The Numbers to $1,000,000: How is Your Blogging Progress?

My multimillionaire uncle told me to always have three projects: a short term source of income, a medium term project or two, and a long term goal that you are making a reality. And the only way to assess whether this work is making you good, sustainable income is to look at the numbers again and again.

In this post I want to look at the numbers to $1,000,000 and see how your blogging progress is going.

Why a million?

A million dollars is a large number that most people dream about. And while it seems far off and distant for many people, for others it is quite achievable. And as bloggers we have something that other generations did not. The Internet. Google. Facebook. These giants are capable of sending tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors to your blog every week. All you need is a domain and a host and you are on your way.

Compare that to the old days when you needed a railroad or a factory or an entire office building to make that kind of money and you will realize that we have a very unique opportunity right here and now. And if you think its not possible to make a million dollars from blogging alone then you might want to think again. Darren Rowse does it. So do a bunch of others.

The numbers to $1,000,000

Lets take a look at some figures to see whether you are on track for your goal. Remember, you don’t need to make a million to change your life and perhaps even change the lives of others. You might only need $40k or $50k a year to completely change things. That’s what this post is about.

Let’s say you start a blog and you are going to make money by selling an eBook. Here are some very rough, small and static numbers to think about:

• You write three posts a week aiming to grow email subscribers and build a community
• You do some light SEO work and begin to get traffic from Google as well as social media
• You get around 100 visitors a day after six months
• You convert 10% of those visitors into email subscribers
• In one year you have (182 x 10) 1820 subscribers assuming none were gathered in the first six months
• You sell an eBook at $49 to 50% of your list and make $44,590 in your first year (910 x $49).

Sure, the reality could be totally different. It could be better or it could be worse. Some factors will push the income up and others will push it down. On Blog Tyrant, for example, I have written only 20 posts and already get around 40 to 60 new email subscribers per day. So after a year I could have closer to 14,000 subscribers to sell an eBook to. And the above equation doesn’t take into account ongoing sales, affiliates, etc.

As a blogger you need to constantly assess your goals and your targets. If you want to get to a million dollars you need to adjust the numbers and set them as targets. There is absolutely no point blogging aimlessly and hoping that one day you might strike it rich. If you aren’t getting the 1000 or 2000 (or 10,000) daily visitors that you need, then you have to take a look at what is going wrong and fix it.

What is your plan?

I am really interested in hearing about your plan. Are you aiming for a certain level? Do you have the numbers and the strategy all worked out or are you kind of just floating through and hoping that it will all add up in the end? More importantly, are you growing? Please leave a comment and let me know.

About the Author: The Blog Tyrant has sold blogs for large sums of money and blogs about how you can build your blog fast and do the same. He is a 25 year old guy from Australia and answers all the comments on his website.

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6 Blogging Mistakes You Might Not Have Considered

Talent and smarts don’t always equate to successful blogging. For example, you could be a great writer and use Twitter effectively to promote your site, but still miss the mark in other critical areas of your blog.

Lists with blogging mistakes are pretty common, and useful, but there are some mistakes that usually are not included. I created a list with 6 of them, and I suspect you might not be paying attention to those, so check it out.

1. Publishing a series of posts consecutively all on the same subject

I have nothing against doing a series on a blog as long as it’s done right. If done wrong, you’ll have created a scenario in which it’s painful to read your blog.

For example, you’re a personal-development blogger and writing a series on positive thinking. If you post five consecutive days on this subject you will have destroyed one of the greatest assets a blog can have, variety.

If you’re planning on doing a series on a single subject, I advise you don’t do it over consecutive days. Publish some posts on a different subject in between your series posts. This way you can still do a series without killing variety on your blog.

2. Not using pictures

While there are occasions when not using pictures is wise, much of the time it’s a costly mistake.

The most obvious benefit a picture provides is that it encourages people to dive into your post.

Another thing you must realize is that a picture is not merely benefiting the single post it’s in; it’s also benefiting your entire blog design.

People are often shallow when they land on a new blog. If they see you include pictures in your posts, they’re more likely to investigate your blog further.

Text without a picture is like a store without windows.

Just think of how many more subscribers you could gain over the long term by taking the time to include pictures with almost every post.

