Duration-wise, I recommend 30 or 31 days (where participants can dedicate a whole month to it), or 21 days if you think 30 days is too long. 30DLBL was, of course, 30 days long, whereas my healthy living challenge was 21 days long. Anything longer than one month will be too long—participants will be likely to lose steam before it finishes.

6. Create channels for participants to engage with one another

A successful challenge is one that allows the participants to interact with one another—not just to interact with you. Establish channels for them to engage with one another. With 30DLBL, I initiated a twitter hashtag of #30DLBL, so that participants can connect with one another. I also created a new forum, with a sub-forum dedicated to the challenge so readers could have their own space to interact with one another. This approach worked very well. Participants used these platforms to give each other support and encouragement, and at the end of the process, many new friendships and bonds had been formed. Many of them added each other on Facebook afterward, and stayed in touch through the forums and Facebook.

7. Make your challenge tasks easy to follow

If you make your challenge tasks daily (which I recommend), you want to make them easy to follow. Don’t set tasks which take a week to complete. If your challenge is too tough, your readers may get discouraged and give up mid-way. This will defeat the whole purpose of the challenge to begin with! Make the tasks easy to process—break them up into mini-steps and spell everything out in layman’s terms.

For example, when I first ran 30DLBL, there were several tasks that made the participants feel discouraged, because they couldn’t finish them on time. Subsequently, they kept putting off the tasks and eventually disappeared off the radar. Hence, in my upgraded version of 30DLBL, I revised the tasks such that they could be completed in 30 minutes to one hour, if the person made an effort to do so.

8. Be in tune with your participants’ needs

Your participants are the backbone of your challenge, so stay in tune with their progress every step of the way. Observe what’s happening at ground level. If there’s something going awry, step in to help out. Throughout 30DLBL, my site received over a thousand comments from readers. I read through as many comments as I could and replied to all the questions that they asked. I also made a point of responding to as many participant comments as possible, so that they would be encouraged to share more. This created a tightly-knit community around my challenge.

I also noticed after four or five days in the challenge, some participants were falling behind. Hence, I introduced a three-day break after the first week, so the participants who were falling behind could catch up. It was very much welcomed and many participants were able to regroup themselves and get back into the challenge after that.

Moving forward

Challenges can be resource-intensive, but they definitely pay off. Your readers become more engaged, you help to make a positive difference in their lives, and you can build a community for your site. It’s up to you whether you want to create one, and what you want it to be about.

For me, running 30DLBL has been an extremely rewarding experience, and it’s not going to end there. I’ve planned a series of new challenges which I look forward to completing with my readers. Have you ever run, or considered creating, a challenge for your blog? Tell us about it in the comments.

Celestine writes at The Personal Excellence Blog on how to achieve excellence and live your best life. Check out the life changing 30DLBL program and live a better life in the next 30 days. Get free ebooks 101 Things To Do Before You Die and 300 Inspiring Quotes of All Time now by signing up for her free newsletter.

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The Sure-Fire Approach to Monetizing a Blog

Tweet

It can be frustrating building a blog for months only to discover it is almost impossible to monetize it when you try to do so. Many people start a blog because they want to make money from it and it won’t be a good thing to see all their efforts wasted.

As far as monetizing a blog is concerned I made a lot of mistakes I’m not proud of and my main reason for writing this article is to make sure those who read this article don’t make the same mistake. This article will be giving you some tips to ensure you get the best from monetizing your blog.

Decide Your Approach From The Onset

One great debate in the blogosphere is that of monetizing a blog. A lot of people have argued that monetizing from the beginning is the best approach while others believe it is not. When I started blogging I followed the monetize later approach but I discovered it wasn’t the best for me.

Don’t delay monetizing your blog because you’re unsure it is the best for you but sacrifice your time to see what will be better for you – If you’re confused you might want to take a look at some top, average, and new blogs in your niche and see which approach they follow. If you can’t find out what you need you can contact their owners to get more details from them.

A great way to decide which approach is better for you is by having a crystal clear understanding of why you’re blogging. If your number 1 reason for blogging is to make money from your blog you will get the best result by monetizing from day one because you will be able to learn a lot of things along the way and you will also be able to tweak your earning system in a way that will guarantee you stable results over time.

