ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

From Imposter Syndrome to Tech Influencer - A Tech Podcaster Tells His Story Today's episode continues our series where I hand the podcast over to you, the listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. Today’s blogger is Neil Hughes from Technology Blog Writer. Neil shares how he started out writing articles on LinkedIn, and talks about some of his struggles, accomplishments, and goals. Links and Resources for From Imposter Syndrome to Tech Influencer - One Tech Podcaster Shares His Story Technology Blog Writer Blogger Neil Hughes Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group PB121: 7 Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to Episode 231 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the founder of problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks and a course all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog, to grow that blog, the traffic to it, the content on it, and to make some money from it as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our little series of blogger stories which we are ending 2017 and starting 2018 with in the lead up to our Start a Blog course. My goal in 2018 is to see hundreds, if not thousands, of new blogs started. We’ve developed this great little course which you can find at problogger.com/startablog. It’s free and it will help you, all your friends, to start a blog. As part of the launch of this new course, we wanted to feature the stories of bloggers who had started blogging and to tell the stories of the opportunities that came from that. Also, to share some tips particularly for those starting out but also for those who are on the journey. Today I’ve got a tech blogger from the UK who is gonna share some of his tips. He’s actually used blogging, podcasting. He started out on LinkedIn. He’s got some expertise in that as well. He’s really built himself an amazing little business as a result of that, a business that has enabled him to leave his full time job and work for himself. He talks a little bit about imposter syndrome and pushing through that. He gives a brilliant tip that I wanna add some thoughts to at the end of his story as well. I’m gonna hand over now to Neil Hughes from Tech Blog Writer. You can find his blog at techblogwriter.co.uk. You can also find a link to that on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/231. I’ll be back at the end of Neil’s story to wrap things up and tell you a little bit about tomorrow’s show too. Neil: My name is Neil Hughes. My blog, podcast, and everything that I do comes into the name Tech Blog Writer. My URL is predictably www.techblogwriter.co.uk. I’m hoping that you know what I do from the title there. That was the idea from the very beginning. My story really began in July 2014 when I published my very first post on the LinkedIn publishing platform. It was a simple post calling out gurus, ninjas and those self-proclaimed influences, you know the kind, the Instagram expert with 72 followers. The post was called The Rise of the Social Media Guru. This is where my tech blogging journey started. At the time, I didn’t have any objectives, any hopes, goals or dreams for the blog. I just wanted to share my insights having spent 20 years working in IT. I gotta be honest with you, I was originally scared about blogging on the LinkedIn publishing platform and crippled with that self-doubt and imposter syndrome that so many of us go through. I still, to this day, remember nervously hovering over the publish button full of fears and doubts. What would my professional colleagues, friends, and contacts say?

How a Blog Helped Grow a Voice Coaching Business In our continuing series of blogger stories I’m handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. This series started in episode 221, and is helping us launch our new (and completely free) ‘Start a Blog' course that will go live on 10 January 2018. You can sign up to reserve your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. Today’s short and sweet episode comes from My Happy Voice blogger Vahn Petit, and even includes a bit of singing.. Links and Resources for How a Blog Helped Group My Voice Coaching Business My Happy Voice Blogger Vahn Petit 213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hello, is it me you’re looking for? I promised you that there will be singing today and there’s gonna be more. I’m sorry about that. The singing that will come will be bit better than that. Hi! Welcome to Episode 230 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger. A blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and soon to be an album, maybe not, all designed to help you to grow your blog and to build some profit around your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you as listeners and as readers of the blog, to tell your story, to share your tips, to talk about the mistakes you’ve made, and to talk about the opportunities that your blog has brought you. This series did start back in Episode 221. It’s all about trying to inspire as many bloggers as possible to start a blog in 2018 because we’ve got this free course going live on the 10th of January, just a few days away now. You can still sign up to reserve a spot in that course, it’s completely free. Go to problogger.com/startablog. My goal, it’s a big one, is to see thousands of new blogs started this year because of this course. If you are thinking of starting a blog, please go sign up. Please get that blog launched. In today’s episode, you’re going to hear from someone who is gonna sing to you. She’s gonna give you some amazing tips. It’s a sweet episode, it’s not too long. The blogger is Vahn Petit, who is a voice coach. She blogs at myhappyvoice.com. Love this episode, is lovely, and sweet, and has some great tips. I’m gonna come back at the end of the episode to share a few thoughts that I have on what Vahn shares with us. I’m gonna hand it over to her now. Vahn: Hello, Darren. Hello, ProBloggers. Hello, my name is Vahn Petit, I am a voice teacher and a vocal coach in modern music at myhappyvoice.com. I started my first blog in 2010. I just wanted a platform to share my journey as a vocal coach. At first, I was writing very short articles, very, very short articles with stories about what was happening in the studio, could be about a student having difficulties to sing a song and how we’re trying to fix it. I remember also I was posting each month a list of songs that had been studied with the links to some YouTube videos. I remember also I was sharing pictures and videos of the concerts of my students. I guess, at that time, I had several objectives. The main one was sharing stories and what was happening in the studio for my students so they could share the articles with their families. The second one was to find more students. I had a page with information about the singing one-to-one lessons, the group classes, and the workshops. I also was posting articles from time to time to attract people who wanted to take lessons. It went pretty well but probably because I started in 2010.

2 Finance Bloggers Share their Tips for Taking Blogs from a Hobby to a Full Time Business Once again we're handing the podcast over to you, the listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. Since episode 221 we've been hearing from our listeners about their blogs as a lead up to our new (and completely free) ‘Start a Blog course’, which goes live on 10 January 2018. You can sign up to reserve your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. Today we're we’re featuring another two bloggers from the same niche. In this case, they’re both finance bloggers. I met both these guys for the first time at our SuccessIncubator event in 2017. In fact, they both spoke and did great sessions. Links and Resources for 2 Finance Bloggers Share their Tips for Building Blogs from Hobby to a Full Time Business Well Kept Wallet Blogger Deacon Hayes Wallet Hacks Blogger Jim Wang HARO - Help a Reporter Out Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 229 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger. A blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, courses all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, and to build profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing this series of blogger stories where we’re hearing from readers of ProBlogger and listeners of this podcast telling their stories of starting a blog and some of the opportunities that that blog has opened up for them. They’re also sharing some of their mistakes and tips for those of you who are starting out. But also you’ll hear today tips that I think are really relevant for those who are along the way with their blogging as well, particularly today, we’ve got a couple of tips that I think are particularly relevant for bloggers who’ve been around for a while, bloggers who maybe had been blogging maybe for a few years and things haven’t quite worked. Today is really relevant for both new bloggers and older bloggers as well. This series started back in episode 221. If you haven’t heard them, we’ve been pumping them out on a daily basis for the last week, there’s quite a few there now. We’re hearing from DIY bloggers, travel bloggers, recipe bloggers, nutritional bloggers, all kinds of bloggers. Today, we are hearing from two bloggers both from the same niche. They’re both finance bloggers and both of these guys who I met for the first time in 2017 in person, I met them at our Success Incubator event in Dallas. Both of these guys, a lot of fun, they both actually spoke at the event and did amazing sessions. There’s a lot of wisdom behind both the men. I do encourage you to check out their blogs. You can find today’s show notes with links to their blogs as well as a few things that they mention along the way over at problogger.com/podcast/229 and you can also leave a comment there. Remember, all of this is a part of our launch sequence for our new course for those of you who wanna start a blog. If you’re thinking about starting a blog, head over to problogger.com/startablog. I’m gonna come back between these stories to just make a few comments, throw out a few points, and then at the end I wanna tell you something new that I haven’t told you yet about the Start A Blog course, so stay tuned right to the end today. The first blogger I wanna introduce you to today is Deacon Hayes from wellkeptwallet.com. He’s got an inspirational story. He’s gone from being a wood flooring salesperson to full time blogger over the last few years and has some really useful tips. As I mentioned at the top of the show, some of these are quite relevant for those of yo...

Leaving Her Job to Create a Multi Six Figure Online Business - A Writing Blogger Tells Her Story We're continuing our series of blogger stories, and handing the podcast over to you so you can tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. This series, which started with episode 221, is all part of the launch of our new (and completely free) ‘Start a Blog' course, which goes live on 10 January 2018. You can sign up to reserve your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. In today’s episode we hear from Joanna Penn, who has done amazing things with her blog at www.TheCreativePenn.com. Joanna blogs about fiction and non-fiction writing, independent publishing, and making a living from writing. And she's built an amazing business around that topic. I first met Joanna at the very first ProBlogger conference in Melbourne back in 2010. Joanna is English, but at the time she was living in Brisbane, Australia. Blogging and podcasting has allowed Joanna to move on from a cubicle job she really didn’t like and build a business that not only brings in a multiple six-figure income each year, but has also provided many opportunities for her to travel and speak on the topic she covers. Joanna’s story is one of my favorites in this series, so settle in and enjoy. Links and Resources for From Crying in the Bathroom at Work to a Multi Six Figure Online Business The Creative Penn Blogger Joanna Penn Canva PB094: 5 Mistakes Bloggers Make with SEO and What To Do About Them 194: 5 SEO Tools for Bloggers 221: From 0 to 500,000 Page Views a Month – A DIY Blogger Shares Her Story Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 228 of the ProBlogger Podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, an event, job board, series of ebooks, and a course all designed to help you to start an amazing blog that’s gonna change the world in some way, and hopefully change your life too by building a bit of profit for you. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories which I started back in Episode 221. Essentially, this series is all about handing the podcast over to listeners so that I can share their stories of starting blogs. We’ve heard some amazing stories so far, and today I’ve got a really great one, an inspiring one for you. As I said, this started back in Episode 221, go back and listen to those previous episodes. They’re all relatively short stories, and some of the episodes actually have two or three bloggers sharing their stories as well. This is all leading up to our Start A Blog course which launches on the 10th of January, 2018, which is all designed to really help you to start a blog, or someone you know to start a blog. We all know someone who should be blogging, and my hope is that you’ll share that course with them. You can find the course and sign-up where you can register to be part of it at problogger.com/startablog. Please do feel free to share that with others. It’s a completely free course. In today’s episode, we’re hearing from a blogger who has done something quite amazing with blog and podcasting since she started. She has a blog on the topic of fiction and non-fiction writing, covers independent publishing, and making a living with your writing and has built an amazing business on that particular topic. The blogger’s name is Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. I know many of you are familiar with Joanna already, because she’s been hanging around ProBlogger for years now. In fact, I first met her at the very first ProBlogger Conference back in 2010, back in Melbourne. Joanna is English,

