Darren: Hey there, friends. It’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 278 of the ProBlogger Podcast. The podcast is designed to help you start a blog, to build that blog, and to monetize it.
Today, I’ve got a special treat for you. It is a keynote that I gave a couple of years ago at our ProBlogger event in Melbourne. It’s titled Evolve Don’t Revolve. It’s all about how as bloggers and online entrepreneurs, it’s really easy to revolve in our blogging, to just go around in circles. I don’t know if you can relate to that of feeling going around in circles. I certainly can. There’s been so many times over my 15 years of blogging where I’ve realized I’m just treading water, I stopped growing, I stopped evolving. The call of this keynote is to look at seven different areas where you can evolve your blog and online business.
Also, a taster of what we do at our Evolve event, at our ProBlogger event, which we’ve been running it for quite a few years. We’ve got our new event coming up in August of this year on the 10th and 11th of August, again, in Melbourne. I want to tell you a little bit about that event before we get into the keynote. There’s two options for those of you who want to come to our event in Melbourne. On the 10th of August, we’ve got a training day. This is a one day event for beginners, intermediate level bloggers. It’s also probably relevant for other content creators as well.
If you head to problogger.com/events you can actually see a rundown of what we’re doing at that particular event. Largely though, it’s me. You’ll get a full day of me teaching on the four key areas of building a successful blog. I’m going to talk for about an hour about content and crafting great content for your blog. I’ll talk about evolving your engagement with your readers, how to build community on your blog, how to find new readers for your blog, and then, how to monetize your blog.
This is perfect if you are a beginner or intermediate level. If you’re just starting out, you just set up your blog, maybe with our Start a Blog course, this is brilliant to help you get the ball rolling. If you’re more intermediate, maybe you’ve been blogging for a while, you want to evolve what you’re doing, maybe from a hobby blog to a professional blog where you make money from it, or maybe you’ve had a blog that’s going a little bit dormant, a little bit stagnant, and you want to give it a refresh, then this is the perfect event for you.
You will also, in that event, hear from Jeff Goins, who we’re bringing out from Nashville, Tennessee in the States. He’s going to come out and do the keynote on finding your voice as a blogger. He’ brilliant on that particular topic and a really great teacher when it comes to writing and communicating on a blog. You’ll also hear a little bit from Nicole Avery at the end of that day as well. She’ll talk about productivity and really help you shape what you’re going to do as a result of the day.
The other option for those of you who are a little bit more intermediate and advanced is to come along to our mastermind. This is the second time we’ve held masterminds at our ProBlogger event. It’s being held this time over two days, the 10th and the 11th of August, again, in Melbourne. We’ll actually overlap with our training day. You’ll hear the same keynote from Jeff Goins at the start of the day. The rest of the two days, you’ll hear from some other people including James Schramko, who is a Sydney-based content creator and business owner. He’s brilliant on selling and helping you to grow a business. He’s brilliant on membership sites and just a really smart guy. You also get to sit around the table with Jeff and James in masterminding, myself as well on the second day. Nicole is there as well. We’ve also got Kelly Exeter, who’s brilliant on writing, editing, also design, self-publishing. And Shayne Tilley from 99Designs, who’s spoken at all of our events. He’s brilliant on creating products via blog marketing and just really helping you to shape your business.
You get the opportunity at the mastermind to sit with all of those people and also other attendees. This is where the real value comes when you sit with other bloggers, online creators, entrepreneurs, and spend a couple of days really workshoping your business. If you like to get to our event on the 10th and 11th of August this year, just head over to problogger.com/events. You can see all the details there. We do currently have an early bird offer and that ends at the end of June. You don’t have long to grab your tickets at that special rate.
All right, I’m going to get into today’s keynote. You’ll also, at the end of this keynote, hear from a familiar voice to many of you, from Pat Flynn. Pat was at our event. We fly out at least one international guest every year. This year it’s Jeff Goins, but Pat was at our event two years ago. I interviewed Pat on stage and there’s a bit of Q&A with our audience as well. As we talk particularly, again, about him and how he’s evolved his blog. Pat is just a brilliant example of someone who has done that brilliantly over the years. What he’s doing today is very different to what he started out doing. I think that’s the reason that he has had so much success.