Know Your Audience

A major factor that influence your monetizing decision and the results you get is your audience. The way you will monetize a blog that talks about making money online and the approach you will follow will be completely different from that of a blog that helps you improve your English language. If you take a look at the make money blogging audience you will notice that they are used to clicking ads, paying for services and downloading digital products from almost any blogger but if you take a look at the English learning audience you will notice that they don’t just buy anything but are highly selective about what they buy; first, they are not used to buying digital products and secondly they don’t just buy from anybody but from someone they so much trust and respect. Following the “monetize first” approach will be highly effective in the make money blogging niche while following the “monetize later” approach will be the best option in the English learning niche.

Take Action

This is the problem faced by a lot of bloggers, especially those following the monetize later approach. I followed the monetize later approach as a blogger and my major problem was taking action, I will be telling myself that I want to create a services page to start monetizing my blog, I want to create a resources page etc. but the truth is that I never got started with anything. This continued for months and I never knew how much I was missing, I was able to force myself to take action and it end up bringing results I could never imagine. There is nothing much better than taking action, no matter what decision you take!

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Don’t Be Paralyzed By Media Consumption in 2011

“I will be a producer, not a consumer.”

Late last year a friend shared this resolution on Facebook. It caught my attention as being a great resolution that I think every entrepreneurial blogger could do well to have.

Have you ever been paralyzed by consumption?

As I write this post, it’s 11.49 a.m. on Monday morning.

This morning, I returned to my computer after a weekend off with the intention of jumping into some solid blogging. My plan was to start early (8.00 a.m.) and whip out at least five posts this morning and to start work on a report that I’ve been planning to write in the afternoon.

That was the plan, anyway…

The reality is that I’ve been quite distracted. It started on Twitter (I should never switch on Tweet Deck that early in the day!) with a link that a friend sent me to read. That link led me to another, and another.

This morning I must have read 20 articles and blog posts, scanned 100 or so feeds in my feed reader, watched ten videos, spent a good hour scanning my Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook feeds, spent another 30 or so minutes in forums, tested out a new plugin, and … well, you get the picture.

Everything I did was related to blogging and my business. It was all interesting. Some of it was even helpful, and gave me ideas I may not have otherwise had.

However, until right now, I’ve not actually produced anything at all today. This morning has been about consumption rather than production.

Is consumption evil?

Don’t get me wrong—there are times when you need to consume.

We all know that our bodies don’t function properly if we don’t eat well. Cars don’t run well without consuming petrol. Consumption is necessary.

We all need to consume to survive in a physical sense. In the same way, as bloggers we need times when we take in the ideas of others, and are informed by what others are saying—time when we soak in the latest trends and information in our industry.

There are also times where we just need to switch off from work, and consuming something fun and mindless can be good for us, too (anyone for Angry Birds?).

However, many people live in consumption mode to the point where they don’t produce anything.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve chatted with bloggers who have the following problems:

• not enough time to post, but plenty of time to aimlessly surf the web for fun
• too many distractions, whether they be Angry Birds, Farmville, Twitter, Youtube, or something else
• feeling the need to read every other blog in their niche for fear of missing an important development.

I suspect a “consumption” mentality is one of the reasons that many of us get to the end of a year and wonder why we didn’t achieve any of the grand plans that we had.

Consume to produce

Let’s return to the example of our bodies. The main reason we consume food is to gain energy—to take action. We eat so that we’re fueled to do.

The danger with food arises when all we do is eat and eat, and we don’t actually burn off the energy the food gives us. Consumption without some kind of action to burn off what we consume leads to obesity. And my experience is that the same advice applies to running an online business.

There’s nothing wrong with consuming what the Web has to offer, but take the approach of consuming to energize your own action and production and you’ll be in a much healthier space than if you’re simply consuming for the sake of it.

I resolve to be a producer, not a consumer, in 2011

As we enter into a new year, I wonder if perhaps we need to do something concrete together to get us on a path to production in 2011.

I don’t want to get to the end of this year and look back on the year as being one where I read a lot of articles, played a lot of games, and read and made a lot of Tweets…

I want to get to the end of 2011 and be proud of the fact that I’ve:

• created things that mattered to myself and others
• inspired others to better themselves
• added to conversations instead of watching others talk
• made the world a better place in one way or another.