3 Travel Bloggers Share Their Tips and Stories Once again I'm handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to share your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. I started this series towards the end of last year with episode 221: From 0 to 500,000 Page Views a Month – A DIY Blogger Shares Her Story Today I’ve got three blogger stories for you. And like our ‘tech blogger’ episode 222, I’ve put together stories from three travel and tourism bloggers. Links and Resources for 3 Travel Bloggers Share their Stories and Tips Captivating Cappadocia Blogger Duke Dillard 14 Types of Stories You Can Tell On Your Blog Red Sweater MarsEdit 4 Travelletto Blogger Dianne Bortoletto Amateur Traveler Blogger Chris Christensen Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there, welcome to Episode 227 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the founder of problogger.com – a blog, a podcast, event, job board, a series of ebooks, and a course all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create great content for the readers who come to it, find those readers, and to build a profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you, podcast listeners and blogger readers, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. We started this series back in episode 221. We’ve had six episodes since that time. They’ve all been from bloggers from different niches. In today’s episode, I’ve got three blogger stories for you. They’re all relatively short, one of them’s only 2 ½ minutes. Like in our tech bloggers episode last week, today’s three stories all come from bloggers from the travel or tourism space. I thought it would be nice to put them together because there are some similarities there. I know a lot of you do have the dream of becoming a travel blogger. I hope you find some ideas in today’s show. This is all part of our series of podcast all to help you to get inspired to start a blog. If you haven’t started a blog yet, we encourage you to join our Start a Blog course, which starts from the 10th of January. You can head over to problogger.com/startablog and find out more about it. It’s completely free. There’s an opportunity there to put your email address in, and we’ll let you know when that course goes live on the 10th of January. More about that at the end of the show today. I want to hand over now to our three bloggers. I’m going to just jump in in between each of the stories just to pull out a few of the thoughts that I have about the stories, a few little tips, and a little bit of further listening for you today as well because I do mention some things that I find quite fascinating. Let me hand over to our first blogger now who is blogging American accent but living in Turkey and blogging about Cappadocia. Duke: Hi, my name is Duke Dillard. My blog is Captivating Cappadocia. It focuses on the amazing Cappadocia region of Turkey. The URL is www.captivatingcappadocia.com. Cappadocia is in the center of Turkey. It’s an ancient region mentioned a couple of times in the bible. We were living in Anchorage before. I just finished a master’s degree and then decided to move to Cappadocia. During my MBA, I have been researching blogging and started thinking about doing a blog for our visitors to Cappadocia. I thought it’d be a great way to meet lots of people and motivate me to get the most out of the area. We moved here in July 2011. I started the blog in September. I’ve been reading all I could and gathering resources. I had a name, and a logo, and tagline, and I’ve written a few posts.

Over $100,000 in Ad Revenue - a Dating Ideas Blogger Tells Her Story It’s the beginning of January, and I want to wish you all a Happy New Year. You may want to kick off the new year with our Start a Blog Course. Today we're resuming our series of blogger stories where I hand the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. Kristen Manieri from Orlando, Florida started a blog with no real plan to make money. Kristen writes about dating ideas for a particular location, and her blog has grown to the point where she's making over $100,000 in advertising. Links and Resources for From Passion Project to Over $100,000 in Advertising Revenue Orlando Night Guide Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 226 of the ProBlogger podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, event, job board, a series of ebooks, and soon to be a course all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create a blog with great content that’s going to serve your audience, and to build some profit around that blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. It is the first of January as this episode goes live. I do want to pause and wish you all a very Happy New Year. I hope you had a good holiday period, no matter what you did, and ready and raring to go for a great year of blogging ahead. We’ve got a massive amount planned for you this year. Starting on the 10th of January, with our new course, The Ultimate Guide To Starting A Blog, which is a seven-step guide to starting a blog that has the foundations to be profitable. We want to talk you through how to set up a blog but we want to take you a little bit back from that and get you starting a blog that’s on the right topic and is well-thought through in terms of what you’re going to be creating. That starts on the 10th of January. If you head over to problogger.com/startablog, you will have an opportunity there to reserve your spot in that course, it’s a free course, and be notified when that goes live. Today, we are continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you, as listeners, to tell your stories of starting a blog. It’s all about trying to inspire as many people as possible to start and grow their blogs in 2018. Today’s story is an amazing one. It’s of a blogger who started a blog about dating and dating ideas in a particular location. She has grown that blog, which started as a passion project, with no real intent of making money. She’s over the years built that up to the point where it’s making over $100,000 a year in advertising just on writing on dating ideas for a particular location. She tells a little bit more about how she’s going to expand that to more than one location as well. This is a great story. I hope you enjoy it. You can find today’s show notes with all the links to our course as well as the blogger that we’re featuring today over at problogger.com/podcast/226. After she shares her story, I’ll be back to point out a few things that I love about the story and give you a few more tips of my own. Thanks for listening. Kristen: Hi, this is Kristen Manieri from Orlando, Florida. I wanted to tell you all about my blog, orlandodatenightguide.com. I started Orlando Date Night Guide in 2007. It’s a total passion project. My husband, Mark, and I just moved to Orlando the year before. I was immediately struck by how much there was to do outside of the theme parks and by how often when I would share these things with people who already lived here, even people who’d been here for five years or more, how many had never heard of them or hadn’t ever bothered to check them out.

How One Nutritionist Uses Her Blog to Help Grow Her Business Here's another episode where I hand the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. In today’s episode I’ve got Aussie blogger Nina—one of the attendees from our recent events in Australia. She came to our mastermind day, and I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit of her story there. And I wanted to include her story today because it illustrates another model of building an income around your blog. Links and Resources for From How One Nutritionist Uses Her Blog to Grow Her Business: Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Nina Mills Series Started in Episode 221 Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren : Hey there and welcome to episode 225 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, a job board, an event, a series of ebooks, and soon to be a course designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create fantastic content for it that will change your reader’s lives and to build some profit around your blog. You can learn more about what we do over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, episode 225, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories. This started back in episode 221. If this is your first one in the series, you might wanna go back and listen to that one. I explained this series a little bit in more detail but basically we’re giving bloggers who are listening of this podcast a chance to share their story and some tips that they have. This is all part of our Start A Blog challenge. We really want this series to inspire as many people as possible to start new blogs. We’re going to launch a course at the end of this series, second week of January, to help you do that. It’s a short course which will walk through some of the technicalities of starting a blog but also help you think about how to build a profitable blog and get some of those foundations in place before you start. If you are thinking of starting a new blog or you know someone who you think will be a great blogger, send them over to problogger.com/startablog and you can sign up there to be notified when that course goes live. In today’s episode, I’ve got another Aussie blogger. This is Nina from Australia and she’s one of the attendees from our recent events in Australia. She came to our mastermind day and I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit of her story there. I wanted to include this story today. It’s very short, it’s very simple, because, I think, it illustrates another model of building an income around your blog which we don’t talk about enough. I’m gonna leave it at that. Nina is a Nutritionist and she is using her blog to, I guess, help her to build her private following and find some work. I’m gonna hand it over to Nina, it’s a very short episode, and then I’m gonna come back at the end and just make a few comments and give you a few thoughts on what Nina says. You can get the show notes today and find Nina’s blog, whatsforeats.com.au. You can find the link to that and the full transcript over at problogger.com/podcast/225. Nina: Hi there! My name’s Nina and my blog’s called What’s for Eats? You can find that at whatsforeats.com.au. I started What's for Eats? back in 2010, after I have graduated from a Graduate Diploma in Human Nutrition. I was really struggling to find work. I mean, here I was, a freshly-anointed nutritionist with all of this new knowledge to share and nowhere to share it. Blogging seemed like the perfect opportunity to practice my health, writing, and spread, and I cringe to say this now, messages about “healthy eating.” When looking back at what I did in starting my blog,

From 5 to Over 1,000,000 Monthly Readers - A Finance Blogger Shares His Story Once again I’m handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. In today's episode you'll hear the story of Robert Farrington, a finance blogger. After a couple of fairly unfocused years where he made no money from his blog, Robert managed to turn things around through storytelling and taking his readers on a journey. In his third year he made $30,000, and today he earns a high seven-figure income from his blogging business, with more than a million people reading his blog every month. I love that how the bloggers in the series who've ‘made it’ to a full-time level are giving us insights into their early years. This series is designed to give those starting out (or about to start out) some inspiration, along with some practical tips and encouragement for those early days. It’s part of the launch of our brand new Start a Blog course, which launches in the second week of January. To learn more about it, and get notified when it goes live, head to problogger.com/startablog Links and Resources for From 5 to Over 1,000,000 Readers a Month - A Finance Blogger Tells His Story: Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Robert Farrington Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren : Hey there and welcome to episode 224 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to create some great content, to build community and monetize your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I am handing the podcast to you as listeners of this podcast and the readers of the blog. To tell you stories, to share you tips of starting and growing your blog over these 12 episodes and they’re daily at the moment so they’re coming thick and fast. You’re hearing stories of bloggers who started out, some of them a few years ago and some of them 10 years ago now to tell us some of what has happened since for them. They talk about their mistakes, their tips, the lessons they’ve learned and the good things that have come as a result of starting their blog. Today, you’re gonna hear the story of a finance blogger who started a few years ago now and it was a fairly lean start. He pushed through a couple of fairly unfocused years where he didn’t really have focus for his blog, where he wasn’t really making any money at all from his blog, but he pushed through it anyway to the point where in his third year, he began to get it together. In that third year, he made about $30,000 which was the beginnings of a new business that formed around his blog. Today, he has over a million readers a month and he’s making high six-figures a year from that blog. I’m not guaranteeing that if you take our Starter Blog course that you are going to get to that point, but really, this series is about giving you a little bit of inspiration, to tell you some stories of what could happen as a result of starting a blog, but also to give you some practical tips, and to give an insight into the beginning days of these blogs. One of the things I love about this series is that we are hearing from bloggers who have, to all intents and purposes, made it. They’re at a full time level, they’ve built successful businesses but they’re giving us little insights into their early years. I love that and I’m very grateful to all these bloggers who are doing that. This series is designed to give you, as a someone who’s potentially starting out in your blogging journey,

From 0 to Six Figures in Two Years - A Recipe Blogger Shares Her Story In today’s episode we continue our series of blogger stories where I hand the podcast over to you listeners to tell your stories and tips about starting and growing your blogs. We kicked off the series three episodes back with a DIY blogger, and yesterday we featured two tech/Microsoft bloggers. Today I'm introducing you to Erin Chase, a friend of mine. In 2008 she started a blog where she documented what she was having for dinner each night, hoping it would help people on a budget cook affordable meals for their family. Erin's simple idea has grown into a blog with MILLIONS of readers, and has become an extremely profitable business for her. We’re sharing these blogger's stories in the hope of inspiring people to start some great new blogs in the year ahead. In the second week of January we’re launching a free course on ProBlogger to help as many new bloggers as possible get started by equipping them with great foundations. Links and Resources for From 0 to Six-Figure Blogger in Two Years - A Recipe Blogger Tells Her Story: Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Erin Chase Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog The Biggest Lesson I Learned About Building a Profitable Blog in 2015 Should You Blog Anonymously or Use Your Real Name? Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, a podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and soon to be courses all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog. The archives of your blog, the traffic of your blog, the community of your blog and the income around your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you as the listener of this podcast, to tell your story, and to share some tips of starting and growing your blogs as the community of ProBlogger. We kicked off this little series three episodes ago now with a DIY blogger. Yesterday, we featured two tech Microsoft bloggers. Today, to do something a little bit different, I wanna introduce you to a friend of mine, who, back in 2008, started a blog that would document what she was having for dinner every night in the hope that it will help others on a budget to cook affordable, healthy meals for their families as well. It’s such a simple idea but one that this blogger has grown into a blog with millions of readers and six figure income. In fact, she hit that level in her second year of blogging. It’s become an extremely profitable business. We’re sharing these blogger stories in the hope of inspiring some great new blogs to be started in the year ahead. In the second week of January 2018, we’re launching a free course on ProBlogger with the goal of equipping as many new bloggers as possible to get started with great foundations for profitable blogs. If you wanna start a blog or a second blog, sign up to be notified of this free course. Now, we’re starting in a few weeks’ time now at problogger.com/startablog. You can find today’s show notes with a link to that Start a Blog course, and a full transcript of today’s story over at the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/223. Today’s blogger story is from Erin Chase from 5dollardinners.com. I’ve been hearing stories about Erin and the business that she’s built for many years now. When this year I had the opportunity to meet her face-to-face, in person, for the first time and to start an event with her at the Success Incubator event that we ran earlier in the year, I leapt at that opportunity. Erin is a real go-getter who has built a remarkable business.

