Blog Karma: How Good Blogging Deeds Can Spike Your Traffic

This is a guest post by Joshua Noerr of  JoshuaNoerr.com.

Since I was very young, I was told, and shown, the importance of giving back and doing things for other people. I’ve always felt that the highest measure of a person’s character is the degree of service they are willing to provide for others. In fact, your service to others will be the cornerstone of your legacy long after you are gone.

I also believe that as an individual of able body and mind, I have a certain level of obligation to help others. Not everyone has the abilities that I do, or that most of you do. My way of saying, “Thanks” for being blessed with all of these things is by giving back.

When I started blogging earlier this year, I knew that I had to carry that spirit into what I do, I just didn’t really know how.

A decision to share the love

One day, I was getting ready to write a post when I had an idea. I said to myself, “How about you share all the great blogs you read with your readers?” That seemed like a pretty good idea.

So I scrapped my original post, and shared five blogs I had read that month, with a featured post and some commentary on just what I felt made those blogs so awesome. Almost immediately, my traffic jumped. The bloggers themselves stopped by to say “Thanks” and read what I wrote about them, and my regular readers loved that I was exposing them to new content.

I have since made this a regular monthly feature on my blog, and it’s always extremely popular. I get a traffic spike, an increase in subscribers, and—best of all—I start new relationships with other really cool bloggers. Seems like a pretty good way to go to me.

A decision to share the load

A blogger whose work I read regularly, and for whom I have the utmost respect, published a post asking her readers for help.

She had a goal of making it to Blog World, and was inviting donations to help her get there. I thought that was great! I loved the fact that she’d built such a strong community at her blog that she felt comfortable enough to ask them to help her reach her goal.

This blogger was actually the very first person to post a comment to my blog (other than my mom!), and as I was reading her call for donations, I remembered how I felt that day. She made me feel like a blogging rock star, even though it was just one little comment! Remembering that feeling, I decided I wanted to help her get to Vegas.

So I posted a call to action to my readers. I told them all about what was happening, linked to the post asking for donations, and hit the publish button with a huge smile on my face.

The response was very nearly immediate—and overwhelming! People loved the idea just as much as I did, and wanted to help. There were so many wonderful comments from outstanding people. After all was said and done, the blogger reached her goal and booked her trip to Blog World.

Now I can’t take the credit for her goal being reached—I’m pretty sure her talent had something to do with it! Nevertheless, I felt like I was part of something, and that my blog had a small hand in making someone’s life better.

That day was also, to date, my blog’s highest traffic day. People Tweeted the post, Stumbled it, shared it, and Dugg it. I got some new subscribers, and met some new people. That wasn’t my goal in doing what I did, but it was a pretty nice side-effect!

What can you do?

It’s your turn! Have you ever done something like this before? What kind of results did you see? Do you have something planned for the future? I’d love to hear how good deeds have benefited you and your blog.

Just remember, your blog is a wonderful platform for making someone’s day, or helping other people in a positive way. I think that’s a great thing, and who knows, a simple act of kindness could lead more people to your door. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Joshua Noerr is a former MMA fighter and powerlifter turned blogger. He owns or is partnered in several blogs on different topics, including personal development, and health and fitness.

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To Use or Not To Use Video

So, you’ve been thinking you’d like to add video posts or messages to your website. Is this idea feasible? Will it go over well with your readers? Will you get the desired results you’re looking for?

Well, only trial and error will determine the answers to the above questions, but before you get to that point you need to know a few pros and cons of using or adding video to your site.

One of the first things you need to ask yourself is, will you do the videos yourself or do you have a partner that will do them? It is very crucial that you or whoever does the video feels comfortable in front of the camera. You will want to be enthusiastic but not to the point of annoyance.

What can video do for your blog? The Pros

It can effectively grab a viewer’s attention and get them excited. This works especially well if you show excitement and enthusiasm in your message.

It can offer something new to your viewers other than a mundane written post.

It can help your viewers get to know you a little better if you decide to get in front of the camera yourself. People feel more comfortable doing business with someone they can see. You become more real by showing them the person behind the blog.

What’s the downside of doing video? The Cons

Some people are annoyed by video, so make sure that your video doesn’t start automatically. If you do set it to start automatically, make sure it’s easy for the viewer to find the stop button.

Video takes time. You may record several hours of video to get a good 30 second segment.