So, settle in, maybe grab yourself a beverage or something to eat because this goes for about an hour, a bit over an hour. You might even want to break it down into two sessions; that’s totally fine as well. There’s lots of practical stuff in this. If you also want to checkout the slides, head over today to our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/278 where you’ll be able to get the slides. There are a few things in this talk where I do refer to stuff that’s on the screen including a few jokes and funny bits as well. Hope you enjoy this keynote. Then, I’ll come back at the end just to wrap things up.
I was interviewed on a radio just recently. Someone asked me that same question but they asked me to go back to the very start of my blog and said, “What has changed in your blogging since you started?” Now, I started blogging in 2002. It was a mind-blowing question to be asked because everything has changed in my blogging since 2002 except for the fact that a blog is pretty much the same thing. It’s chronologically organized information, it’s got comments usually, and it’s content, it’s useful content. That’s always been my philosophy. Fifteen years of blogging, things have changed a lot for me.
This is the first article anyone ever wrote about me. It was written in 2006. I found it the other day as a screenshot. When I read the article, I realized things have changed but also the picture. Hopefully, I looked a little less stressed than I did back then. I don’t know what it was but this photographer just seemed obsessed with me putting my hands in my head. These are the pictures he took that day. I thought I was maybe looking seriously or maybe wanted to cover up the fact that I was bald.
Anyway, things have changed for me. I now have a pose slightly differently for photos that’s partly because I’ve got an Instagram-obsessed wife and she knows you’ve got to […] this kind of stuff. Things have changed a lot and I look back on those times and think things have changed for me a lot.
This is my first blogpost. When I first published it, I didn’t look like this. I’ve started on Blogspot which became Blogger and my first theme was a free theme. There was hardly six to choose from, and it was navy blue, black, and monochrome. It was the most ugly thing that you’ve ever seen.
Then, this is my first attempt at a blog design. It’s pretty much the only time I’ve ever attempted a blog design and I realized very quickly that even after three weeks of work to get to this point that I wasn’t really very good at it. Even if you look at that post, you’ll see things have changed. I used tiny little fonts. It was peaches at all on any post that I wrote. The tools that I was using, Blogger, they were very basic. You couldn’t even have comments on Blogger when I first started. You had to install a script. There’s lots of things have changed since 2002.
The next question I was asked in the interview when I recapped some of these things was, “How did you make the change from where you were then to where you are now?” This is the most impossible question I’ve been asked because I knew that the interview only had three minutes to go. “How did you do it? How do you transition from those awkward starts that we all start with to a point where you have a business around your blog or you’re a full-time blogger, or whatever it is that is your goal?”
I completely stuffed up my answer. I’ve been stressing about how I answered that on the radio that day and I’ve been thinking about how I should’ve responded. If I have 45 minutes to answer, I probably would’ve told you what I’m about to tell you. That’s what I want to really just give my proper answer today, how do you change from those awkward starts to building a business to realizing your goals of blogging?
The first thing I wished I said was that persistence is really 90% of it. That’s not the sexiest answer. It’s not a strategic answer, but it’s true. I love this quote from Albert Einstein, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I’ve stuck with problems longer.” I think it’s probably a bit of false modesty in that from Albert Einstein, saying he’s not that smart, but I really relate to that. I look around this room and I know I’m not the best writer in this room. I’m not the best writer out there. I’m not the best marketer. I’m not the best at technology. I’m certainly not the best blog designer. I’m not the best at anything, but I really stuck at it for a long time and I think persistence has really paid off for me.
I love the story of the turquoise and the hare or the turtle and the hare. You’re going to see a few turtles today because I really relate to that turtle. Taking one small step after another. Keeping the momentum going is just so important. Really, I think 90% of any success I had has come from persistence.
What can you persist with? I’ve shared this quite a few times now in this event. Success is usually more about doing the things that you know you should be doing rather than trying to find the secret strategies, the secret sauce all the time. I say this at the front of this event because a lot of our new attendees often come going, “What’s the real secret? How are we really going to do this?” and they’re looking for that thing that’s just going to escalate things for them. Some of the strategies that you hear will escalate you forward. But really, what is going to grow you the most is doing the things you already know you should be doing and they’re the things that you probably knew when you first started your blog already.