From Corporate Desk Jobs to Full-Time Bloggers - 2 Tech Bloggers Tell their Story In today’s episode we're continuing our series where I’m handing the podcast over to you as listeners to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. It started yesterday with the story of Brittany Bailey, a DIY blogger who grew her blog to hundreds of thousands of readers a month. Today I want to introduce two tech bloggers whose blogs have allowed them both to leave their corporate jobs to start their own businesses around their blogs. We’re sharing these stories and tips in the lead-up to the launch of our free ‘Start a Blog’ course, which launches in the second week of January. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, this free course will walk you through how to do it, and provide you with a good foundation for building a business around it. Links and Resources for From Corporate Desk Jobs to Full-Time Blogger: Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Paul’s blog Sumit’s blog How to Create an Efficient Contact Page That Boosts Your Productivity How I Diversified My Blogging Income and Became a Full Time Blogger Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you to start a great blog to create some amazing content that will change your readers’ lives and to build some profit around that blog too. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, episode 222, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you as listeners, to tell your stories and to share some tips of starting and growing your blogs. This series started yesterday with the story of Brittany Bailey, a DIY blogger who grew her blog to hundreds of thousands of readers a month. You can listen to that. She did the introduction to these series, in episode 221. Today, I want to introduce you to two bloggers, two tech bloggers. Both of whom whose blogs enabled them to leave their real world desk corporate jobs to start their own businesses around their blogs. We’re sharing their stories and tips in the lead up to our Start A Blog course which launches in the second week of January. Have you been thinking about starting a blog? This free course will walk you through how to set up that blog with good foundations for building not only a useful blog to your readers but also good foundations for building a profitable blog. You can get notified when this course goes live by signing up over at problogger.com/startablog. You can also find a link to that in today’s show notes where I’ll also link our two bloggers of the day over at problogger.com/podcast/222. As I said at the top of the show, today, I want to play you two stories, both of which are from tech bloggers who started their blogs in the last four years. Both of whom have grown their blogs to a point where they’ve been able to give up their previous corporate jobs to become full-time bloggers which I know is a dream of many listeners of this podcast. I’ve decided to put these two stories together today because there are some real similarities and I know also that there are many of you who are our listeners to this podcast who blog about these more technical things. I thought putting those two together will give you a couple of examples of the kind of blogs that have done well. The first blogger that I want to introduce you to will be familiar to many of you, it’s Paul Cunningham from practical365.com. Paul will be familiar to many of you who are part of their Facebook group because he’s a regular contributor there.

Today is the first episode in a 12-part series we’re running on the ProBlogger podcast over the next few weeks. We’re handing the podcast over to you - the listeners and readers of ProBlogger - to tell your story of how you started your blog and what’s happened since. As I said a couple of weeks ago, in the second week of January we’ll be releasing a brand new (and completely free) course on how to start a blog. And in the lead up to that we wanted to feature stories of bloggers who've already started. Head to problogger.com/startablog for more info on the course In each episode you’ll hear a story (and in some cases two or three) of a blogger who will share: a mistake they made starting out something they’re grateful that they did a tip for new bloggers something good that's happened since they started. We’ve chosen bloggers from different parts of the world and different niches, and I hope you come away from this series with a little inspiration and a few practical tips to start your next blog. When we first asked for story submissions we were hoping for a handful of good stories so we could feature one a week over the next three or so weeks. But we were inundated with hundreds of them. And while I can’t feature all of them, we’ve decided to feature more than we’d planned. And in the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out 12 short episodes (16 bloggers in total). Five of those episodes will come out this week (daily shows). Then there’ll be a little break for Christmas and New Years before we roll out seven more shows over the next week and a bit. It was really hard to choose which bloggers to feature. We wanted to include a selection of different niches, objectives of blogs, and countries of origin. And of course were looking for good stories and tips. Thanks so much to those who submitted stories. We’re only featuring 16 in this series, but we do hope to use more submissions later in the year, both on this podcast and on the ProBlogger blog. I should note that not all the recordings are perfect audiowise. But they're all under ten minutes, and despite some small imperfections in the audio we’ve chosen them because they’re good stories with good tips. So, with that all said, it’s time for our first blogger. Links and Resources: Blogger Brittany Bailey of Pretty Handy Girl Register for ProBlogger's FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 221 of the ProBlogger podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, event, a job board, a series of ebooks, and soon to be some courses all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and to build a blog that’s profitable, as well as a blog that’s going to change the world in some way. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all we do over at problogger.com. Today is the first episode in a 12-part series that we’re running over the next few weeks here on the ProBlogger podcast where we’re handing the whole podcast over to you, listeners and readers of ProBlogger, to tell you a story of starting your blog and what’s happened since. As I said a couple of weeks ago in an episode, in the second week of January we will be releasing a brand new and completely free course on how to start a profitable blog. In the lead up to that course going live, we’ve wanted to feature some stories of you, of bloggers who’ve already started. If you want to know a little bit more about the course and be notified when it does go live, just go over to problogger.com/startablog for more information on that. Over the next 12 episodes, we’re going to push them out a bit faster than normal, you’re going to hear a story in each one and in some cases you’ll hear two or three stor...

What You Should Include in Your Email Newsletters (and Answers to 4 FAQs About Email) Do you email your blog readers regularly? Maybe you put ‘set up email newsletter’ on your ‘someday’ list ages ago, but still haven’t done it. Or maybe you have a newsletter list, but you haven’t sent one in months. You might think it’s optional – something you can do once you've finished everything else on your to-do list. You might even think email is dead (or at least old-fashioned), and that you’re better off building connections through social media. (Which is nothing new, by the way. I was talking about bloggers having similar concerns nine years ago.) The truth is, email is still one of the best ways (if not the best way) to connect with your blog’s readers. Email is a big part of my strategy on both of my blogs. It drives traffic, and helps us build our community, understand who's reading our blog, and monetize both directly and indirectly. If you’re not using it, you really are missing out. But what do you email? What is the content you include in your communications? Email can be used in many ways, and you can sent a variety of email types. But today I want to talk about creating a regular email newsletter, which for me is the foundation of my email strategy. A few of the most common questions I get about newsletters and email strategy: What tool should I use? (we use Drip and also recommend ConvertKit) What content should I put in my emails? What format should they be in – plain text, rich text, HTML? How frequently should I send emails? What other types of emails should I consider sending? How do I get more subscribers? (I'm not going to cover this today, but recommend you listen to episodes 68 and 69) Links and Resources on What to Include in Your Email Newsletters: How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money Comparing Email Service Providers for Bloggers 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter 3 Examples of Content You Can Include in Your Email Newsletter Other Podcasts On Similar Topics: PB117: Case Study – How One Blogger Used a Blog Post, SlideShare Deck, Lead Magnet, Email Sequence and a Webinar to Earn Over $28,000 PB107: Affiliate Marketing Tips – What Links to Use in Your Emails PB069: Create an Opt-In to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers PB068: How to Increase Your Email List Subscribers By 100% Or More Today 161: 3 Things Most Bloggers Don’t Pay Enough Attention To Tools We're Using: (These are affiliates and we get a small commission on purchases.) Drip - the current email service provider for ProBlogger ConvertKit - a tool we’re just starting to experiment with that looks very promising. Built from the ground up for bloggers. Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 220 of the Problogger podcast. My name's Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, and soon to come some courses, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog and to make some money from it as well. You can learn more about Problogger at problogger.com. And while I’m mentioning it, sign up for our newsletter, Problogger PLUS. You’ll see calls to action to do that wherever you go on problogger.com. That will keep you in the loop in terms of our new content, but also some of the new things we’ve got coming for 2018. In today’s episode, I wanna talk about email. It’s a fairly introductory... I guess the frequently asked questions that I get about email, particularly what should you include in the emails that you send. I think most bloggers know that they should be sending some emails and collecting email addresses,

An Invitation for YOU to Be Featured on the ProBlogger Podcast Today's podcast is a little different. It's an invitation for YOU to be featured in an upcoming episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Early next year we’ll be releasing a brand new free course for bloggers to help them launch their blogs. And in the lead up we want to feature stories and tips from ProBlogger listeners and readers who've already started their own blogs. So if you’ve started a blog, whether it was recently or a long time ago, we’d love to include you in the series. Links and Resources on I'd like to Feature YOU on the ProBlogger Podcast Blogging What’s Your Story? Facebook Group Join the video challenge in our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 219 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today I’ve got something a little bit different. Normally I teach something to you. I share an idea or a tip on how to improve your blog. But today I want to invite you to teach the rest of our audience. I want to try something a little different and give you an invitation to be featured in an upcoming episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Early next year we’re going to be releasing a brand new course for bloggers to help them to launch their first blog, pre-bloggers really. In the lead up to that, we would love to feature stories and tips from ProBlogger listeners and readers who’ve already started their blog. If you’ve started a blog, whether it be in the last few months, the last year, or a long time ago, I would to love to include you in this upcoming series. Today’s episode is all about how you can be involved in this little project we’re running. Listen on to find out how. But let me share the show notes for today where you can find all the details of what I’m going to mention, it’s at problogger.com/podcast/219. Every year in January we notice a really big swing, upswing, in traffic to ProBlogger’s articles on the topic of how to start a blog. It seems that many people make this their New Year’s resolution. "I’m going to start a blog in 2018." And we’re expecting that in the beginning of next year, many people will begin to do that. This next January, we want to really help as many of those bloggers as possible in a way that we’ve never done it before. We want to really see in 2018 be the year that thousands of new blogs get started. And to do this we’ve been working on a brand new free course on that very topic that’s going to walk pre-bloggers through the process of not only setting up a blog, the technicalities of that, but setting up the foundations for a profitable blog. We’re going to be talking about choosing a topic, and a niche, and really refining what it is that you want to do on that blog. It’s not just about getting a domain and a server, that’s certainly part of what we want to help people with that. But we want to really get the right foundations for starting a blog. If you are one of our listeners, and there are quite a few of you who are yet to start, yet to do your first blog, or you’re thinking about starting a second blog, I want to encourage you to just be on the lookout for that because it’ll happen early next year. You can sign up to be notified of that in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/219. But if you are someone who’s already started blogging, we would also love to involve you in the process as much as possible. We want to ask you to share your story and a few tips on the topic of starting a blog. My team and I are really excited about this course we’ve already put together. I’s very comprehensive. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had when I was starting out. However, we know that in the wider ProBlogger community, there’s such amazing knowledge and some really inspirational stories...