3. Failing to use subheadings

I used to rarely use subheadings in my blog posts because I don’t particularly like them. I later realized that just because I don’t like them doesn’t mean that everyone else feels how I do.

Unlike me, many people scan posts when they read them. If scanners come to a post that isn’t scanner friendly, they’re not going to give you the time of day.

Every post you write that’s not short should have subheadings.

4. Making paragraphs too large

I’m not going to give you a specific rule on what constitutes a large paragraph, but you know it when you see it.

Paragraphs the size of mountains are extremely intimidating to the eye. If I see a blog post with large paragraphs, I won’t read it no matter how good the content may be.

Keep your paragraphs short to encourage as many people as possible to read your content.

5. Not displaying all your content in a subscriber’s feed reader

Some bloggers opt to only provide a link to their posts in the feed reader.

While doing the above will get more people to click over to your blog from the feed reader, you’ll also upset your readers, encourage them to unsubscribe and will end up with a significantly smaller readership in the end.

The fact that virtually all successful bloggers have their entire post displayed in their RSS feed is all the proof you need that it’s the most strategic thing to do.

6. Waiting to do guest posts

If you have a blog with a giant readership like this one, it’s understandable that you don’t feel compelled to guest post.

But for most of us, the objective is to grow our readership so that one day it’s huge like this one.

With a small readership you can publish a remarkable post and receive almost nothing beneficial from it.

In fact, some very talented bloggers will publish remarkable post after remarkable post and never really go anywhere with their blog.

When you consistently publish great posts on your blog and get no retweets, and no new subscribers, it’s time to ensure that a significant percentage of your finest material is submitted to other blogs so that your blog not only gains subscribers, but also gets on the radar of other influential bloggers.

While nothing can guarantee you become a successful blogger, there are definitely things you can do to at least ensure you have a fighting chance.

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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Things You Should Do Before the New Year

The year is quickly coming to a close, and while it’s mostly just a psychological change, there are something tasks that need to be taken care of before year’s end. Not only is this a list of tasks that you should take care of, but most of them are relevant to myself as well.

2011 GOALS & PROJECTS

It’s amazingly easy to start new projects and get side tracked while running a business online. How many times this year did you lose focus on your main projects, or want to start something new. With the new year right around the corner, it’s a great time to make a list of your top goals and new projects to work on. I know I will be weeding out the smaller sites/campaigns and tasks that got me side tracked in 2010 and will either let them die off, or outsource their management.

DOMAIN NAMES & RENEWALS

I’m sure most of you have you have your domains on auto renewal, but it’s always a good idea to take a good look at your domain names and still have a good idea on when they expire. I have several hundreds of domain names and they are pretty much all over the place, mainly with GoDaddy, NameCheap and eNom. Before crossing over into the new year, I’m taking some time to consolidate and transfer my domains names into one large account with NameCheap.

CLEAN YOUR INBOX & OFFICE

I’m guilty of always having a messing inbox. No matter how many times I find myself clearing out my GMail account, it’s loaded up with hundreds of unread emails within days. The same holds true for your desk or office room. head into the new year with a fresh start. A clean inbox and office will get you started on the right track!

SALARY, BONUSES, PAYMENTS & STOCKS

Manage your finances and make any necessary purchases, employee payments or stock sales before the year ends. Head into the new year without any pending debts or payments looming over your held. Also make sure to make your final contributions to 401k/IRA accounts. You never know what the new year will hold for you and your company, so make sure your finances are in order.

Other quick ideas you should take action before the new year include… updating your DMCA/copyright/privacy policies, back up you site and data, clean out your social accounts of “non friends” and change your passwords. Feel free to leave a comment with any ideas I may have missed, and what you’ll be doing to make 2011 your best year yet!

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Watching Out For Shoddy Business Practices

Anyone that works on the Internet will be able to tell you that while there are virtually limitless business possibilities available for writers and bloggers, there are also a lot of people who do shoddy business on the web and are out to take your work away or pay you nothing for it.

Last year I noticed there were more than a few of these snake oil salesmen out there and even though I’ve learned over the years a few things to avoid, sometimes your only recourse is to cut your losses and start looking for another client when one of these people cross your path.