We call these Pillars of ProBlogging and you may have heard us talking about these before. Chris Garrett, who wrote the ProBlogger book with me, came up with this in 2009. We actually based the first event on these four pillars and that’s what we’re doing again today.
The first one is content. On day one, when I wrote that first blog post, I knew that I needed to write content. We all do. This is just no brainer stuff. You look at that first blog that you set up and you see there’s no post. Instinctively, you need to create content for it unless it’s not really a blog. For me, this is obviously the key to it. Every post you write is building the asset of your blog. Every useful piece of content that you write, it’s the archives that really is the value.
A lot of bloggers do look for that viral piece of content. They just want to write one piece of content that’s going to escalate them. Occasionally, those viral pieces of content do come and they do escalate you forward. But really, it’s persisting with your content. This is one of those things you already know that you should be doing but you need to persist with it. That’s so important to do.
The second pillar is community. It’s engagement. It’s about interaction. The way we’ve been in 2002 is changing. Previous to 2000, I reckon that most people went online trying to download stuff. A lot of it is dodgy. They were satisfied to go online and get stuff, receive stuff, download stuff. That’s what I used to do. I used to go online and research the essays I was writing. I was studying at that time. I was downloading stuff.
Around 2000, and even before, but really started to escalate 2000–2002, people realized that they could interact more. The web became a much more interactive space and this is the beginnings of social media. I probably started with user boards, internet chats, and some of these older technologies, but blogging really escalated this. This is the reason I started blogging was I saw it was an interactive medium and I saw that people were really engaging.
The day I installed comments on my first blog, it took me about a week to do it. I saw my blog improving incredibly. As I improved the content I was writing, it’s that engagement. People sharing their stories, sharing their experience, disagreeing, and encouraging, those types of things have really improved the content that I was creating. I realized that my blog grew faster the more engaging it was.
Community is so important, but the thing about community is that it doesn’t just happen in one day. It takes time and it takes persistence. Every time you respond to a comment, every time you respond to an email, every time you engage with someone on social media, you’re building the asset of your blog. It’s persistence with community and engagement that is so important.
Number three pillar is traffic. Remember that first day where you realized you’ve written a piece of content and no one is reading it except for you? That feeling sometimes last for some of us for weeks. Then, someone shows up on you reblog and you realize, someone found your blog. I remember that moment very clearly. I published my first post and then, my next feeling was, “How am I going to get people to read the post?” I did what almost every blogger does. I spammed all my friends and said, “Here’s my blog.” That’s how most of us start.
Most of us realize that we can’t really sustain that approach for too long. Our friends are only going to put out with those emails for the first few days. But we’ve learnt something on that first day. We’ve learnt that we need to take responsibility for driving traffic to our blog. It’s something that we need to take initiative to.
We all have these dreams that if we just write good enough content, floods of traffic is going to come to us. But in the early days of our blog, particularly, we need to take the initiative. We need to take steps to drive traffic and that really shouldn’t go away. We should always be thinking, “How am I doing to drive traffic to my blog? Where can I be engaging? Where can I be useful? Where can I build my profile and drive some traffic back to my blog?” This is something we need to persist with.
Now, in time, word of mouth does kick in. Our readers begin to spread the word for us. But even today, 15years later, I’m still asking myself, “How can I get traffic to my blog?” In fact, just two days ago, I said to my team, “We really need to up our game in this area,” because we’ve noticed our traffic’s sliding from some of our old steady sources of traffic like Facebook. The Facebook algorithm is killing us all. At the moment, we need to be more proactive with that. We need to take some more initiative on that front. Traffic is the third pillar. This is all the stuff that we all know on the first day of our blog. We know we need content, engagement, and traffic.
The fourth pillar is another thing. If we want a profitable blog, we need to be proactive in the area of monetization. For me, this really didn’t even kick in for a year-and-a-half because I didn’t know that you could monetize a blog back in 2002; no one was really doing it. But again, I learned very quickly that even though I dreamt of a passive income straight from my blog, that I needed to do some work to get that passive income stream going in the early days. This is another area we need to persist with.