I resolve to be a producer, not a consumer, in 2011. How about you?

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5 Lessons I learned from Writing Almost 300 Guest Posts in One Year

I started blogging in January of 2010, and I’ve decided to give what it takes to make my blog successful. This great desire and determination of mine has led me to do a lot of things, some quite surprising, which includes writing almost 300 guest posts in one year. After writing tons of guest posts I’ve learned a lot of lessons, and I wanted to share them with you.

1. Having Goals Matter

You probably have heard many bloggers say that having goals is critical to succeeding as a blogger; this same principle applies to guest blogging.

When I started guest blogging, I used the work hard approach instead of the work smart approach, I didn’t have a specific goal in mind and this led me to writing so many guest posts without tracking the results, it was after I have written so many guest posts that I discovered I’m not getting results.

Right from the onset, make sure you know what your purpose for guest blogging is because it will determine your approach. If your purpose for guest posting is to improve your search engine rankings your approach will be different from that of someone who wants to increase his/her blog subscribers.

2. Quality Beats Quantity

I wouldn’t have agreed with the above statement when I was still new to guest blogging, no wonder they say “experience is the best teacher”.

There were days I wrote as much as 6 guest posts and I write guest posts almost every day of the week, my main aim was to get my guest posts published on many blogs, which led to the quality of my guest posts suffering. I submitted most of these guest posts to small blogs and they ended up sending me very little traffic, some blogs didn’t even send me any traffic.

I didn’t discover the truth until one day, my guest post was published on an A-list blog which sent me thousands of visitors; it was then that I realized that quality beats quantity.

The bitter guest blogging truth many people might not want to hear is this, “submitting 5 guest posts to 5 “big” A-list blogs is better than submitting 100 guest posts to smaller blogs”. Most A-list blogs will send you thousands of visitors depending on the quality of your guest post while the majority of the small blogs will send you very little traffic, if at all.

3. Your Guest Post Will Determine How Much Traffic You Will Get

From my experience with telling people the benefits of guest blogging I’ve seen a lot of people who believe that writing valuable posts for other people’s blogs is a waste of time. They believe it’s better to have all their best posts on their blogs only.

The truth is, if you write an exceptional post on your blog it can go viral, but as far as blogs with little traffic are concerned, luck plays a very large role,

In order to get good results from your posts you must have a big audience, and one great way to do this is by writing for other, larger blogs. A guest post on a big blog can send you far more traffic than you’ll ever get in a week, no matter how great you think your blog posts are.

Another thing is that many people make a mistake of writing low quality guest posts for other blogs, as this ends up affecting them because it is either rejected or it underperforms on the blog they submit it to.

The better your guest post, the more traffic you get – and this factor might be even more important than the size of the blog you as publishing your post on.

4. It is Very Important to Work on Sustaining Your Traffic

When I wrote a guest post for an A-list blog that sent me thousands of visitors, I was so happy and I began to think I would be getting so many visitors from that period onward. How mistaken I was. A lot of factors will determine the percentage of visitors you’ll be able to sustain from your guest posts, some of these factors include the quality of your own content, your domain name and your design/user experience.

It is very important to work on getting as many visitors from your guest posts to subscribe to your blog because that is the best way to keep them returning over and over again.

5. Rejection Is Inevitable

One thing many people are afraid when they consider guest blogging is rejection. They wonder what will happen if the other person doesn’t like their posts. That is a pretty good question, but you should also know that being rejected is not the end of the world – as long as you will be guest posting you should always be prepared for rejection. What matters most is not the rejection but how you deal with it.

If a blogger rejects your guest post, try to face the reality and find out what can be responsible for your guest post being rejected. It can be because of your guest post’s quality, it can be because of too much grammar errors and it can be because your guest post is not in line with the style of that blog. If you can’t figure out what is responsible for your guest post being rejected try to get in touch with the blogger and ask him/her politely to tell you why your guest post was rejected so that you can improve on it in the future.

Share Your Thoughts

What do you think about guest blogging? If you were to start guest posting again what would you do differently? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

About the Author: Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16 year old entrepreneur and founder of YoungPrePro, a site with practical tips on achieving online success.