Hired Guns Without Any Bullets

Although it’s not always the case and you should not take this piece of advice as gospel, it’s quite often true when a company or individual you are working for hires some kind of a consultant or editor to oversee your work, it’s a red flag. Just this past year I lost a lucrative contract in Toronto to somebody whose resume reads like he might be a programmer or a comic book aficionado or some combination of the two, but I didn’t see him as qualified to take over the social media and blogging he did. That happened as soon as I’d got the blogs running for the firm in a professional way. Watch out for these hired guns. They don’t want qualified writers hanging around but they like to learn from you.

That brings me to another point concerning social media and the less than qualified hackers who come along and often convince business owners they can get them the traffic and Google rankings they are looking for. Social media is the latest thing in Internet advertising if only because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy but it certainly attracts a fair share of people who convince naïve business owners that it’s worth a lot of their hard-earned money. It is, in a way, but unfortunately it has also become the domain of a bunch of scammers who charge exorbitant amounts of money for maintenance on Facebook or Twitter that’s really a lot more affordable when they use a professional writer.

Sample Sorrows

I’d like to be able to sit on the mountaintop and tell anyone who’s ever written a sample blog or article and then never got paid for it, ‘I told you so’ but I’ve fallen prey to the same creeps who ask for these samples and then take off with your work. Here’s a great way to get around those prospects who ask for 200 to 400 words on a subject to ‘test’ your skills:

• Make sure you have some samples on your website. Understandably, that could be hard since you’re more than likely ghostwriting and the client wants to adopt your work as their own, but there are usually smaller clients who don’t mind you using your work or at least a link to it. Then anyone who wants a sample can be directed to your website.
• If you’re just starting out and don’t have a good resume yet, the best thing you can do is get the right contact information from the client to check their credibility. Ask for a telephone number and give them a call over Skype or the other VOIP system you use to make sure they have nothing to hide and look for something more than just an email address for contact information.

The Internet is like any other business in that you’ll meet all kinds. While an overwhelming majority of your clients will be upstanding people who pay on time, you do need to be on guard for others who use questionable practices.

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7 Tips to Keep the Blogging Fires Burning!

You know how in the beginning of a relationship everybody’s interested and interesting? How we keep up our appearance? How we interact, engage and put forth our best effort?

Then with some time and familiarity we tend to take things for granted. The fun factor fizzles, or we simply lose steam. Or perhaps our attention is diverted by some other “new and shiny object.”

Well, the same thing happens with blogging.

Here’s the scenario.

In the beginning you work hard to create posts to bring people to your spot. You appear at the popular social media sites in hopes of “making friends and influencing people.” You’re consistent in your blog updates.
After awhile, you find you’ve hit your stride!

Your followers increase, you have repeat visitors, and your amount of comments are encouraging. Eureka, you’ve found success!

That’s the honeymoon stage.

Fast forward.

It’s a year later, or two, or five. And your blog has the excitement factor of a tax audit.

It’s like a ghost town. The activity level has dwindled and so has your motivation. In the words of singer Roberta Flack, “Where is the love?”

Don’t despair. It happens. But you can resurrect a dying blog and get back that lovin’ feelin’ with a few creative, strategic steps. Here’s how.

1. Take a break. That’s right—put up your “gone fishing” sign on your site, and disconnect. Take time to cultivate new ideas, to relax and rejuvenate. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow fonder.
2. Survey or poll your readers to assess their interests and to determine your future direction.
3. Schedule guest bloggers to bring a different perspective and new energy to your site. Which bloggers do you admire? Start there.
4. Study and analyze your most popular previous posts. What was the common denominator? Were they posted on Tuesdays? Were they technical in nature? Rev up that traffic by doing a repeat performance!
5. Post interviews with prominent people in your niche. A good rule of thumb is to diversify your content so readers won’t get bored.
6. Don’t be afraid to court controversy. (Remember the Dixie Chicks and President Bush)? Sometimes “stirring the pot” can have hot results!
7. Respond to comments. To cultivate an active blog community, it’s crucial to be responsive to readers’ questions and comments. There’s great truth to the expression, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” .

Follow these seven tips to keep the blog fires burning, and most importantly to avoid burn out!