If you don’t feel comfortable in front of the camera, the viewers will notice it.

If you aren’t genuine in your video, your viewers will notice that too.

Tips for video

Practice…a lot. Spend as much time playing around in front of the camera as you can. This will help you get more comfortable being recorded. It will also show you little quirks about yourself that you weren’t aware of. By practicing and watching yourself you will probably discover that you look away from the camera. It looks easy on television, but it isn’t.

A good way to practice is to make a video to send family. It will help you get comfortable, family will be so happy to “see” you that they won’t judge your mistakes, and it will make them feel good to get a video of you.

You may also discover that watching yourself on the screen is not where you should focus your point of view; especially if you use a laptop with a build-in webcam. You can’t watch yourself and the camera at the same time.

Be silly. Get it out of the way. No matter how serious you try to be when recording yourself, you will make mistakes and have silly moments. Just get those out of the way. Make faces at yourself if you have to. The point is to get comfortable seeing yourself on screen and learning which side is your good side, discovering facial expressions you may want to avoid if possible, or facial expressions that viewers may find amusing.

Start with using free programs for recording and editing. These may not be as nice as programs you’d pay for, but if you’re just starting out with video, practice with the free stuff to make sure this is something you can utilize into your blog before purchasing an expensive program.

Remember, adding video to your site can be a great benefit, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. People will enjoy seeing you as a real person instead of a rehearsed news reporter.

Does anyone else have tips for adding video to a website? Any other pros and cons, suggestions, or stories to share?

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Blogging with a Learner’s Mind

“¿Qué quiere para su desayuno?” she asked, inches from my face.

I thought as quickly as I could, and managed to haltingly request a piece of toast. “Pan tostado, por favor.” It was the only breakfast food that I could remember from Spanish class. It ended up being all I ate for breakfast for the next week.

Clearly, I hadn’t yet found my learner’s mind.

Each of the first few nights I spent in Bogotá I curled beneath the covers with a pounding headache. Trying to think and speak in another language was physically painful. Of the six Americans going through exchange student orientation that year, my Spanish was the worst of the bunch.

Those first weeks I spoke like a four-year-old. It was excruciating, especially for someone who took pride in her communication skills.

Despite the painful beginning, I learned a valuable lesson that year. It didn’t have anything to do with the Spanish language. It had to do with losing my fear of looking like a fool.

Public humiliation

If you’ve ever tried to make yourself understood in a language you’re just learning, you’ll know what I mean. You’re proficient in your native language, but to learn a new one you need to start from the beginning. You have to be willing to speak like a toddler for a while.

Once you’ve learned some basic vocabulary, you might begin to speak like a young child. All the while, you mangle words and raise eyebrows and send people into fits of laughter several times a day.

It’s the public humiliation aspect to learning a new language that no one ever mentions. You’ve mastered your own language, but to master a new one you have to be willing to look like a fool for a while.

A fool with a tool

Fast forward … let’s say “many years.” As a blogger, I find it’s great to feel comfortable making a fool of myself.

Blogging is a decidedly public venue to make beginner’s mistakes in, but the only way to become an experienced blogger is to be a beginning blogger for a while.

You publish a draft post by mistake. You send out a link that doesn’t work. You discover — too late — that you’ve left out a crucial piece of information.

The only way to get past blogging mistakes is to make them in the first place.

When it comes to developing products to sell, we go through the same thing. Our first sales pages suck. The first products we develop may not sell. We cast about, trying to get a bite on our lines. Often we head home empty-handed.

And it all happens in public. But each failure gets us closer to success, even if the only thing we learn is what doesn’t work.

Baby chicks are easy to spot

Twitter is another space where it’s easy to see who the beginners are. I know, because I was one of them not long ago.

People start out talking about their breakfast. They check into Foursquare incessantly. They try to direct message someone, but post it publicly instead.

After a while though, they observe how the power users make the most of Twitter. They figure out a way to fit it into their workflow so it doesn’t consume all their time. They master the language.

Here’s the thing: if you want to master a new skill, you have to start somewhere. As uncomfortable as it is, you have to submit yourself to looking like a fool while you master the tool.

There’s no use standing on the sidelines analyzing. You can’t study your way through the beginner’s phase. You can’t strategize yourself into mastery of a new skill.

At some point, you have to dive in, make your mistakes, get them out of the way and move on from them. That’s where having a learner’s mind will help.