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Check Out the Lifestyle Theme for WordPress

Whether you’re a one-person shop at a kitchen table, or the next Rupert Murdoch (or both), you need to start thinking like a media business.

Say you want to run an online magazine. Or maybe you’re a personal publisher executing on myriad ideas that need more options than a simple blog post can provide.

You’re covering multiple topics, in multiple formats.

You’ve got video, you’ve got text, you’ve got photos … You’ve got the idea.

How do you organize and layout all that content in a meaningful and attractive way for your readers?

Let’s take a look at the Lifestyle theme for WordPress from Copyblogger Media’s StudioPress division.

Lifestyle, simply put, is an elegant frame for everything you’re publishing. Particularly if you’re publishing everything.

Effortless design and layout

Organization and layout of various forms of content is easily the biggest headache facing the magazine publisher.

It’s true that you could drop everything into a traditional blog theme and run with it. But what if you could comfortably create and maintain a magazine-style site that was comparable to the biggest players around?

And what if that site was built on one of the most secure and stable foundations available?

The Lifestyle child theme powered by the Genesis framework delivers just that with your content.

In Lifestyle you’ll find, with a few clicks, just what you need to organize your growing new media presence:

• Simple widgets to control and support your video, photography, and in-depth articles
• Quick-change between five different color schemes without touching a line of code
• Evolve with your site’s growth using six different page layout options
• Powerfully simple navigation control allows you to highlight your most important work
• Logical category layout that lets your readers get to what they want

Best part is, we’ve only been talking about the skin of your site here.

Let’s move on to the breakthrough that’ll put you into an elite class of hackers and SEOs, without spending a single minute sweating inside a computer science class…

Simplicity and stability

If you’re building a website these days, you’re in luck. The idea of a “framework” has revolutionized the ease and power of what a website (or blog) can do and be.

Genesis is much more than a mere WordPress theme. It’s an underlying framework of immaculate code that’s been built to achieve two general objectives:

1. Spoon-feed Google your content. If you know anything about how SEO works (don’t worry if you don’t, Genesis will take care of a lot of it for you), you know that Google hands out brownie points for clean code. As amazing as search engine are, they’re not as smart or grown-up as you might think. Present them with an orderly, squeaky clean page of code, and you’re well on your way to a solid ranking for your chosen words.

2. Erase the headaches of constant, stressful updates. Everything changes. Nowhere more quickly than on the web. Unless you’re a rockstar developer, being up-to-date on the latest SEO, WordPress, and security developments can be a full-time gig. The Genesis framework responds and adapts to these constant advancements.

So, the power of a framework lies in its simplicity, spotlessness and stability.

With one click of that update button, Genesis handles the fickle problems of SEO and security for you.

And it does all of this without going near the design of your site, which is taken care of entirely through the use of “child themes”.

Uh, what’s a child theme and why should I care?

Think of Genesis (the framework) as your car, including the engine, the transmission and the thousands of parts that make it run.

Lifestyle (and the 30 other child themes from Studiopress) are the paint job that make your car so damn hot. You pick the color, the stripes, and an airbrushed coyote howling at the desert moon (if that’s your thing).

Here’s where the car analogy breaks down (as if it hadn’t already): the really cool thing about using child themes is the ability to change the “paint job” of your site in minutes, without trashing the underlying engine that powers your site.

• Want to focus on your photography this year? Drop in Landscape and start snapping away.
• Bootstrapping a new startup? Easily skin your site in Venture, and then get on with generating revenue.
• Prefer point-and-click design control over your theme elements? Pick up Prose and unleash your creativity without code.

Whether you’re building a new site, or revamping a classic, child themes allow you the freedom to re-invent yourself without ever touching the critical code underneath.

Website security ain’t easy, until now …

There’s no way around the fact that some very talented, very bad folks are out there hacking away at blogs and websites every day.

Question: when was the last time you updated your WordPress software, or your particular theme’s software?

If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while. You think, “Eh, I can let it go for a bit, can’t be that important…”

Maybe you’re worried that all the work you’ve put into the design and customization of your site will disappear into the digital ether as soon as you punch that ominous “upgrade” button.