About the Author: Jennifer Brown Banks is a veteran freelance writer, pro blogger and relationship columnist. She recently became a contributing writer for the ever-popular site Technorati.com. Visit her blog at PenAndProsper.blogspot.com.

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Interview: Michael Mindes

Michael Mindes is the founder of Tasty Minstrel Games, a relatively new publisher of hobby board games. Despite primarily dealing with a physical product, Michael is actively marketing over the Internet. Michael especially likes email marketing, blogging, and generating organic results on Facebook, and has seen great success in these areas.

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been making money online?
I live in Tucson, Arizona and have been here for most of my 29 years of life. I am married and I have 3 children. During the day, I am a financial advisor/planner (no, you can’t hire me and I am not soliciting business) to pay the bills while I build up Tasty Minstrel Games.

I wouldn’t say I have been making any money online, but I have been actively gathering permission assets and building up authority in the board game publishing arena for about 15 months.

Do you have any experience with affiliate marketing? If so, to what extent?
My experience with affiliate marketing is very limited. Like many other people, I have read the blogs people like Shoemoney, John Chow, and Jonathan Volk for a long time. Like many of those people I gave affiliate marketing a try.

To me, affiliate marketing feels too much like being a transactional stock broker (which I opted not to be). Except that there are tons of people actively scouting and trying to take your best ideas. I would rather have a group of people trust me enough to take my recommendations.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
In life, I am most proud of my 7 years of happy marriage, my 3 kids, and Tasty Minstrel’s progress. In the realm of Internet marketing I am most proud of the following:
• Building a laser-targeted and responsive list of over 3,000 people.
• Having over a 9% conversion rate for people to buy out of my list.
• Building a network quickly within the board game industry.
• Doing all of the above in my spare time.

How did you become successful? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in the Internet? When did you first “hit the big time?”
I became successful as an online marketer by following through with the sales and trust building techniques that I learned by managing people’s life savings and constantly convincing them that their trust is well placed.

I chose to go into financial planning because I could go to work with my father, support my growing family, and have challenging and fulfilling work. I chose to publish board games, because I love games. Games are my absolute and fundamental passion in life.

Obviously any communication method as fast and inexpensive as the Internet will be incredibly powerful. But I did not really feel the scope of it, until I first started bribing people to join my email list. I gave away some games for free, and 545 people signed up for a chance to win in the first 7 days. That was with one forum post.

What do you think it takes to be successful?
Dedication, Honesty, Intelligence, Passion, OTHER PEOPLE (relationships are incredibly important)

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
Getting a shipment of 4,000 games with numerous manufacturing issues. It was significant effort to mitigate the damage, but sales were slower, product was lost, and hours have been spent sending out replacement parts.

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
See above. The initial response is detailed on my blog. Being as transparent as possible on my blog has led to a small army of people that are dedicated to defending Tasty Minstrel Games online, which is wonderful.

What is the future of marketing?
Being able to directly reach people that want to hear from you, and turning customers into evangelists. Building quality relationships over time and email marketing are the solution here.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
In the past I have been distracted by a number of things. Which is why I have so many free eBooks available, including an 80+ page eBook about relationship building strategy and email marketing. Right now I am just working on improving Tasty Minstrel.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
The pressures of having 100% commission based compensation and convincing people to have me advise them on investing their life savings makes you learn fast. When compared to bringing in a $1,000,000+ account, selling some $40 board games seems easy.

What are your greatest strengths?
My stunning good looks. After that, my ability to sell stuff and generate trust through honesty and transparency.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
Project management and slacking off. Thankfully, when running a business you can find people to fill in for your weaknesses.

What motivates you?
It will sound cheesy, but bringing families closer together through games. Oh, and providing for my wife and 3 children.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
Do it and do it now. How long does it take to send a 1-2 line email? Fill out an interview? Make a phone call? Each item takes very little time, and the aggregate of all those actions adds up to some amazing results.

For example, I let these interview questions sit for 20 days. I could have spent the 1 hour to answer the questions and been covered on a popular blog that much sooner.

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
My father. He taught me probably 80+% of what I need to know in sales and marketing (in life too). The rest I have learned through reading the thoughts of great minds, thinking, taking action, and remembering what works.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
I would like to be involved with publishing board games full-time. Providing modestly for my family and having extra money for emergencies is enough. If money was no object, I would be spending time with my family, playing games with my friends, and helping to change the world.