Now, this is a common theme at a ProBlogger event. If you’ve been to our events before, you know I talk a lot about putting time aside to monetize your blog. I think it was about four years ago. I put a challenge to our community and said, “Put aside 15 minutes everyday to monetize your blog in some way.” If we all put aside time to write content, we put aside time to engage with our audience, we put aside time to promote our blog, but most of us don’t put aside time on a regular daily basis to monetize our blog, at least a lot of bloggers don’t. Four years ago, I put that challenge out.
I remember, a lot of bloggers took up that challenge. Twelve months later at the next event, I was amazed at how many bloggers came up to me and said, “You know, I took the 15-minute challenge and I wrote a book this year. I wrote a book I’ve never have written. I wrote […] guide, launched a course. I launched a membership site.” I can see people in the room who actually came up to me and said, “That 15 minutes a day challenge changed my blog.” To me, it was really a great illustration of how persistence in this pillar pays off. I think this is probably one of the biggest messages I want to get across to new users. If you want a profitable blog, you need to take some initiative in this, no matter what model you used. Persistence in this area is so important.
Persist with content, engagement, traffic, monetization. It’s the accumulation of the little steps that you take in these areas that’s really is going to put you in the best position for a profitable blog. It’s not the secret strategies. It’s these four things. That’s why we designed today around these four things. We want you to persist in these areas.
Here’s a question for you, which of these four things your weakest link? Which one is the weak one for you at the moment? Where have you been putting all your energy? That’s great that you’ve been putting your energy there but where, maybe, have you been taking the foot of the accelerator this year?
For me, every year, it’s been different. Every year, I realize that there’s been times where I really haven’t put much time into my content. Or there’s been times where I really just not serve my readers and engage with them as much as I could’ve. Or like this year, maybe I got a little bit lax at driving traffic, maybe I’ve been focusing on other things, or maybe it’s been monetization.
There are times in your blog’s life cycle where you probably do need to focus more on one thing. There are other times where you need to just ask yourself again, “Where have I been missing out?” That’s one of the quickie questions I would ask you to ponder today as you think about your next steps with your blog.
Persist. Persisting is so important but it’s not enough. Often, I hear business quotes. There’s a lot of quotes about persisting. Sometimes it sounds like all you have to do is persist. Actually, it’s not. Persisting is really important but there’s something else that I think is just so important. We’ve actually chosen six speakers to speak to you today. Tomorrow, Shane is coming tomorrow for the mastermind. We’ve chosen people who I believe have persisted but they’ve done this other thing as well.
I’ve been talking about the tortoise. I actually felt really sorry for the hare growing up. I don’t know whether you did but I use to think that the hare had wasted potential. He had some qualities that had he just applied it to himself a little bit more or perhaps haven’t been so destructive, maybe he could have been a good thing. I am an empathetic kid. I was an empathetic kid. I looked for how could the hare have won the race. I actually think that there were some things that we could learn from the hare that our speakers have as a quality as well.
As I look at that first blog, I can see things have changed. I didn’t just persist to get my blogs to the point that I am today. You can see that things have changed. If I have just persisted on this blog design, I don’t think I would’ve got here. If I hadn’t persisted with tiny fonts like I did back then, I wouldn’t have got there. If I haven’t persisted with just written content, no visual content, I don’t think I would’ve gotten where I am today. Things changed and I think the lesson that we can learn from the hare is that they’re quick to change direction.
Has anyone ever tried to catch a rabbit in the wild? That’s very hard to do. It can be a little bit cruel if you do it the right way. My parents actually lived on farms for a long time. I spent a lot of time chasing all kinds of animals on those farms including rabbits and I never caught one. It wasn’t that they were just fast. It was just that they had the ability to change directions and they’re very nimble.
I love this quote from Richard Branson. “Every success story is a tale of constant adaptation, revision, and change,” and that’s certainly been the story for me. Evolution is really important; evolving. That’s why we call this event Evolve because persistency isn’t enough. We need to evolve what we do. Persist in those pillars but evolve what we do in those pillars as well.