A learner’s mind is fearless

Children are wired to learn, which is why they make such huge developmental strides in their first years of life. In the space of a year, they go from unable to hold themselves upright to running; from crying to expressing their needs quite clearly.

They fall, shed a few tears, pick themselves up, and keep going. They don’t worry about what people will think: they don’t give it a thought. All the while, they’re learning and making great progress.

We can apply this attitude to the new skills we’re learning, too. We can expect mistakes and embrace them when they happen. We can pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, put our chins up and keep going.

Plan to fall

Blogging, Internet marketing, Twitter and all the rest of these newer technologies present great opportunities. You can learn a lot by studying them before you start to use them. You might be able to avoid some mistakes by doing that.

But you can’t vault yourself from beginner to expert just by reading about it. You have to take the first steps, and prepare for the inevitable bumps and bruises that come with making real progress.

It’s the only way to learn, really. And it’s the only way to get past plain toast for breakfast every day.

Worth it, though, don’t you think?

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5 More Things Haunting Taught Me About Blogging

Around my home, it is definitely that time of year again. Halloween is just a few weeks away, the outside decorations are already up and work inside our small charity haunt is moving at a fever pitch.

It was at about this time last year that I wrote a post entitled “5 Things Haunting Taught Me About Blogging“, which was a look at some of the lessons I got about life and blogging through running a haunted house.

With another year down and more time to reflect, it seems there are still more lessons to share. With that in mind, here are 5 more lessons haunting has taught me about blogging and how you can apply them yourselves.

1. Your Visitors != You

Though your visitors are probably a great deal like you, they are not the same as or identical to you and will have critical differences both between them and you as well as among themselves. You have to factor in these differences when doing everything from picking topics to write about to your theme.

I got a reminder of this in last year’s haunt when a new “collapsing” ceiling worked exceptionally well on myself, my wife and our crew but failed to get a reaction from most of the visitors. The reason, my wife and I are about 6 feet tall and most of our visitors were a good six inches to a foot shorter, as a result, they didn’t get the full effect. We’re making modifications to it this year to make sure that everyone, regardless of height, gets the desired effect.

So talk with and poll your readers, find out ways they are not like you and figure out how you can meet their needs better, even if you don’t necessarily see the point of the changes.

2. People Don’t React Predictably, At Least Not Consistently

Much of haunting is trying to predict how people will react and then manipulating the environment to get the desired effect. However, for all of the predictions and trials you do, it is impossible to be right 100% of the time.

Two years ago, our first with that particular layout, we thought we had predicted where people would go naturally only to find that a high percentage of visitors got lost and many wound up in actor areas of the haunt. We had to adjust the layout of a room in order to prevent that from happening and make the path more clear.

Likewise, bloggers should spend more of their time looking at what is actually happening on their site, not what they think should be happening. Services like Clicktale can be a real help in trying to find out what visitors are actually doing and where things might be breaking down.

3. The People Show Up All at Once

You know this one already if you have run a site for any length of time, or even if you’ve just been a cashier at a large store, people have a tendency to arrive in waves.

Though it would be nice if the flow of traffic was a steady stream, it rarely is. At the huant, we did over 1/2 of our foot traffic during 2 hours on one night. The rest of the open time was torn between putting small groups through and waiting for the next one.

Site traffic isn’t much different, though there is a baseline level of that a site can expect on any given day, traffic spikes caused by everything from social news to a jump in relevant Google queries drive an inordinately large percentage of visitors. As such, you need to make sure your capacity is not geared toward your day-to-day operations, but geared to handle the busy times too.

4. Advertising is Good But Word of Mouth is Best

It is always important to remember that your best form of advertising is your current visitors.

I get a lesson in this every year as comments from visitors always show that well over half of all the people who came by did so because their friend or family member told them about us. This is in spite of thousands of fliers put out, articles in the newspaper and prominent listings in local event calendars.

Though the percentage won’t be nearly that great for a website, it’s likely that it is for visitors who stick around and become regulars. After all, most search engine traffic simply “bounces” away, indicated by the fact that bounce rates are usually well north of 50%.

If you want a strong core readership, you have to encourage your existing readers to go to bat for you, it’s the best way to build a good audience.

5. You Have to Constantly Adjust

Finally, with blogging, as with most things in life, the only thing that is certain is change.