Using the SMART Approach to Set Your Blogging Goals for 2018 It’s that time of year where many of us are reviewing the year gone by and setting our blogging goals for 2018. Goal setting is really important in any venture. Without goals, your actions tend to be aimless and random. By setting something specific to aim at, you'll be motivated and more focused in your efforts. A lot has been written about goal setting over the years. But one way to set your goals is to use the SMART approach, where SMART is an acronym for characteristics of good goals. Most people say Peter Drucker came up the idea, while others say it was George Doran. In any case, both men were almost certainly contributors. Today I want to work through one version of it (there are a number of subtle variations) and see what we can learn about it as bloggers. Join our Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, and welcome to Episode 218 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, series of ebooks, and a job board all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to build an income around your blog, and hopefully change the world and make it a better place at the same time. Today in Episode 218, I want to talk about goal setting. It is that time of year where I know many of you are beginning to wind down a little bit. You’re beginning to do some reviews of your blog and you’re starting to think about next year. You’re thinking about what you should be trying to achieve in the year ahead. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably starting to think about some goals or objectives for the year ahead. That’s something that we’re talking about as a team for ProBlogger and Digital Photography School at the moment. I thought I would share some tips on setting some goals. Goals that are going to stretch you, but also goals that would be realistic. Goals that will move your business forward and move you forward, I guess, in many ways as well. I want to give you a bit of a framework for thinking about those goal settings. You can find out a little bit more about what I’m doing today on today’s show notes. There’s a full transcription of today’s show, as well as some further reading as well. Go to problogger.com/podcast/218. There’s also an opportunity for you to sign up for our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter on the show notes. And simply, that is a weekly email that I send out every Thursday, Australian time, on Thursday morning US. That’s just a recap of what we’ve published over the last week. You get a little notification of our new podcast and new blogpost and if I’ve done a Facebook Live as well. Anyway, I want to get on with today’s show. Show notes again at problogger.com/podcast/218. As I said in the intro, it is that time of the year where many bloggers are reviewing the year gone by, beginning to think about goals for 2018. Also, many of us are looking forward to a little bit of a break over the holiday period. Here in Australia of course, we’re going into Summer at the moment. I’m standing here in my shorts and t-shirts which is a welcome relief after a long winter. We’ll be having a warm Christmas and New Year’s period with a bit of a break. That’s what, us, Aussies do. But also, in the midst of all that planning for a break, we’re beginning to think about next year, 2018. I can’t believe it’s almost upon us. Goal setting of course is so important in any part of your life really. If you want to achieve things, it’s much easier to make those achievements if you’ve actually got a specific goal in front of you. Your actions tend to be pretty aimless in life and random if you don’t have something to actually aim for. How do you come up with that thing that you’re going to aim for?

4 Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain Name for Your Blog This episode is perfect for anyone who's preparing and planning their first blog, as well as those thinking about starting a second blog. Note: if you are starting a blog sign up below to get notified of our brand new course on the topic which will go live early next year - and check out our article on how to start a blog in 5 steps. Today I'm talking about what to consider when naming your blog and choosing a domain name for it. I'll share four things to consider when choosing a domain name. You want one that: helps you achieve your goals will have a memorable impact on your visitors helps you to build your brand sends the right message to Google and the search engine bots. (Domain names have an impact on SEO.) I'll also talk about legal implications of choosing a domain name, because it's important to stay within the law. Links and Resources on 4 Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain Name for Your Blog: 4 Things to Consider When Choosing Your Domain Name How to Choose a Domain Name Knowem Nameboy GoDaddy Facebook group Legal Links: Copyright.gov Uspto.gov Bloglovin.com Aussies: Asic.gov.au ipaustralia.gov.au Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse. Welcome to Episode 217 of the Problogger Podcast. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com - a blog, a podcast that you’re listening to, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to create great content to grow your audience, and to build some income from that blog. You can learn more about what we do at Problogger over at problogger.com. Today’s episode is for those of you who are just starting out. It’s perfect for those of you who are considering starting a blog in the preparing, planning stage, or for those of you who want to start a second blog or even a second business of some kind, because we’re gonna talk about things to consider when you are naming your blog, or finding a domain name for your blog to be more specific. I said both of those things because they really are tied together. Ideally you want a domain name that is the same as the name of your blog, or at least tied to it. In today’s episode, I wanna share with you four things to consider to find something that is going to suit your needs in terms of a domain. Something that’s gonna help you to achieve your goals in blogging, whatever those goals are. Something that’s gonna impact the people who come to your blog and be memorable, but also something that is gonna help to build your brand, to communicate something, a meaning, to those people. Also, something that’s going to communicate something to Google and the bots, the machines, the little robots that come to your site as well and help to determine how your site will be ranked, because your domain name has an impact on SEO. Lastly, something that is gonna help you to stay within the law because there are some legal things that you need to know about choosing a domain as well. If that is of interest to you, listen on. I’ve got today’s show notes with some further reading for you. This is actually based upon an article that we published on Problogger a year or so ago, I’ve updated it slightly but you can find the original article on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/217. I almost forgot the podcast bit there, you would think after 200 episodes, I would’ve got it. It’s problogger.com/podcast/217 where you can find that further reading and a full transcript of what I’ve got for you today. I wanna say right upfront, there’s a lot of different opinions on this. The main thing that I really wanna say is whilst I’m going to talk about some ideal scenarios today,

How and Why You Should Create Style Guides for Your Blog In today's episode, I talk about style guides for blogs – why they’re important, and what elements you should include in yours. Links and Resources for How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog AP Stylebook The Chicago Manual of Style Virtual Tickets Facebook group Further Reading and Listening for How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog 10 Writing Tips to Help You Sound More Human How and Why to Create a Blog Style Guide How to Create a Content Style Guide to Improve Your Blog’s Quality How to Create a Writing Style Guide Built for the Web Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. Welcome to Episode 216 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a great blog, to grow your audience, and to build some profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Now I’m just back from Dallas. I’ve had a few weeks off from the podcast and it’s been great to get some feedback from some of you that you missed the podcast over the last few weeks. I’m sorry for the break, but I hope you had a little bit of fun digging around in our archives. As I’ve said, just back from Dallas and we had an amazing time in Dallas. I was at the FinCon Conference where I did the opening keynote and had an absolute ball. I think there was around 1800 financial bloggers, real estate bloggers there. Really great conference, very good community. And before FinCon, of course, we ran the Success Incubator, a little event that we had as well. We had about 80 or so ProBlogger listeners and some attendees from the previous digital collab events and it was fantastic. We had this full day of training, we started about 8:30, 9:00 in the morning and went through to about 9:30 at night. It was a big day and that was packed with teaching. We had Pat Flynn, Kim Garst, Andrea Vahl, we had Rachel Miller, Kelly Snyder, a variety of other bloggers as well. The feedback we had on that day of teaching was fantastic. People loved how intense it was, the fact that we packed in so much information. That was great. And then we had half a day of masterminding the next day, which I always love – that opportunity to sit around the table with bloggers and online entrepreneurs and brainstorm. You can still pick up virtual tickets for that event, if you go to problogger.com/success. I think they’re US$127 and that gets you the first day, that first full day of teaching. I think it’s about eight hours of teaching and you get the slides as well. That price will go up. It’s not an early bird one because it’s now after the event, but it will go up in the coming days as well. You get some teachings there on live video creation from Kim Garst, Pat Fynn’s teaching on creating an editorial calendar, promotional calendar for your business, you get some training on Facebook advertising, using challenges to grow your blog, how to sell courses, Steve Chu did an amazing session which I picked up so much information on how he promotes his courses using webinars and Facebook advertising. It’s really practical teaching, and again you can check out the agenda there at problogger.com/success. On to today’s episode. Today I want to talk about style guides – how to create them for your blog, and why you should create them for you blog as well. Style guides in my opinion are one way that you can really lift a good blog to a great blog by building more consistency across your content, across from one blog post to another. You can grab today’s show notes with the full transcription of this episode at problogger.com/podcast/216. Lastly, I should say on our events,

Ways You Can Simplify Your Business and Increase Your Blogging Profitability Today, I want to share two big lessons I learned this year at our Australian ProBlogger events. They were lessons I think apply to many aspects of blogging and online business. It’s all about simplifying what you do while making more profit. I’m heading to Dallas for our Success Incubator event and to speak at FinCon in a few days time. So I'll be taking a couple of weeks off the podcast to travel and focus on the event attendees as much as possible. In the meantime, dig into the archives. There are now 215 to choose from. Recommended Further Listening for the Next Couple of Weeks: Episode 137 - 7 Days to Finding Your Blogging Groove Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse. Welcome to Episode 215 of the ProBlogger Podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Now in today’s lesson, I want to share two big things that I learned at our Australian ProBlogger events this year. They were lessons that really apply to business as a whole, but I think they’re particularly applied to many aspects of blogging and online business. I guess really the theme of today’s show is to think about simplifying what you do whilst also increasing your profit because both of the lessons that I'm going to talk about today do exactly that; simplifying what you do, taking some of the complexity out of what you do, but also increasing profit. Now before I get into the lessons today, I just want to share I'm heading off to Dallas later this week for two events, the Success Incubator event, the ProBlogger event that we’re running in Dallas, and also to speak at FinCon. I'm doing the keynote there. I’ll be taking off to Dallas in a couple of weeks time. I'm looking forward to meeting many of you at those events. There still are a few tickets left for the Success Incubator event, it’s a one and a half day event with people like Pat Flynn and Kim Garst and Rachel Miller who many of you will be familiar with from previous episodes of this podcast. You can go to problogger.com/success to get any last tickets that may still be available. There’s also a virtual pass there which is pretty affordable. You get plenty of teaching with that. I'm heading off to that event in a few days time and while I'm away, I am going to be pressing pause on this podcast. Just wanted to let you know that for the next couple of weeks, there won’t be episodes, highly unlikely that there will be episodes. I may chime in and suggest some previous ones to listen to, but there’s plenty in the archives to dig back into. I will suggest a few episodes at the end of today’s show that you might find useful, particularly practical episodes that we’ve done in the past. Dig around in the archives and I look forward to getting back with you late in October, probably early November. You can get all of the details of our events and I will link to all the podcasts that I recommend you dig back into over on our show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/215. Okay, so let’s get into today’s show. The lessons I learned this year were from our event. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that these are lessons that I’ve been learning over the year in other areas as well, and I’ll touch on some of those towards the end. But just to give you a little bit of the backstory, the ProBlogger event, for those of you who haven’t been, we’ve been running it since about 2010. This makes it our seventh year of running the event. Since we ran the first event back in 2010, the event has evolved a lot. And I’ve told the story of that evolution in previou...