Why is evolving so important? It’s because everything around us right now is evolving. Has anyone noticed the space we’re engaging? It’s just changing. We could run an event every month and still not keep up with the trends in blogging and the […] space at the moment. It is changing so very fast. The challenges in front of us as bloggers at the moment, just changing all the time, and as a result we need to evolve.
One of the massive challenges that faces us at the moment is noise. Is anyone struggling with noise at the moment? There’s so much content being produced in all of the niches that we’re in. There’s tens of millions of blogs producing hundreds and millions of pieces of content. There so many different platforms now. When I started blogging, there wasn’t really many ways to create content. Now, we can do it on YouTube, on Instagram, and all these social networks. There’s different platforms in blogging, all these places producing noise. We’ve got mainstream media producing amazing amounts of content.
The Washington Post is publishing over a thousand articles a week. Some of those articles have been written by computers now. You can’t even tell the difference between the computer-written content and the human-written content. That’s just going to get escalated more and more. We’re seeing the rising bots and messenger bots. This is all the more noise and more content. We’re seeing the automation of repurposing of content.
I was talking to one blogger earlier this year about the noise and she said, “I think I’m making a lot of it myself.” I’m like, “Why? Why do you say?” She said, “I write three blog posts a week.” I’m like, “That’s certainly not much noise. You’re not really contributing.” She said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s just three posts a week. Then, this is what I do to promote those posts.” She created this checklist. I was proud of her but I was also like, “It’s your fault,” at the same time.
This is what she does for every blog post. She emails her readers twice in the first month. She puts it on Facebook, on her page twice in the first month. She puts it in the Facebook group twice in the first month. She puts it on Twitter 15 times in the first month. Then, it goes into a less frequent cycle. Then, she puts it on Pinterest in her own boards—she’s got several—and other people’s boards where she’s a group member. She puts it on her LinkedIn profile, her LinkedIn page, her LinkedIn group, in Instagram as a photo, video, and a story. Then, she puts it on Snapchats. I stumbled upon Google+ on her profile and a page in her Reddit.
Then she starts pitching other people to write more content for them that promotes her post and her goal is to write two guest post to promote her post on her blog for every post she writes. Then, she pitches influencers on different social networks. She repurposes all of her post into SlideShares and then turns them into YouTube. She creates Medium and LinkedIn post audio for SoundCloud, puts them on Facebook live. Then, she does visual graphics for all of these posts. She does a PDF version of her post which she uses as an opt-in. Then, she starts advertising it.
She does over 50 pieces of content. Some of them micro content but 50 for every post that she does. This is happening more and more. Many of you in the room, maybe you don’t have quite as advanced system as she does, but a lot of us do. If we think about it, the amount of […] time that we spent promoting our content, this is happening more and more. Mainstream media are even better at doing it than we are. This is contributing to the noise. As a result of these massive challenges facing us at the moment, how do we stand out amidst this noise? We need to evolve our approach. We need to evolve.
Another massive challenge for us at the moment is distribution. It used to be that someone will come to my blog and go, “I want more of his content. I’m going to follow him on Facebook.” Then, I would see every post that I did. Although, I would say, “I want all of these. I’m going to get his email. I’m going to subscribe to his emails or I would subscribe to his RSS feed. It used to be very neat like these yellow pipes. They want the content, they get the content.
It all changed. It has become a mess. This is again, one of the biggest challenges facing us at the moment is that people want to have content but doesn’t see our content for a variety of reasons. They’re scattered in different places. The algorithms are filtering our content in social networks. Also, our emails now are being put in folders that people never open. We’re seeing a rise in pay-to-play. We’re seeing a lot of our audience now becoming blind to the techniques that we use in marketing. It used to be that I just didn’t see the banner ads, but now I don’t think that’s a opt-in as much. They don’t see our emails as much because they don’t want that. They’re distracted a lot now, partly because of the noise as well. This is another challenge we need to evolve. We need to evolve if we want our messages to be seen.
Now these are negative things. The noise and the distribution challenges are negative, and I don’t want to depress you too much. There’s also some positive reasons we need to evolve as well. One of the positive reasons is that there’s these incredible opportunities facing us at the moment. The tools of that before us, the technologies that are opening up at the moment are amazing. It’s like no other time in history. The demand in video is a real opportunity. The demand for live video and the tools that are right in our fingertips, that enable us to go live on social media.