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Alive and married to my wife is sufficient for my needs.

How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
I spend my free time working on building up Tasty Minstrel Games. Life is work, truly challenging and satisfying work is the basis of happiness.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I would have started earlier. It would have been nice to realize I do not need an endorsement of any kind to start building a business or changing the world.

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
Again, cheesy… But my greatest achievement in life is my successful marriage for 7 years and my 3 beautiful loving children. While I am sure I have unfulfilled dreams, it doesn’t matter because I have them. They are awesome.

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
I like to use Facebook as a natural funnel for Tasty Minstrel, so we have a page for the company and for every game that we publish.

http://www.twitter.com/michaelmindes
http://www.twitter.com/tastyminstrel
http://www.facebook.com/tastyminstrelgames
http://www.facebook.com/homesteaders
http://www.facebook.com/terraprime
http://www.facebook.com/trainofthoughtgame
http://www.facebook.com/playjab
http://www.facebook.com/belfort

5 Content Steps to Take For the New Year

As we approach Christmas and the rest of the holiday season, many are already starting to look toward the new year and finding ways that they can improve their blog.

Though I don’t typically like New Year’s resolutions, they seem to be mostly self-defeating, it is a great time to look at what you did or didn’t do over the past year and how you can improve.

With that in mind, here are several copyright and content-related steps that you may want to consider taking in the New Year as you use the turning of the calendar as a chance to get a fresh start.

1. Add a Copyright Notice

Even though copyright law does not require any kind of notice for copyright to be affixed to a work, it exists merely by fixing the work into a tangible medium of expression, every site should have some kind of copyright notice on it.

The reason is because it not only puts aside any misunderstandings about the law (many people still feel that works without the notice have no protection) but it also puts the reader on notice, which might have legal benefits down the road.

If you already have a notice, be sure to update it in the New Year and, when you do, make it an automated process so you never have to do it again.

2. Add a License

As important as having a copyright notice is, you also need to make it clear the terms under which others can use your content.

If you don’t want others to use your work and wish to reserve the maximum amount of protection, simply say “All Rights Reserved” and leave it at that. If you want to encourage some sharing, perhaps consider a Creative Commons License or, if you want to be asked first, a Konomark.

Make your wishes clear and those who want to be good neighbors will follow them.

3. Find a Good Stock Photo Site

Images are important to blog posts but simply taking images from anywhere can lead to serious copyright headaches. Instead of using Google Image Search, find a good stock photo site and use those images.

Morguefile and Stock.XCHNG are both great free stock photo sites and there are a ton of microstock photo sites that will sell you images for as little as a dollar.

There is simply no reason to get in a copyright war over an image in a blog post, too many great, free alternatives exist.

4. Start Tracking Your New Content

Start monitoring where your content is being used. Free services like FairShare make it easy to track where your work appears on the Web. by parsing and searching for what’s in your RSS feed This can both help you spot infringements, but also let you know who is talking about your work.

It’s a great way to not only enforce your rights if you wish, but to also follow the conversation and participate in discussions you might have otherwise missed.

5. Spot Check Your Old Content

In addition to tracking where your new content appears, you might want to do an audit of some of your older work as well, in particular anything that you didn’t create, such as guest posts.

You can use services like CopyScape to search for the work, see where else it appears and make decisions about what to do. Specifically, you want to make sure the content wasn’t plagiarized, and see where it is being used elsewhere on the Web.

It probably is not worthwhile to go through and check all of your old posts. But focus on any posts you didn’t write and particularly popular ones. You may be surprised what you learn.

Bottom Line

As much as New Year’s resolutions are broken, something that is the punchline of a bad joke these days, it still makes sense to take advantage of the new calendar to make some changes and adjustments.

One of the things every blogger can do is look at the way they approach their content, as well the content of others, and start making adjustments and improvements to the process.

The result, if done well, will be a safe legal climate, a better understanding of how one’s work is being used and, if desired, better control over one’s creations.

It’s a great way for a blog to start 2011 and and an excellent opportunity to make the new year better than the last.

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