4 Difficult Realities All Bloggers Face During a conference last year I was invited to have dinner with three other bloggers who had all been blogging for 5-10 years and were now doing it full-time. It was a fun dinner, and we covered a lot of ground in terms of conversation. But during dessert the conversation got a little deeper as one of them began to share how they were struggling with their blog. On their surface, their blogging was going okay. They had a great readership, and the content they were putting out was going well. But on the inside they felt disillusioned. And as they continued their story, I looked around the table and saw a lot of nodding going on. Their story was resonating with us all. I related to it a lot. Blogging can be hard sometimes, and it's to become disillusioned. As a blogger I’ve heard people rave about my, blog with comments like: "You’re so prolific!" "How do you stay so productive?" "How did you write that way?" But on the inside I’ve wondered why they can’t see what a grind and a struggle blogging can be. This podcast is largely positive and constructive about how to build a profitable blog. But after reflecting on this conversation from last year it struck me that while I often talk up blogging, and share the benefits of doing it and the tactics of building profit, it may be worth acknowledging some of the hard stuff we face as content creators. So in today's episode I want to talk about four realities of blogging that many of us bloggers don't always share. Part of why I'm doing it is to give you a realistic insight into the life of a blogger. But I also think it’s important for us bloggers to realise that we're not alone in facing some of these things. Being a little vulnerable with each other during that conversation last year seemed to lift our spirits a little. And out of the conversation came encouragement to keep at it. So today I present four things about blogging that are hard. By no means is it a definitive list - I could probably come up with a lot more for a part two - but I hope it's helpful. Join our Facebook group Further Listening on 4 Realities of Blogging All Bloggers Need To Talk About 167: My Million Dollar Blog Post (and How Procrastination Almost Stopped me Writing It) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, and welcome to Episode 214 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I'm the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, and series of ebooks all designed to help you to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I wanna do something a little bit different. Last year, I was at a conference and was invited to have dinner with three other bloggers. They were bloggers who had all been blogging for 5 to 10 years, they were all full time at what they do. Relatively successful bloggers. It was a fun dinner; we laughed, we joked around, it was fairly lighthearted for the main. We covered a lot of ground in terms of our conversation. Somewhere around the time that dessert was served, the conversation got a little bit deeper as one of our dinner party began to share that they were struggling with their blog. On the surface, this particular blogger’s blog was going okay; they had a great readership, they were producing lots of content, they had built a team, they had a beautiful design. It was all going well on the outside, but on the inside the blogger was feeling disillusioned. As the blogger shared, I looked around the table and I saw that we were all nodding at the story. The story that the blog was telling was resonating with us all. I personally related a lot. There are times in blogging where it’s hard. There are times where it’s easy to get disillusioned.

10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging and Content Marketing When I Started Today, I want to share the audio of a keynote I gave at a conference early last year about 10 things I wish I’d known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started. In episodes 204 and 205 I shared some recordings of keynotes I’ve given, and the response from many of you was that you wanted to hear more of that style of podcast. So today I dug out a talk I gave at the Super Fast Business conference, which is run by James Schramko here in Australia.s James, who puts on a great event, asked me to share some of my story and give some practical tips on content creation. I talk about defining what your blog is about, the three phases of creating great content, how to mix up the different types of content you feature on your blog, idea generation, creating ‘content events’ on your blog, and how to differentiate yourself in your content. I loved doing this talk, and I hope you enjoy it too. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group Slides from the Talk For those of you who would like to follow along with the slides - here they are. 10 THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING WHEN I STARTED from Darren Rowse Further Listening on 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging (and Content Marketing) When I Started 059: What Should I Blog About? 15 Questions to Ask to Help Identify Your Blogging Niche or Focus 033: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog 011: Create 10 Blog Post Ideas for your Blog [Day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog] 084: How to Come Up With Fresh Ideas to Write About On Your Blog 086: How to Get into the Flow of Creating Great Content for Your Blog 087: 9 Questions You Should Ask Before Hitting Publish On Your Next Blog Post 152: How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog [Challenge] Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 213 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience. You can find more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to share with you an audio from a keynote I gave at a conference early last year. The topic was '10 things I wish I had known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started'. A bit of a mouthful, but you get the idea. Back in episode 204, 205, just a few episodes ago, I shared a couple of recordings from keynotes I’ve given at my ProBlogger events and I had so much positive response from that. People really enjoyed that format, a presentation, a talk. Longer form and also the slides from those talks as well. I wanted to do it again because many of you wanted more of that style of podcast. We’re not going to do it every week by any account. I don’t give that many talks. But I did find this one from the Superfast Business Conference. It’s a conference that is run by James Schramko. Many of you will know here in Australia. It’s run in Sydney and it was a great event. I really enjoyed getting to that particular event. James puts on a really good event, and he asked me at the event last year to share some of my story but also give some practical tips on content creation. Really, that’s what the focus of this talk is about. In it, I’ve given a few tips on defining what your blog is about but then we get a lot into content creation itself. I talk about three different phases of creating content. I talk about how to mix up the different types of content that you might want to feature on your blog. I talk about idea generation, some tips on creating content, finishing content, running content events and challenges on your blog and also how to diff...

Evergreen Content Ideas for Bloggers: Part 2 Today I want to talk about evergreen content, and want to suggest seven more types of evergreen content you might like to try on your blog. This episode is essentially part two of what I started in episode 209, where I suggested the first seven types of evergreen content. But whether you listen to this one first and then that one, or listen to that one first and then this one, you should get some ideas either way. 7 More Evergreen Content Ideas for Your Blog Influencers to Watch in Industry Bloggers to Watch in 2017 XX Habits of successful xxxxx 10 Habits of Highly Effective ProBloggers 5 Good Photography Habits to Start Today 3 Habits Every Outdoor Photographer Should Develop to Avoid Missing Shots The 9 Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers 5 Photography Pitfalls to Avoid That No One Tells You About 4 Mistakes Beginning Landscape Photographers Make 9 Bad Habits of Photographers History of (topic/brand/product/industry) We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned (New Research) Observations about an Industry 5 Ridiculous SEO Myths Every Blogger Should Ignore Four Common Myths About Full-Frame Cameras Dispelled The Myths and Realities of Becoming a Professional Photographer Links and Resources for 7 Types of Evergreen Content To Create On Your Blog Facebook Group Dallas Event Further Listening 209: 7 Types of Evergreen Content You Can Create On Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 212 of ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I'm the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to talk about evergreen content again. I want to suggest to you seven more types of evergreen content that you might like to try on your blog. This episode is essentially part two of what I started a couple of episodes ago, back in 209, where I suggested the first seven types of evergreen content. You might want to go back and listen to that one, but you might also just wanna go ahead with today’s as well. I’ve designed this episode as a standalone one and you can go back and listen to the other one later if you’d like. Either way will work. Before I get on with the show, just a quick note that there are still a few tickets for our Dallas event – problogger.com/success. It’s on the 24th and 25th of October. I’d love to meet you at that event as well. There are also some virtual passes available and I’ll talk more about those at the end of the show. You can find them at that same link. Back in Episode 209, I presented the first seven types of evergreen content. I talked a little bit about what evergreen content was, the type of content that doesn’t date. It’s the type of content that you continue to promote on social media again and again, it tends to do quite well in Google. We touched on very much educational content there. We talked about 'how to' content, frequently asked questions, research results, stories, case studies, introductions to topics or ultimate guides, and I do recommend that you go back and listen to that episode perhaps after this one is finished. That episode got so much positive feedback. I loved it. I loved getting the tweets and the emails from people saying I listened to this episode, and I planned out my next week’s content. Or, in one case, I had someone plan out their next three months of content based upon that one episode. I was so inspired by the way many of you applied what you heard in the episode that I wanted to create another one. Really,

Advice from Pat Flynn on How to Create a Successful Podcast Today I have a treat for anyone who has ever considered starting a podcast (or already has one), because I’ve just finished a Skype call with Pat Flynn about the art of podcasting. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Pat’s teaching on podcasting is the number one thing that helped me as I was starting the ProBlogger podcast two years ago. If it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn't have started at all. And so I was very excited when he launched his Power-Up Podcasting course earlier this year, because I knew it would help many more Pre-Podcasters get into this amazing medium. Pat spoke at our Aussie ProBlogger events earlier in the year (he'll also be speaking at our Dallas event in October), and during that event we talked about how often I heard ProBlogger readers say things like "I really should start a podcast". It’s a statement I hear all the time. But it's almost always followed up with something like "But I don’t know where to begin"’ or "But I don’t have the right gear" or "But it all seems so overwhelming". So I asked Pat if he’d be willing to come on the show and help those in our audience interested in podcasting take their first steps. Today we jumped on Skype, and I put a lot of your questions and challenges to him in this interview. Not only that, Pat has also opened up his Power-Up Podcasting course exclusively for ProBlogger listeners. His course opened for just a week in July when a couple of hundred students signed up, but then he shut the doors so he could concentrate on serving that first intake of students. So this is pretty special. He’s opening it back up for only one week, and only for ProBlogger readers and listeners. You can see what it’s all about over at ProBlogger.com/powerup. Whether you enroll in the course or not, I encourage you to stay tuned to today’s interview. In it Pat and I talk about A tip for growing your podcast audience through Facebook Groups (it’ll help you grow your blog too) What two of his most successful podcast episodes have been What microphones he recommends if you’re on different budgets Working out which format of podcast is right for you Interviewing techniques to help you get conversations flowing Surfacing stories in those you interview Editing podcasts The pros and cons of seasons vs ongoing episodes, How to make your episodes sound more alive and energetic Much much more. Pat is incredibly generous with his advice in this episode. So whether you take his course or not, you’ll get a lot of inspiration and ideas from staying with us. Again, if you’re interested in checking out the Power-Up Podcasting course head to problogger.com/powerup where for the next seven days you can enroll. If you’re listening after that seven-day period there will be an option to join his waitlist until the next time he opens the doors. Links and Resources Pat's Course (Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for Pat’s course but as you'll hear I’m a genuine fan of what he does.) Dallas Event Audacity Garageband Libsyn Buzzsprout Microphones ATR2100 from Audio Technica (affiliate) Heil PR40 (affiliate) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today, I have a real treat for anyone who has ever considered starting a podcast or anyone who’s already got one, because I’ve jumped on a call today with Pat Flynn to talk about the art of podcasting. As I mentioned in past episodes, Pat’s teaching on podcasting is probably the number one thing that...