The bad news is that not upgrading software is one of the most common reasons websites and blogs get hacked.

The good news is that Brian Gardner has worked like a dog on your behalf, to make the Genesis framework upgrade process a piece of cake.

Painless. Future-proof. Easy.

If you’re more worried about upgrades breaking your site than you are hackers breaking in, you’ve got the wrong theme.

Keep your site (and your readers) safe…

Get Lifestyle + Genesis today

• Lifestyle’s color and widget design controls to layout your content the way you want
• A great-looking magazine-style theme that puts a laser focus on your content
• The considerable SEO and security benefits of the rock-solid Genesis Framework
• Unlimited updates and support (you’re not alone)
• The go ahead to use Lifestyle on as many sites as you want (no developer surcharge)

Pick up Lifestyle powered by Genesis today.

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Fundraise $1000 with Your Blog in 3 Days

This guest post is by Eric Kim of Erickimphotography.com.

When I first got into blogging about street photography, I told myself that I wasn’t going to sell out to the man, and that I would keep my blog as ad-free as I could. The reason I decided this was to keep it more of a passion and a hobby, rather than a job. I enjoyed writing my blog posts for my audience, as well as engaging them with questions while even getting some people to write guest posts for me.

Eric with the workshop team (author's own image)

One day, one of my blog posts, titled “101 Things I Learned About Street Photography”, went viral and brought 3,000 visitors to my blog in one day (I averaged about 100 visitors a day at that time). Then, a photography workshop director in Beirut, Lebanon, emailed me to ask me to teach a street photography workshop.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic and very excited about the trip. However, there was a problem. I didn’t have the $1100 at the time to afford a round-trip ticket to Beirut. The organization holding the workshop was able to fund my lodging and expenses, but not my flight.

When all hope seemed lost, my girlfriend suggested that I reach out to the community on my blog and try to fundraise for my air ticket. I thought it would be nearly impossible to fundraise the necessary funds for my trip, but I thought it would be worth a try.

Fast-forward three days. I had $1100 in my Paypal account for a round-trip ticket to Beirut to teach my street photography workshop. I ended up having the trip of a lifetime, meeting some of the most cordial and amazing people, and taking inspirational photos as well.

Now, perhaps you’re not looking to finance a trip to boost your career. Maybe you want to raise funds for a charity or cause that’s important to you. Or perhaps you want to be able to donate money to a specific appeal. Using your blog to raise funds for a cause you care about is a very fulfilling, enjoyable thing to do. Here’s how I did it.

1. Have a personal connection with your community

Well before I started fundraising for this trip, I had a very strong and personal connection with my community. On my Facebook fan page, I regularly ask for my audience’s input and opinions about certain issues, and try my best to address everybody by his or her first name. Not only that, but I also try my best to reply to every single comment I get on my blog personally.

I genuinely believe in human generosity and kindness. People want other people to achieve their dreams. When I asked people to donate, I asked them to help be a part of achieving my dream—which was to go to Beirut. Also, the fact that my mission was not selfish, but sprang from my wanting to spread my love of street photography to other places, helped tremendously.

2. Chart your progress

Whenever I got a donation, I charted my progress on my blog. I made a percentage bar in Photoshop, and would update it every time somebody donated to my cause, helping me get closer and closer to that 100% mark. This way, I relied on game mechanics to spark action; people wanted to see me reach that 100% mark and had a reason to donate. Making the experience much more visual helps out tremendously.

3. Use various social media platforms

When I was asking for donations, I accessed all of my social media platforms. This included Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and my blog. Being able to effectively leverage each platform helped me reach different audiences, all of which believed in my cause. Only utilizing one social media platform is selling yourself short, as kindness is very wide-spread on the Internet.

4. Thank your donors personally

Once somebody donated to my cause, I gave him or her a heart-felt and personal response, thanking them for their generosity. This way the person who donated to your cause feels great in helping you, and motivated to spread the word. Which goes to my next point…

5. Ask others to spread the word

It never hurts to ask other people to support your cause. Simple things such as updating their statuses on Facebook or sending out tweets truly helps out a lot. Imagine if you had 100 fans, and each of them updated their Facebook statuses, asking for their contacts to help. Now let’s also assume that the average person has around 200 friends on Facebook. That means that your message is being broadcast to at least an audience of 2000, which can continue to ripple outwards if other people believe in your cause as well.