I don’t know if you listen to my podcast but recently I talked about a tool called Ecamm Live. It’s US$30 and it puts a TV studio on your computer. It enables you to have multi cameras, do overlays, share your screen, do these amazing things live in front of people, and interact with people. The tools are quite amazing. It’s an incredible opportunity.
In Australia, over the last six or so months, I’ve seen this rise in interest in podcasting. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, my family and friends are now on podcasting, listening to podcast like I’ve never seen before. Vanessa, I reckon, she can choose four or five hours of podcast a day. She just constantly listening. I’m seeing my family and friends doing this. It’s really on the rise in Australia. It’s an opportunity before us at the moment.
We’re seeing the emergence of messaging bots which is something I think is escalating at the moment. There’s opportunities there. I’m seeing the growth in Facebook groups. We’re seeing a growth in all these tools that enable us to market in a more personal way as well. It’s incredible opportunities if only we are able to evolve fast enough to take them. Some of these opportunities come and go very quickly, so we need to be nimble. We need to be like the hare, being able to change directions while we also persist as well.
Persist and evolve. I actually start to think this way about the evolution of my blogs. This is the evolution of Digital Photography School which is my main blog since 2002. I did this because it’s actually been a tough week for me, for our company as well, and for my family. We had a death in the family this week. My father-in-law passed away yesterday. It’s been a tough time on that front.
Also, it’s been a tough time in our company because one of our key staff members who many of you know, resigned three weeks ago. Jasmine. Does anyone know Jasmine? Jasmine used to direct this event. It was really sad to see her go but also exciting to see her opportunities. One of the things I started to do after she resigned was to think about the evolution since she joined my company. I actually did a little bit of a timeline on how she’s been involved in changing our company. I wanted to show her what’s she done for our company. This started as the last seven years since Jasmine coming on board, then I went back earlier.
I want to show you this because it’s been constant evolution, the Digital Photography School. It really has and it started even before Digital Photography School started. It started back in 2002 when I started blogging at all. I just wanted to point out, to finish off my talk, some of the evolutions that have taken place in the last 15 years. I’ve chosen things that I think are really relevant for bloggers of different stages for you. Bear with me as I reflect on the last 15 years. It all, as I said, started in 2002 when I started blogging. I’m not going to retell that story because I’ve told it many times before. The one thing I do want to say is that I didn’t procrastinate. This is one of the only times I didn’t procrastinate in my life, pretty much, and in my business.
Someone shot me a link to a blog and within an hour or so, seeing what a blog was for the first time, I started my own. I don’t really know why I didn’t procrastinate. I probably should’ve. I had a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t have started a blog back then, but I didn’t procrastinate. I started that blog and I’m so glad that I started quickly because this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that I see happening is that people try to get their blog perfect before they launched it. I’m so glad that I didn’t.
I can see that some of you are nodding to each other right now and you can relate to this. We get analysis paralysis. What I’ve learned about getting a perfect blog—there’s no such thing—any kind of ideal, perfect, blog comes through evolution. It comes through starting and realizing it’s not perfect, then fixing the mistakes. Then watching how people respond to that and then moving forward in that regard. You need to start. It just need to start. If you’re at that point where you’ve been procrastinating on starting your blog, please get it done. You’re more than welcome to come to this event if you haven’t started a blog, but if you come back next year and haven’t started, I’m going to chase you down. So start.
The next most obvious thing from an external point of view about the evolution of Digital Photography School is that it’s changed its design. I’ll talk a little bit about that. This is the first design of Digital Photography School. This is the second time I tried to design a blog; really not very good. Actually, it was free template and this is what I started. This is what many bloggers do. We start with the free templates. I’ve been blogging for four or five years by this point. I didn’t really have an excuse to start with the free template, but I did and I’m tired.
Very quickly, I decided that once I got some runs on the boards, want some readers done […] I decided I was going to change the design. So then, I moved to a premium template where I paid $40 for it. Then, I paid someone $100 to design a logo, so it’s slightly more customized. Then, I decided to bite the bullet and get someone to design a proper blog design for me.