How Many Live Posts Do You Need When You Launch Your Blog Today, I want to answer a question almost every blogger asks when they start blogging: How many posts should I have live before I launch my blog? It's a common question I get, and while I’ve mentioned a few approaches in other episodes today I'm tackling the topic specifically. So if you’re starting a blog for the first time, or thinking of starting a second blog, this podcast is for you. Links and Resources Vanessa’s blog Digital Photography School Dallas Event Facebook Group Facebook Live on me using Adobe Spark Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. Welcome to episode 210 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to start that blog, to grow it and to create content that’s going to help your audience. And then, hopefully to monetize that as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all we do over at problogger.com In today’s episode, I want to talk about a question that I get asked quite regularly from readers of ProBlogger. In fact, it’s a question that all of us, bloggers, at one point or another ask ourselves, particularly when we’re starting our blog. The questions is this: “How many posts should I have live before I launch?” This is one of those common questions I get asked, and I have mentioned a few different approaches to this in previous episodes. Today I want to tackle that specifically as an episode. My view on this has changed slightly over the years, maybe slightly different from what you heard me talk about in the past. I’ll tell you a little bit more about why I’ve changed that as the show goes on. If you’re starting a blog for the first time, or if you’re thinking of starting a second one, today’s episode is for you. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/210. Before I get into today’s teaching, two things I want to mention very briefly. Firstly, if you haven’t already joined our Facebook group, head over to problogger.com/group where there is almost 9,000 bloggers who are coming together every day to talk about their challenges, the wins that they’re having, the things that they’re learning and to ask questions as well. If you’ve got tips to share, or if you’ve got questions to ask, head over to problogger.com/group and answer the questions that we ask you to answer as you apply. That helps us to approve you faster. The second thing I’ll mention just briefly is that I will be in Dallas co-hosting a special event for ProBlogger readers and listeners on the 24th and 25th of October. The event is called Success Incubator. It’s going to be a day and a half which we are packing, literally we’re packing every minute of this day, particularly on the first day and then the second half day. We’re teaching for bloggers and for online entrepreneurs. We’ve got speakers like myself, Pat Flynn, Kim Garst, Rachel Miller who you heard in the last episode about Facebook, Andrea Vahl, Steve Chou, Kim Sorgius and many more speakers as well. You’ll hear some of those speakers in upcoming episodes of this podcast as well. If you want to grab a ticket for that event, they are limited. Head over to problogger.com/success. That’s an event that I’m co-hosting in Dallas on the 24th and 25th of October and I would love to see you there. Again, show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/210 and I hope you enjoy what I’ve got for you today. The question of the day is, "How many posts should I have live before I launch my blog?" There are a few different thoughts that I want to run through today. The first one is that there is no right or wrong answer here, as is the case with many of the topics that we cover here...

7 Types of Evergreen Content for Your Blog Today I want to talk about Evergreen content, and suggest seven types of evergreen content you might like to try on your blog. I’ve got loads of advice for you today, and in today's show notes I have a lot of examples you’ll want to check out. Some are from my blogs, but there are also a lot from listeners who put examples of their own evergreen content in our FB group. 7 Types of Evergreen Content To Create On Your Blog How to Content How to Start a Blog How to Hold a Camera Beginners Tips for Night Sky Photography Advanced Tips for Tack Sharp Images How to Recover Images from a Damaged SD Card 5 Ways to Write Faster How to Replace a Face in Photoshop in 6 Easy Steps Frequently Asked Questions What is a Stop? The Common Currency of Exposure Explained What the Numbers on your Lens Mean How Often Should I Post? How Long Should Posts Be? How to Shoot in Low Light – 9 Commonly Asked Questions Can You REALLY Make Money Blogging? [7 Things I Know About Making Money from Blogging] Research Results ProBlogger Earnings Poll Results – April 2006 The 37 Most Popular DSLR Lenses with our Readers The 19 Most Popular DSLRs Among our Readers The 19 Most Popular Compact System and Mirrorless Cameras with Our Readers Storytelling What to Write When You Feel Like You’ve Got Nothing Left to Say 14 Types of Stories You Can Tell On Your Blog Using Photography to Make a Heartfelt Difference How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World Case Studies Case Study – How One Blogger Used a Blog Post, SlideShare Deck, Lead Magnet, Email Sequence and a Webinar to Earn Over $28,000 The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog [Case Study] $72,000 in E-Books in a Week – 8 Lessons I Learned Introductions to… Introduction to Shutter Speed in Digital Photography Introduction to Aperture in Digital Photography ISO Settings in Digital Photography An Introduction to Street Photography for New Photographers An Introduction to Bird photography Lenses 101 – An Introduction to Camera Lenses Introduction to Taking 360 Degree Photos Ultimate Guides The Ultimate Guide to Street Photography The dPS Ultimate Guide to Photography for Beginners The dPS Ultimate Guide to Getting Started in Lightroom for Beginners The dPS Ultimate Guide to Landscape Photography The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program Further Listening 136: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Evergreen Content for Your Blog 139: How to Create Content That Answers a FAQ [Challenge] 142: How to Create a ‘How to’ Post [Challenge] 181: How to Overcome the Challenges of Being a Solo Entrepreneur And don’t forget to join our Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. I'm the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks and a whole lot more all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog, to grow an audience, to create content that will change the world and make money from your blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, Episode 209, I want to talk about evergreen content. I want to suggest to you seven types of evergreen content that you might like to try on your blog. I’ve got loads of advice for you today. It has taken me a long time to prepare this show because there’s so much in it. If you want to follow along with me and get the examples that I mention along the way, I do encourage you to head over to the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/209 because there I do have some examples of the type of content I'm going to talk about today.

Get Better Facebook Page Results With These 5 Actionable Tips Today, I want to present you with five actionable things you can do to increase the effectiveness of what you do to build your business on Facebook - particularly from Facebook pages. I know there’s a lot of pain and frustration among bloggers when it comes to Facebook pages. Just a short year or two ago FB was a major source of traffic, engagement and even monetization for many of us. But increasingly over that time FB has been making organic reach and engagement harder and harder. So today, I’ve invited someone who understands FB as well as anyone I’ve ever met to chat with us about how to approach the social network. That person is Rachel Miller from Moolah Marketing, whose teaching has had an incredible impact my own FB strategy in the past six months. Rachel began her journey as a blogger, but in more recent times has created FB pages that reach millions of fans. She has a real knack for building audiences and then monetizing them. I met Rachel back in 2015 at a conference, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I really dug into what she does. Rachel has an amazing Facebook group that is dedicated to helping online entrepreneurs with their FB pages. I joined it six months back and immediately started to get actionable tips from Rachel. I was so impressed with what she offered that when she opened up a FB training course I immediately signed up. The course is brilliant. I’ve learnt so much, and ever since I’ve wanted to get Rachel on the show to share what she knows with you. Of course the topic is massive. We could quite easily have talked for days about this, which is why she offers training courses. So to bring some focus to today’s episode I pulled out five actionable things I loved about Rachel’s training that I think you could start implementing straight away. These are all things you can do without spending money and which I’ve found helped me grow my pages. Links and Resources on 5 Actionable Tips You Can Use to Get Better Results on Your Facebook Page Rachel’s Free Facebook Group Audience Growth Pack Downloads Rachel’s Course (join the waiting list) Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for Rachel’s course. But I'm also a paid student, and personally recommend it based on my experience as a student. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse, and welcome to episode 208 of the ProBlogger podcast. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and make money from your blogs. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today, I want to present you with five actionable things that you can do today to increase the effectiveness of what you do on your Facebook page. I know there’s a lot of pain among your audience when it comes to Facebook pages. I see it all the time in our Facebook group. A couple of years ago now, Facebook was a major source of traffic and engagement for many of us. It even helped us monetize our blogs directly in many cases but increasingly over the last couple of years, it’s so much tougher to get organic reach and engagement on Facebook. You can certainly pay to get it but that organic reach is disappearing for many of us. We hear that pain from you, our audience, quite regularly. Today what I’ve done is invited someone who understands Facebook as well as anyone I’ve ever met, to come on to the show, to talk to us about how to approach Facebook. That person is Rachel Miller from Miller Marketing whose teaching has impacted my own Facebook strategy over the last six months, quite incredibly in fact. She’s taught me so much. Rachel began her journey many years ago now as a blogger,

Blogger Apps for Smartphone and Tablet Today, I want to take you on a tour of my iPhone and iPad, and talk about the apps I use most in my blogging and online business activities. One of the biggest changes that has happened in my blogging since I began back in 2002 is the technology I use. In the early days it was all done purely through my old desktop PC (and by old I mean really old) and via dial-up internet. Things were so simple. I started on Blogger and everything that went on my blog was written directly into it. Adding images or video to my posts were not even something I considered as my internet speed was too slow and my computer not really powerful enough to do anything with them. But since that time a lot has changed. For me, it started with an upgrade of computers (I bought myself a little white apple iBook with my first earnings) and upgrading to ADSL internet. I also remember around that time I got my first phone (a Nokia if my memory serves me correctly) that allowed me to go online and look at websites. It had a built-in browser, and while the user experience was horrible I remember looking at my blog for the first time on it and even managing to find a way to log in to the back end of my blog which enabled me to edit a spelling mistake. I thought that ability was so cool, even though it took ten or so minutes to login, find the mistake on that tiny screen, make the change (using the keypad) and save the change. Of course 2007 came around and changed everything when the iPhone was released, and I began to realize that life was about to change for bloggers. Higher resolution screens, touch screens instead of buttons, and these ‘app’ things that while at the time were pretty basic I could see would have amazing potential. I’m not sure how many iPhones I’ve had since 2007, but apart from one 12 month period when I tried an Android I’ve stuck to Apple products. I have also had a number of iPads in that time (although I never actually bought any of them - I managed to win them all in affiliate promotions). My first iPads were used more for entertainment - reading Kindle books, watching movies, playing games - but in the last 6 months I have started using an iPad Pro (10.5 inch) which I won and am starting to realize that that device can actually replace my notebooks for some circumstances. So today I want to talk about the smartphone and tablet apps that I use most regularly. Of course as an Apple user they’ll be iOS specific, although quite a few of them can also be found on Android. It’s also worth noting that increasingly I’m using apps that allow me to sync up with my Apple computers. Cloud computing is of course one of the other big changes that has happened, and I LOVE that I can work on my desktop and then keep working on another device. Links and Resources on Smartphone and Tablet Apps for Bloggers Group Discussion About Apps Group Discussion About Note Taking Apps Productivity and Planning Wunderlist Apple Notes Evernote Onenote Bear Awesome Note Simple Note MindNode Fantastical 2 Analytics Google Analytics for iOS Google Analytics for Android AdSense for iOS AdSense for Android Content CoSchedule Using CoSchedule as a Blogging Tool Adobe Spark Snapseed for iOS Snapseed for android Lightroom Google Drive for iOS Google Drive for Android Communications Slack Gmail for iOS Gmail for Android Other Chrome Podcasts Other Apps Mentioned by Our Community Buffer Trello Later Tailwind Google Keep Pocket Wordswag Typorama Dropbox Asana Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. Welcome to episode 207 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger and the podcaster behind problogger...