Last year we were open three nights and it felt as if we ran three very different haunts. Though most of the changes would have been subtle to visitors, they radically changed how the haunt worked. From rearranging furniture in one room to redirect visitors (mentioned above) to moving mats to adjust timing, we never stopped tweaking, even after opening night. This was regardless of whether or not there was an obvious problem, so long as there could be a slight improvement.

Likewise, though you should resist large, sudden changes to your blog, small and subtle ones can make a great deal of different and might not even be spotted by your visitors, even as they are affecting them.

Always be looking for ways to improve and make the changes that you need. If a change doesn’t work, undo it and try something else. Blogging is all about refinement over time, as so to avoid growing dull.

Bottom Line

All in all, building a haunted house is no different than any other large scale project one can undertake. However, all projects and experiences have lessons that can be carried over into other objectives.

Because of this, it’s worth taking time after any big project concludes or before it ramps up and see what lessons you can take from it. I usually do this by sitting down with the people I worked with and drawing up a list of things that worked well and things that needed improvement.

This type of honest evaluation is crucial in improving your work and avoiding stagnation. Best of all, it can be a very fun way to relive some great memories along the way.

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The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog

As a digital branding and marketing agency, our company has encouraged, coached, and cajoled clients over the years on the importance of blogging for building traffic, buzz, and organic search.

We watched some clients grow by leaps and bounds, attracting hundreds of thousands of blog visitors per month.

And we watched others clients stumble along without ever gaining the momentum we were working for.

Of course there are a lot of factors that drive success or failure. But among the blogs that succeeded on a huge scale, we noticed two common factors.

First, the breakthrough blogs had a strong editorial calendar. And second, they used a thoughtful, strategic approach to managing editorial content.

What is an editorial calendar, and why do you need one?

An editorial calendar is just a fancy term for a publishing schedule.

If you blog regularly, you should look ahead at least one month and make some decisions about which posts you want to publish on what dates.

It’s really that simple.

An editorial calendar is the foundation of strategic blogging. That little bit of planning goes a surprisingly long way toward getting the most audience reach from your blog content.

1. An editorial calendar lets you plan ahead

By planning your posts ahead of time, you drive perseverance.

An editorial calendar encourages blogging as a habit, wards off writer’s block, and ensures that you never miss another deadline.

It’s a small, subtle thing, but you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes in your mindset.

2. An editorial calendar adds structure to your creativity

Many bloggers worry that an editorial calendar will straitjacket their creativity. Actually, the opposite is true.

Writing comes to many of us in waves. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, a blogger can write two or three posts in an afternoon.

That’s fine — keep writing about what inspires you. Then use your editorial calendar to publish each post according to a plan that keeps your target audience in mind.

Staring at that blank screen and trying to come up with a topic can be one of the most stressful aspects of blogging.

But you’ll find that when you make those decisions weeks in advance, you actually come up with more and better ideas. You’ll be more creative, not less.

3. You can take a great concept further

An editorial calendar is a powerful tool for maximizing the reach of your content, while removing the pressure of having to generate new concepts for each post.

Say you’ve got a great topic in mind, one you know your readers care a lot about. There’s no reason to blow it all in one day.

Would it make a valuable series, parceled out over a period of time and then gathered into a content landing page? Could you run some interviews or line up some guest posts on the topic? Or go multimedia and round up a few engaging videos or cartoons on the subject?

Whether you write everything yourself or use guest writers, planning ahead lets you group your content more effectively. Once you start looking at your blog a month at a time, you can develop patterns and make sure your content is well-balanced among all the readers you serve.

4. You can be proactive and capitalize on search trends

When you pair planning with a strong foundation in SEO, you start to build your audience highly efficiently.

An editorial calendar helps you pay better attention to key outreach strategies, such as blog post titles and link building. At a more advanced level, you can use it to plan and time posts related to your target audience’s search behaviors.

Capitalizing on search activity can be as simple as timing posts and topics to synch with public holidays or product launches. Or it can be as complex as doing deep keyword analysis and planning content around trending search terms that will deliver maximum traffic to your blog.

Why Stresslimit developed the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin

After years of hacking together editorial calendars for our clients, using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, we wound up in a long discussion with our close friend (and brilliant engineer) Zack Grossbart.

Beyond our mutual excitement about blogging and the power of editorial calendar strategy, we shared a passion for open source projects and wanted to give back to the WordPress community. We also wanted to develop a tool that would make our lives and coaching our clients more efficient, easier, and simply cooler.