We had sliders. Do you remember that time when sliders became the big thing? They’re still the big thing for some bloggers but we added the slider in. Then we changed colors back to some of our roots. We changed the slider a little bit more and it became even more like a magazine. This is our current design. Then, we went for a responsive design. If you haven’t gone responsive, if you haven’t designed for mobile, I really encourage you to do that because it really helped our blog a lot.
Now, we’re working on our next design. This is just a very early concept that we’re working on for the next one. This is something every two years now, we’re trying to redesign our blog just to bring freshness to it. A lot of it is really now about trying to keep up with the technology. Google really wanting you to be mobile responsive. There’s really good reasons for a good blog design as well.
This is another area. Maybe you’ve come today. Maybe it’s time for your next blogs on this. People in this room are really good on that. So, ask questions around. Who designed your blog? What have you found work well for you? Look at each other’s blog on mobile, show each other what’s work well. I really encourage you to evolve in this particular area. The thing we’ve been doing more recently with our design is not just a complete redesign but an evolution. We’re trying to change bit by bit and testing along the way. I think that’s a helpful way to go.
The next area is the technology side. I’m not a very technological kind of person but it’s so important to evolve in the tools that you use and the technologies. The first change from me really came in the early days where I moved from Blogger to where I thought it’s going to be the next big thing in blogging—Movable Type. It wasn’t really the next big thing in blogging, so we eventually moved to WordPress.
The thing I’ll say about this type of change is that I was absolutely terrified every time I made these changes. Am I going to lose my archives? Am I going to lose all my readers? Along with some of these changes, I change domains as well to get off Blogger onto my own domain, onto my own service. These types of things, many of us get petrified by these things. We’re scared by these things. These are also some of the biggest times of growth to my blog as well. Getting more control over what you can do on your blog is so important.
Some of you were probably on that stage where you’re thinking about, “Should I shift platform? Should I shift some of the tools that I’m using?” We’ve been shifting other tools recently. We’ve just recently made a shift from using AWeber as an email tool, which has served us amazingly well over the last 10 or so years. We’ve been realizing that there’s some limitations in terms of how we can personalize our communications via email with our readers. We’re shifting across to a tool called Drip. There’s plenty of other amazing tools as well that enable you to do more.
Maybe you’re at the stage now where you need to change some of the tools that you use. Maybe it’s your email tool. Maybe it’s your landing pages. Maybe it’s your shopping cart or some of those types of things. We use shopping carts on our sites and we for many years use E-junkie which is amazing. It’s $5 a month for a tool that puts a shopping cart on your site. It served us so well. But again, we’ve outgrown it and we’ve been using some of these other tools as well. Again, there’s plenty of others out there.
Just ask yourself again, over the next day also, “Are the tools that I’m using holding me back in some way?” You could be leaving money on the table particularly with something like a shopping cart, an email tool. You could be leaving a lot of money on the table if you’re selling products and using tools that really aren’t feature-rich. There are so many amazing tools right now.
These are just some of the tools we’ve tried over the last 12 months and it’s just scratching the surface. This is one of the biggest evolutions that I’ve noticed in the blogging space at the moment is there’s a whole industry around us now. 2002, you could start on Blogger and that’s about it. There was really no tools. There was a few scripts around that could enhance your tools, your platform, but now, we’re living at a time where it’s just so amazing.
The other thing I would say about tools is you could waste a lot of money. Most of these tools have a monthly fee associated with them. Maybe it’s time you cut back on some of your tools, too. You could be like me and be addicted to trying new things and I’m paying for that.
One of the other bigger evolutions for me was back in 2004. Some of the evolutions for me, really, I think we’re sparked by changing my mindset. For some of you, I suspect, this would be relevant for you. You may not need to do anything differently. Maybe you need to start thinking differently about your blog. For me, it was around the time I’m starting to monetize my blog for the first time. I started to think about maybe I could be a full-time blogger one day. I was earning a little bit of money here and there from my blog. I had AdSense on my blog by this point—I’ll talk about that in a moment—and I think I was earning about $100 a week from my blog which is pretty good. I was very proud of myself and I used to spreadsheet how last month it was $90 a week. This month it’s $100 a week. Next month, it