Is There a Right Way to Brand Your Blog? I’m just back from our Aussie Problogger training events where we ran masterminds with around 40 bloggers per city. In those days speakers spent time with small groups of attendees in round table discussions where attendees could ask us any question they liked. One of the questions that I got asked repeatedly through both masterminds was around whether it is better to give a blog a personal brand or more of a business brand? In one case the questioner was about to start a new blog and was wondering if they should set it up on a domain that was their own name or if they should choose a name that was nothing to do with them. Another blogger asked what to do when they felt trapped on a blog with a personal domain - but they wanted to introduce other writers onto the blog. Yet another blogger had the opposite issue - they had set up their blog on a domain and with a brand that was very niche specific but now felt trapped because they wanted to change their focus and evolve the blog beyond what the brand might allow. I’ve been pondering these questions a lot since our event so wanted to explore it today in this episode. There is right way to brand your blog - there are extremes where you can go one way or the other and also there are ways of doing both a personal brand and a business brand - and that’s what we’re going to explore today. Examples Mentioned for Personal Brands vs Business Brands for Blogs Personal Brands Amy Porterfield Michael Hyatt Seth Godin Business Brands Digital Photography School Nerd Fitness Mashable Gawker TechCrunch Engadget LifeHacker Gizmodo Moz Smashing Magazine Personal Business Brands Smart Passive Income Styling You Doing Both Personal and Business Chris Ducker Gary Vaynerchuk Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hello there. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog, a podcast, event, job boards, series of ebooks and other resources all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to produce great content and to make money from your blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. I’m just back from our Australian ProBlogger event where we ran a couple of masterminds this time around for the first time ever. We did two masterminds, one in Brisbane and one in Melbourne and we have 40 bloggers who have come to each of those sessions. As part of the day, we had some teaching from our speakers like Pat Flynn and James Schramko and Laney Galligan and then Kelly Exeter. We also spent time, as speakers, circulating through the tables, around tables, around the room. We, each, got to spend about 30 minutes being peppered with questions by these small tables. Something made me a little bit nervous because I’m not the fastest thinker but I love that. What I found really interesting over the day was that I was asked some questions on almost every table that I went to. That may have been partly because people thought I could answer those questions but also, some of the questions were quite random. One of the questions that I got asked a lot over both cities, multiple times in each day, was around how to brand a blog in terms of whether it should be a personal brand or whether it should be more of a business brand. I’ll get into some examples of both of those types of options later on today. It was a question that I got asked repeatedly in different ways. One person asked, they were thinking about setting up a new blog, whether they should set it up on a domain that was their own name or whether they should choose a name or domain name that was nothing to do with them personally at all. That was a question I got asked a couple of times.

How to Overcome 5 Blogger Obstacles As I record this, I’m just home from our first ProBlogger event of the year in Brisbane and am preparing for our next one in the coming days in Melbourne. The Brisbane event was really worthwhile. We heard from Pat Flynn, Jadah Sellner, James Schramko, Kelly Exeter, Shayne Tilley and Laney Galligan and had a couple of days of great teaching and inspiration - including a day with a small group masterminding their businesses. Each year at our events, I open the event with a keynote. This year I spoke about evolving your blog rather than getting into a ‘revolving’ pattern (or going in circles). I will share more on that topic on the podcast in the future but as we’re very much focused this week on our events and serving our attendees I wanted to give you another taste of what we do at our events and share with you the opening keynote from a previous year as this week’s episode. I did this in the last episode too and got a lot of positive feedback and hope you’ll enjoy this one too. It’s from 4 years ago but I think it’s spot on in terms of a message for today too. The bloggers interviewed on stage: Tsh Oxenreider Amy Porterfield Brooke McAlary Trey Ratcliff Phoebe Montague The post Brooke spoke about on fear Further Listening and Reading on 5 Obstacles Bloggers Face (And How to Get Over Them) 5 Obstacles Bloggers Face (And How to Get Over Them) slides Episode 83 Battling Blogger’s Block – Where do you get Stuck? Episode 84 How to Come Up With Fresh Ideas to Write About On Your Blog Episode 86 How to Get into the Flow of Creating Great Content for Your Blog Episode 87 9 Questions You Should Ask Before Hitting Publish On Your Next Blog Post Episode 54 3 Questions to Ask When Facing Fear Don’t Fall Into This Trap That Could Destroy Your Blog Dallas Event Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, my name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, some events, a job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to start it up, get content on it, build community with your audience and to make some money from it as well. You can learn more about all we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. As I record this episode, episode 205, I’m just home from our first ProBlogger event of 2017. This year was in Brisbane, just in the last weekend. We’re getting ready for our next one, experimenting this year with two in two weeks. The second one will be in Melbourne. By the time this episode goes live, we will have that one as well. Our Brisbane event was really worthwhile. I’m so excited about what we did this year. We heard from Pat Flynn, Jadah Sellner, James Schramko, Kelly Exeter, Shayne Tilley, Laney Galligan, and had a couple of really great days of teaching and inspiration, including a day with a small mastermind group. Really working through 40 or so blogger’s businesses. Each year, at our events, I open the event with a keynote. This year, 2017’s event, I spoke about evolving your blog rather than getting into a revolving pattern. I guess the catch was to evolve, not revolve, because many times, we go in circles. I’m going to share more about that topic on this podcast in the future, another reason to subscribe if you haven’t already. As we’re very much focused upon our real life events this particular week and serving our attendees who come along to that, this week in the episode in the podcast, I want to give you another taste of what we do at our events and share with you another opening keynote from a previous year, as this week’s episode. Now, I did this last week as well. If you haven’t listened to that back in episode 204, got a lot of positive feedback in the last few days about that one and so ...

How Ordinary Things Can Lead to Extraordinary Results With Your Blog This week and I’m excited to be spending time face to face with quite a few ProBlogger podcast listeners and blog readers at our Aussie blogging events. We’ve been holding annual Australian events since 2010 and it is a highlight of my year each time. It’s fantastic to put faces to names, hear the stories of what bloggers are learning and to get inspired by meeting many of you. So because I’m away this week and busy with the event I thought it might be fun to give you a taste of what happens at a ProBlogger event and to play you a talk I gave at one of our events a few years ago. So for today’s episode (#204) I’m going to play you a full opening keynote talk that I gave in 2014. It’s a talk I gave which explores how doing ordinary things consistently over time leads to extraordinary results in blogging. Often bloggers look for the 'secret' strategies that will launch their blog into a viral success. However the reality is that most successful bloggers spend more time on small, ordinary things - it's these things that really lead to success. In this talk I outlined 6 of these ‘ordinary things’. This is a talk I hear attendees referring to quite a bit - so I hope you enjoy it too. Links and Resources on 6 ‘Ordinary’ Things That Will Grow Your Blog into Something Extraordinary See my talk here. Event link Dallas event Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to episode 204 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I'm the blogger and podcaster behind ProBlogger.com, a site that's really dedicated to helping you to grow an amazing blog, that serves your audience, that creates great content, and that builds some profit around what you do online. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all of the different things we do including our ebooks, events, the podcast and blog itself over at problogger.com. And then, have a dig around. You'll find a lot of information on our Start Here page there as well so look for that in the navigation. This week, I'm really excited because I'm spending time face to face with quite a few ProBlogger podcast listeners and ProBlogger blog readers at our Australian blogging events. We’ve got two events this year, Melbourne and Brisbane, and they're going on pretty much as this podcast goes out. We've been holding these events since 2010 and it is the highlight of my year every year because I get to put names to faces, hear stories of bloggers and what they're learning, and see the growth in our attendees from year to year as well. I always come home inspired although a bit tired from these events as well. Because I'm away this week and not at my office, and not able to record too much in terms of a podcast, I thought it might be fun to give you a taste of what happens at the ProBlogger event. I'm going to play you a keynote presentation I gave at one of our events a few years ago. It's actually completely relevant for today and hopefully, you find some inspiration in it as well. This episode, episode 204, I'm going to play you the full opening keynote of the talk I gave in 2014, three years ago now. It's a talk in which I explore how doing ordinary things, consistently over time, leads to extraordinary results. Often, bloggers come to ProBlogger and I get emails all the time and people will say, "What is the secret strategy, what’s the secret sauce that's going to launch my blog into being a viral success?" The reality is that it's not the secret strategies that tend to lead to that viral success. It's some of the smaller ordinary things. In this talk, I shared six ordinary things that are going to help you to build something quite extraordinary. This is a talk I actually get a lot of feedback from,

How to Connect With Influencers in Your Niche Today I want to share some teaching on how to approach influencers and other well known people in your niche (or outside it too). One of the most powerful ways to grow your profile, audience and brand is to connect with others in your niche. The benefits of doing it can be many and varied - the opportunities that flow from these interactions can be pretty cool for the growth of your blog…. BUT doing it the wrong way can also hurt your blog and brand - so I want to share what NOT to do. Links and Resources for How to Approach Influencers in Your Niche A 10-Point Plan for Connecting with Online Influencers (Without Turning into a Suck-Up) Our FB Group Our Dallas Event Our Australian Events Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good day there. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow an amazing blog, to create great content that’s going to change the life of your readers and to build profit around that blog too. You can learn more about ProBlogger and our upcoming events over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, episode number 203, I want to share some teaching on how to approach influencers and other well known people in your niche or even outside your niche too. Some of what I’m going to share today actually works really well on a personal level if you admire a comedian, or a musician, or that type of person as well. One of the most powerful ways to grow your profile, and your audience, and brand is to connect with others in your niche, particularly those who are prominent themselves. The benefits of doing this can be many and varied. The opportunities that can flow from these interactions can be pretty cool for the growth of your blog, but doing it the wrong way can also hurt your blog and brand as well. Today, I want to share some things to do, the approach that I take with approaching influencers but also some things not to do. You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/203 where I will share some further reading as well. There’ll also be links on the show notes to our Facebook group, which you can find at problogger.com/group, a thriving group and community of bloggers. We’ve got some new things going in there at the moment which I’ll tell you about at the end of the podcast today. Also, you’ll find on our show notes today the last chance to get tickets for our Aussie events which are happening in the next few days in Brisbane and Melbourne. You can find more details on those Australian events at problogger.com/events and our Dallas event in Dallas, Texas later in the year, in October at problogger.com/success. Now, let’s talk about approaching influencers in your niche. Today, we’re talking about how to connect with influencers in your niche. Today’s podcast really comes about after earlier in the week, I listened to a Facebook Live talk by someone else. I’m not going to mention who they are because I’m going to critique what they say. This person was talking about this very topic, how to leverage influencers to grow your blog. Now, the topic is a good one. As I said at the top of the show, I think that getting to know other people in your niche can bring many benefits to your blog. It’s not just about growing traffic and them sending you traffic. It’s also about growing your profile, growing your credibility, making friends, and helping them as well. It’s a mutual thing in my mind. But after 15 minutes of listening to this Facebook Live, I found myself getting very frustrated, and the reason for this was that the person described a system, a systematized approach that was incredibly formulaic and it was anything but personal.