6. Make a video

When I asked my donors to support my cause, I recorded a video, uploaded it to YouTube, and spread it far and wide. Why use a video rather than just writing? Well, when you record a video, people can truly see the face behind the computer—the person they will be donating to. Also, in hearing you ask for support in real life, people feel more secure donating to you, as they know you aren’t some random scammer on the Internet. Show your spirit, personality, and charisma. It truly goes a long way.

7. Have a “donor list”

People love to be honored, and to see their names in public places. Think about all the famous memorials you have been to, which have the names of donors embedded into the bricks that make the memorial. I did the same with my blog. Whenever somebody donated to my cause, I wrote their name in a “donors list” which was proudly displayed at the front of my homepage. Importantly, I made sure not to display how much money they each donated, as I saw that to be a bit too intrusive.

8. Have a minimum suggested donation

Most people love donating to causes, but aren’t sure how much to donate (which prevents them from donating altogether). For my campaign, I asked for a minimum donation of $5. I did end up getting many donations worth $5, but surprisingly enough, the majority of people who donated either gave $20 or $25. If you set a minimum suggested donation, people will know what the standard will be, and will even donate more if they truly believe in your cause.

9. Go big

During my fundraising campaign, I was able to net $300 in donations in the first two days via Paypal. However, what really got me over to Lebanon was a $800 donation from a Swedish street photographer named Thomas Leuthard. He heard about my cause through Twitter, and after seeing my passion and how badly I wanted this trip, he offered to sponsor the remainder of my trip. He also told me that he was looking for some adventure as well, and asked me if he could accompany me to the workshop.

He actually ended up being the guest speaker for my street photography workshop, and after meeting in person overseas, we made a strong friendship and relationship.

10. Share your experiences

People who donated to your cause love to see the fruits of their labor. When you come back from your trip, share your experiences! I took many photos of the people of Beirut, Lebanon, and shared them in this post. Not only that, but I also shared the slides from the workshop that I did for free—for those who wanted to attend but couldn’t.

Have you ever used your blog to raise funds? How did you do it, and what tips can you share?

Eric Kim is a street photographer based in Los Angeles. He shoots, blogs, and tweets about everything street photography. You can check out his work on his blog, and also connect with him on Facebook.

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My 5 Favorite, but Often Ignored, Analytics Features

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

The wonderful thing about working online is that our work is just so measurable.

In just about every other industry, a lot of decisions are based on sample data, or assumptions, or just on gut feel. But online, we can measure just about everything for 95%+ of our visitors—yay for us!

In our world of pretty graphs and statistics, we have are a stack of options to ensure we’ve got our eyes on the numbers. But when it comes to bang for buck (i.e. lots of value for no outlay) there really is no equal, in my opinion, to Google Analytics—and it just keeps getting better.

I’m sure a lot of you are already feeling the Google love with Analytics—and if you’re an addict like me, you’re using it on a daily basis. So I thought I’d share my five favorite, but often ignored, features of Google Analytics.

1. Custom Reports

There are so many levels, layers, and measures in the Google Analytics interface that I often used to waste time attempting to find my first stop in the system: reports.

Custom Reports changed that. Not only does this feature allow for a myriad of different perspectives and data, but you can also save each report and head back to it at a moment’s notice. This video is a good starting point to understanding how to make the most of custom reports.

2. Scheduled Reports

Actually remembering to jump into Analytics to make sure you’re across everything can be a challenge. Scheduled Reports make the job much easier.

You’ll probably have certain reports you’ll look at more often than others. If you click on the little email icon on the top-right of a report, you’ll be able to set up a schedule so that that report’s delivered to you via the inbox.

This is a great way to ensure that your busy schedule is not getting in the way of you knowing what’s happening on your site.

3. Navigational Summary

In December I wrote about the concept of sales funnels, and a lot of you asked how on Earth you can manage to measure all those steps. Well, the Navigational Summary report will get you started.

It covers the essential details for each page view, including where the user came from (another page, external site), and then where they went to (exit, another page)—plus everything in between. This is a key report to start understanding browsing behaviors on your critical pages. You can access the navigational summary through the Content section. I tend to use the Content Drilldown report to find the specific pages I’m after, then click the Navigational Summary for their specific metrics.