Our clients were excited about the idea of using an editorial calendar. But there was no single tool that enabled us to eliminate “busy work” and free up more time for strategizing and creativity.

We were also in synch with Zack on our love for creating simple, intuitive interfaces that help people manage complex behaviors.

An eight-month collaborative project was born: co-developing, co-designing and re-iterating the WordPress Editorial Calendar.

We’re excited to announce the launch of version 1.0 of our editorial calendar plugin, which is (in our humble opinion) the killer tool for managing and driving the success of any blog — from the small and personal to the large and corporate.

We invite you to take the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin for a spin at this link. It’s free, and we think you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Here are some of the things you can do with the plugin

• See a month’s worth of posts at a glance.
• Juggle your calendar by simply dragging and dropping posts from day to day.
• Quickly edit your posts’ titles, contents, and publishing times.
• Publish posts or manage drafts.
• Instantly see the status of your posts.
• More easily manage posts from multiple authors.

And you can do all of that right from the calendar interface itself. It’s simple and intuitive.

No plugin alone can make you a brilliant strategist. But the WordPress Editorial Calendar is a tool that will encourage more strategic habits, thinking, and behavior. Check it out here.

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What Makes Real Blogging Success?

What makes a successful blog?

What makes a successful blogger?

I have been reflecting on these questions as I start planning out the next stage of my Authority Blogger course. It’s important to me that people get real results, and honestly the only way I can do that is by basing my advice on what has worked for me and other clients, and my getting people to take action.

It Takes a Long Time to Be an Overnight Success

Most of the bloggers you know who write about blogging didn’t start off with that. I recall Chris Brogan saying it took him 11 years to be an overnight success. Darren blogged for a while about spirituality. Brian was a lawyer until he took a blow to his noggin. My experience has not been all high-fives either. In fact, most of it was pretty unglamorous. It did, however, teach me a lot.

My first “blog” was around the mid-90′s. It was a science fiction website, where I would write fanboy postings about Star Trek and Doctor Who. I know, sexy, right?

After that I moved on to writing about another ultra-sexy topic. Programming. Oh yeah! This was where I started getting financial rewards in terms of selling services, paid writing gigs, books, the whole deal. As well as the benefits increasing, that was also where I went through my toughening up process. Developers might look like meek nerds but believe me they can craft a cutting remark

IT Geek, to Programming Geek, to New Media Geek

Lesson: Nobody is delivered into the world fully equipped, and it is not always a smooth path. It is hard work and like most things, most people will fail.

Success is Great, Failing is Good

Of course fast-forward a bit and I did a whole bunch of marketing consulting, copywriting and freelance blogging. Some highs and lows, like anybody. Everything from writing about drug-rehab and having friends and family concerned about my health (they were a client! never touched the stuff!) through to a couple of imploded SaS startups. There were many prideful moments, and also many that were followed by a fall.

Not every blogger is going to make a full time income. Of course not. Most people do not intend to, and of those that do, only a minority will put in the effort. Even with best intentions and lots of energy exhausted we can still fail. This is no different to starting a business, launching a career, or higher education. Failure rates are high everywhere.

Lesson: Put in the effort and don’t expect plain sailing. We learn a great deal from our mistakes, especially if we work out how to prevent them in future. Our successes can be educational, providing we learn how we achieved them and why what we did worked.

The Difference Between Successful Blogs and Obscurity

This might be a tough message to hear. We want to create. Craft compelling writing. And it is about that, but we also need people to do stuff or think differently because of our content.

We have to encourage people to subscribe, share, and maybe buy.

Lesson: Successful blogs are about persuasion. You might not have a financial outcome, but you do want to create a result. Leave the reader with an idea, an action, a next-step, and so on.

Content Follows Purpose

Therefore it might sound strange to read me say this but I don’t consider myself a blogger. Not in the way most people would describe it.

Do I blog? Yes, but as a means to an end. I am a marketer and a teacher. Do I call myself a “whiteboard artist” or “telephone user”?

When I am writing for a client blog, I am a freelance writer. If I am building awareness of my product, I am marketing. To get people to be interested in buying, I am a salesman.

This is my website where I encourage people to opt-in to have my content delivered via email and RSS. Of course I like helping people with my free advice, but I also have to put food on the table by people paying me. Therefore this is not just a blog, but a relationship and reputation builder.