4. eCommerce and the $ Index

When you set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics, you open up a whole new world of insight. It’s a feature that’s only useful for those selling online, but it’s scarily accurate and amazingly insightful.

Goals Overview

With eCommerce set up, not only can you see reports on the products you’re selling, and how much money you’re earning, but you can also start to track them back to other pages in your site. You might find that particular types of blog post generate more revenue per page view—and that’s where the $ Index kicks in.

With this metric you’ll know the average income per visit to each page or collection of pages on your site. Unfortunately setting this up is not straightforward, and you might need a little help. There’s a good article on the Analytics blog that will help get you moving. Sorry I can’t show a good screen shot of this—the information was too sensitive for the other sites I have access to.

5. Goals and Funnels

Almost all websites have some sort of desired visitor action. It might be to buy something, to fill out a contact form, to download a sample, or even just look at a bunch of other pages. Setting up goals in Google allows you to track these goals like a fox. You get insight into the overall performance of your site, but you can also track back every step of the way.

Unfortunately, like eCommerce, this feature can be a little tricky to set up and is something you might wish to get help with. I won’t go into too much detail on how to do this—it’s all covered on the Analytics blog.

Warning: Analytics is Like Quicksand

I often tell people that Google Analytics is a little like quick sand. Once you make that first step, it starts to really suck you in, and a short time later you’re stuck for good. More time passes and all of a sudden your head goes under—everything goes dark and you have no idea where you are.

It’s at that point that too many people go back to assumptions and guesswork, murmuring something about leaving “all that statistics guff” to the eggheads. If you’ve fallen into the Analytics quicksand, my recommendation is to keep things simple. Identify ten key metrics you want to measure, create a report or set of reports that deliver you those metrics, and review them over time. Once you’re comfortable, move a little deeper.

The more you understand about your business, the better-informed decisions you can make—and it’s the decisions that will make or break your business, not the numbers.

As I mentioned, Google Analytics in my favorite stats package, but I’d love to hear about any other stats packages you’re using and how you’re finding them in the comments. Or perhaps you can highlight your favorite functions of Googe Analytics that I’ve not covered…

Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.

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Three Excellent Ways to Get Sued as a Blogger

If you run a business online, or even just a blog, you are opening up yourself to a world of potential lawsuits. Everything on the internet isn’t free to grab and do what you like  with.  What you say or post on your web site or blog can easily land you with a unfriendly letter from an attorney, or have a lawsuit coming your way. Here are some of the top ways bloggers may find themselves in trouble when posting content on their sites.

1.) Image and Photo Copyrights

Looking for a great image for your new blog post? Heading over to Google and doing an image search and grabbing/posting any images you like to your blog isn’t a great idea. Just like any other product or created work, images and photography take time to create and also have copyrights and costs. Instead of jeopardizing your blog and getting sued, spend a few dollars on royalty free stock images at sites like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. There are also a ton of free icon and image web sites that won’t cost you any money at all.

2.) Auto Blog Posting

Over the past few years, auto blog posting has become increasingly popular. In short, auto blog posting is setting up a blog and having content taken from other web sites and blogs, then posted on your site automatically. While this may be acceptable if you are working with some article directories and shopping sites that allow this, you may be safe. However, if your auto blog starts grabbing copyrighted material, you can easily see fines of $100,000+ per article taken and posted without information.

3.) Posting False, Misleading or Personal Information

No one likes to have their private and personal information spread around the internet, let alone find misleading or false information about the ways companies do business. From celebrity web sites to coupon web sites, individuals and companies who are finding information that is personal, false or harmful are taking action. Yes, we do all have the freedom of speech, but at the same time, everyone has the right to sue over anything they like, so be careful what you write about.

As a whole, the internet and blogging is still in infancy and new laws are being created all the time. If individuals / lawyers think they can make a quick buck taking action against web site, be sure it will happen. Before posting your next blog content, make sure you are covered and that your content doesn’t fall into any of these area. For more information and ways to avoid getting sued as a blogger, check out this article from Jonathan at BloggingTips.com.

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