My goals with all of this stuff have always been greater freedom and security for my family and myself. This is at the back of my mind as I work. My means to that end is helping and advising the maximum number of people to get closer to their own goals. It is fulfilling and rewarding to see people make progress without the financial benefits, but being paid to achieve that is wonderful.

You have to put your audience first. This stops outside criticism hurting so much, and means you will always be on the right track. Intentions count for a lot. Think long term, rather than aiming for a quick win. The reason I think what I do continues to be valuable and worthwhile over this period of time is because I want people to succeed with my stuff. I’ll only recommend stuff I have full faith in because of a personal experience or relationship, and the stuff I create myself I try my best to make it as good as it can be.

Lesson: What is the purpose behind your blogging?

You must answer this, then build your approach around that outcome.

Turn Your Blog Around With These 10 Quick Tips

1. Start with your end-goal in mind, what change/action/outcome do you want to bring about?
2. Craft your content to work towards a satisfying conclusion.
3. You must answer WIIFM (“What’s In It For Me?”) on behalf of the audience. Avoid “So What?”.
4. What is the big point you want to deliver?
5. Headlines matter - 80% will read headline, but only 20% will read the rest.
6. Compelling headlines are Specific. Beneficial. Intriguing. Unusual.
7. Add emotion and urgency to get more clicks.
8. Openings should Tease, Question, Shock, or otherwise pull the reader in.
9. Anecdotes and stories deliver information subconsciously, but must stay on point.
10. Your reader is King. Focus on them, what can you do for your audience?

Summary

I guess bottom line is this. We get obsessed with the activity of blogging, and we look at the surface of others who blog. Success comes from digging under the hood and working towards an intention and a purpose.

What have I missed? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments ….

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Are We Developing Young Bloggers?

Many of us want to be an entrepreneur, be our own boss, and make money online with a blog. For adults it can be scary and take a long time because we can’t give up the weekly paycheck to follow an endeavor full time. On the other hand there are many people who are already making a full time living online and have the luxury of being at home with the family.

For those who have children, are you missing the opportunity to develop entrepreneurship in your kids? Are you encouraging them to learn the basics of making money online and building their own income?

Most kids are already on the Internet listening to music, playing games and interacting with their friends and other people their age. Wouldn’t it be great if they spent more of that online time building their future and learning how to create their own business?

I found several websites that are ran by or were created by teens. These young people saw a need for catering to their peers and have built very successful websites by doing so. You can find links to those sites at the end of this post.

Benefits of encouraging entrepreneurship in your children:

* Learn to be self-sufficient – They can be their own boss and not depend on others for their livelihood.

* Build effective leadership qualities – It will teach them leadership skills so if they later decide to enter the job force they already have experience in leading a team.

* Decision making – Running their own website or blog will help them to learn how to make smart decisions in the business world.

* Build confidence – Running their own successful website will give them the confidence they need to go for bigger and better things in life.

* Success mindset – They will develop the mindset of being successful and taking risks that other people their age might not take.

The average parent teaches their children to make good grades in school and to attend college so they can secure a good job. As successful bloggers we know this is not the only way to secure our future. In fact the educational system usually leaves a young person pretty deep in debt by the time they graduate college. It doesn’t have to be that way. There is nothing wrong with a higher education, but wouldn’t it be better if they were running a successful business of their own to help cover the costs of college?

As bloggers, we also know the startup costs of a website are extremely low compared to a traditional business. The potential to make money can also be greater than that of a traditional business.

Lessons to teach your child about business and entrepreneurship:

* Any idea can be a good business idea.

* Research all ideas to see if the market is in need.

* Follow through with the idea before giving up too soon.

* Failure is a learning experience; not the end of the world.

* A profitable business requires work and testing results.

* Creativity goes a long way with a great idea.

* Being innovative will push you ahead of competition.

Remind your child that some business ideas can lead to great success, while others provide an incredible learning experience. Some ventures will prove to be highly profitable, while others may only produce a few dollars. The key is to teach your children to be resilient and keep moving forward toward their dreams.

If your child’s business ideas succeed, continue to encourage them to seek greater levels of success. Along the way, continue to promote self-sufficiency, independent thinking, and confidence. With these three traits, young bloggers have a better chance at success than other people their age.

Websites started or ran by young bloggers:

Miss O and Friends

Josh Lam

Stanley Tang

Ben Cathers

WhateverLife

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