Veteran Blogger Chris Garrett on How to Build a Successful Blog Today’s episode is #202 and in it I have my good friend and co-author of the ProBlogger book - Chris Garrett on the show to talk about the changes in blogging since we wrote the book. Chris and I wrote the first edition of the book in 2008 and it went through 3 versions - the last one being 5 years ago in 2012 - so I thought it might be interesting to get Chris on to talk - among other things - about how we’d update the book if we were to do another version. The book still holds up pretty well and continues to be available on Amazon but a lot has happened in 5 years! Chris and I cover a lot of other ground too: Chris tells his story of starting blogging in 1996 and describes how he first monetized what he was doing - in many ways it was ‘content marketing’ years before anyone used that term. We talk about the two main reasons bloggers start blogging - because they want to express themselves and because they want to make money - and try to work out which is best We talk about the biggest challenges facing bloggers today We talk about staying motivated over the long haul with your blogging We talk about how to balance creating great content for your blog while also trying to develop products to sell And much more. Today Chris has his own newish blog called Maker Hacks which we talk about in this episode but he is also the Chief Digital Officer at Rainmaker Digital - the company behind CopyBlogger and StudioPress (the most popular WP theme collection on the web today) so we also talk a little about that at the end of the episode too. Links and Resources for Advice from a Veteran Blogger (Chris Garrett) on How to Build a Successful Blog Our Facebook Group Our Dallas Event Our Australian Event Chris’s Maker Hacks Blog StudioPress (affiliate link) ProBlogger Book on Amazon (affiliate link) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com - a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to increase your audience, to write amazing content, and to build some profit around your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do to help you as a blogger over at ProBlogger.com. Now, today’s episode is number 202, and in it, I have my good friend and co-author of the ProBlogger book, Chris Garrett, on the show to talk about the changes in blogging since we wrote the ProBlogger book. Chris and I first wrote that book – the first edition of that book in 2008, so coming up on a 10-year anniversary. It’s gone through a few different versions. A third edition is currently up, but that was published in 2012, so it’s been five years since we wrote the last edition of the book. I thought it might be interesting to get Chris on to talk about, amongst other things, how we would update that book, if we were to do another version – not that we’re planning on doing that. The book, I think, still holds up pretty well at its core, but there are some things that have obviously come about in the last five years, that we would add to that. If you’ve read that book in the past or if you want to read it, this is a good companion episode, I guess, for that. We cover a lot of other ground as well. Chris tells his story of starting blogging in 1996 – not that it was called “blogging” back then, but essentially that’s what he was doing. He also talks about how effectively he monetized that blogging through what we would now call “content marketing,” years before that term was invented. We also talk about the main reasons that we see bloggers starting to blog, either because they want to express themselves very organically, as Chris and myself did,

How to Build Traffic and Profit into Your Blog On today’s episode I want to talk about a key to creating a blog with lots of traffic and profit. The topic comes from a conversation I had this morning with a new blogger who was asking me about how to create content that would go viral and as I look back at the growth of my own blogs I think it’s an important lesson to my own business’s growth. Links and Resources on The Secret to Building a Blog with Big Traffic and Profit Facebook group ProBlogger Success Incubator ProBlogger Event 4 Techniques to Get More Eyeballs on Your Blog 31 Days to Build a Better Blog 10 Things You Can Do Today that Will Pay Off On Your Blog Forever Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, my name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all we do over at problogger.com. Today’s episode is episode 201. In it, I want to talk about a key to creating a blog with lots of traffic and profit. It comes from a conversation I had this morning with a new blogger who was asking me about how to create content that will go viral. As I look back on the growth of my own blog, I think it’s a really important lesson for bloggers of all stages, good reminders on how to grow a business around your blog and traffic to your blog. You can find today’s show notes with some further listening at the end at problogger.com/podcast/201. Also, join our Facebook group at problogger.com/group. Just wanted to let you know, a bit of a reminder of our events that we’ve got coming up. If you are in Australia, we do have a limited number of tickets left for our events that are happening at the end of July and the start of August in Melbourne and Brisbane. You can get more information on those events at problogger.com/events. If you’re in America and can get to Dallas, Texas, in October, we’ve got a great event coming up there. You can find out more information on that event at problogger.com/success. All of those events, Pat Flynn will be joining me and we’ve got a raft of other amazing speakers happening at all of those events as well. I’ll link to each of those pages in our show notes as well. Let’s get into talking about traffic and profit and how to build those things into your blog. This morning, I had a conversation with a new blogger who asked me a question that I do get from time to time. They ask me, “How do you get viral traffic with a blog post?” It’s not the first time I’ve been asked it. I suspect it’s not going to be the last time that I’ll be asked it. Every time I am asked this question, I find myself wondering whether I should give the answer that the blogger wants to hear or whether I should give them the one that they need to hear. In this case, I told them the one they needed to hear. But the answer that they really want with that question is for me to reveal some secret to writing highly shareable content. Now, of course there are many techniques that you can use to increase the shareability of your content. I’m going to suggest some further listening on that topic at the end of this podcast. There’s nothing at all wrong with writing shareable content and hoping for it to get viral. I actually think you should write some of that type of content but it’s not the answer to building a sustainable full time blog with big traffic. In fact, when you become obsessed with writing just that type of content, it can hurt your blog. The answer that the blogger I talked to today needed to hear is that in most cases, the reason a blog grows into a sustainable business is that they don’t have viral content. It’s actually not the viral content that helps them to grow tha...

Lessons Learned in 200 Episodes of Podcasting Today’s episode is #200, and while it’s a podcast about blogging, today I want to talk about podcasting and share some of the big lessons I’ve learned about this medium since starting this podcast 2 years ago. I want to present with you my biggest lessons in podcasting, some tips on launching, recording, producing and promoting a podcast. I’ll share the tools that I use in putting this show together. I’ll tell you about our stats and share which episodes did best. And I’ll also share some of my frustrations and challenges and how I’ve been working to overcome them. So if you’re a podcaster or are curious about whether it might be a fit for you - this episode is for you. Links and Resources on What I've Learned About Podcasting in My First 200 Episodes Facebook group Podcast Motor Libsyn GarageBand Skype Call recorder Auphonic My Podcast Reviews PowerPress Plugin Rode Podcaster Pat Flynn’s Podcast Tutorials Top 10 ProBlogger Podcast Episodes 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Series (Episodes 1-32) Episode 48 - How to Make $30,000 a Year Blogging Episode 100 - 10 Things I wish I knew about blogging Episode 67 - Why You Should Create a Product to Sell on Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Episode 53 - How I made over $500,000 with the Amazon Affiliate Program Episode 95 - What Do I Need to Have Ready before I Launch a Blog Episode 193 - How to Become a Prolific Content Creator (an interview with Kelly Exeter) Episode 51 - How to Make Money as a blogger Through Affiliate Marketing Episode 109 - 15 Reasons Why You Should Consider Having a Personal Blog Episode 120 - Should You Start a Blog? 22 Questions to Ask to Identify If Blogging is a Good Fit for You Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi! Hey, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. ProBlogger is a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow an amazing blog and to build profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today is our 200th episode; it’s also our 2-year anniversary of blogging, so it’s a big celebration day. I was pondering to myself, “What shall we make number 200 about?” A few people in our Facebook group suggested that I do an episode on what I’ve learned about podcasting. It’s a milestone episode. Surely by now, I’ve learned a few things about podcasting, so I sat down today to list all the big lessons that I’ve learned about podcasting. That’s what I want to share with you today. I want to share with you my big lesson. I want to share some tips on launching, recording, producing, promoting a podcast, and I also want to share with you the tools that I use to put the show together. That’s changed a little bit over the years. I’m also going to share with you our stats, how many downloads we’ve had, which episodes did best; and I’m going to share with you some of my frustrations and challenges. Some of the challenges that I see other podcast is having as well and one of the things that I’ve been doing to work to overcome some of those things. If you’re a podcaster, maybe you are new to it, maybe you’re an experienced podcaster and just want to hear someone else talk about it, or maybe you’re someone, who’s thinking about whether podcasting might be a good fit for you, then this episode is one to listen to. You can find today’s show notes, where I’m going to share some links to the tools that we use, as well as a list of those top episodes for you to dig into a little bit more. You can find our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/200 and also join our Facebook group to connect with the other bloggers on the journey as well. We might do a bit of celebrating the 200th episode in the group this week ...

A Tool to Create High Quality Live Video on Facebook This episode is presented by The Success Incubator - a brand new event I’m co-hosting this year for ProBlogger readers and online entrepreneurs. The event is happening in Dallas Texas on 24-25 October, and I’m so excited to announce that joining me in presenting at the event are a great lineup of speakers including Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Kim Garst founder of Boom Social and Andrea Vahl who is a brilliant social media consultant. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you another COOL TOOL for bloggers that will help you to create high quality live video on Facebook. Facebook Live continues to be a medium that is well worth investing time into. Use it and you’ll grow your reach and engagement on Facebook. The problem with it is that to create a high quality professional looking video can feel a little out of reach. While FB is updating tools there’s still a lot you can’t do without investing a lot into software. Today, I present to you an affordable option that for under $30 will enable you to do some pretty cool stuff including share your screen, schedule your broadcasts, add overlays and more! Links and Resources on A COOL TOOL To Create Professional Facebook Live Videos Ecamm LIVE 7 Types of Facebook Live Videos that Grow Your Audience, Build Your Brand and Make Money Success Incubator Event (Use coupon code SUCCESS17) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there it’s Darren from ProBlogger. This episode is presented by the Success Incubator, a brand new event that I’m co hosting this year for ProBlogger readers in Dallas, Texas on the 24th and 25th of October. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’ve got this year some great speakers coming to this particular to this particular event. In addition to myself speaking, we’ve got Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Kim Garst, founder of Boom! Social, and many more speakers. There’s more speakers to be announced in the coming weeks but I’m excited to have Pat, Kim, and Andrea join us. I’m excited to offer you an early bird discount ticket for this particular event. If you go to problogger.com/success and use the coupon code SUCCESS17, you will get a $50 discount on tickets to this year’s event. I look forward to seeing you in Dallas this October for our only US event this year. Again, go to problogger.com/success. As I said at the top of the show, my name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you another cool tool for bloggers that will help you to create high quality, live video on Facebook. Many of you have heard me raving about Facebook Live pretty much for the last 6 to 12 months. It continues to be a medium that is well worth investing time into. I have been doing it on a weekly basis for the last couple of months and am seeing the benefits every time I do it. If you are to use Facebook Live, you’re going to start to grow your reach and engagement on Facebook. It does help to deepen the relationships that you have with your readers. The problem that many people have with Facebook Live is that to create a high quality, professional looking video can feel a little out of the reach of the ordinary, everyday person. Whilst Facebook themselves are updating their tools, there’s still a lot you can’t do without investing quite a bit of money into software or hacking together a system and being quite technical. Today, I want to present to you an affordable option that will, for under $30, enable you to do some pretty cool stuff including sharing your screen,

6 Recommendations to Monetize Your Blog In today’s episode I want to talk about making money blogging. More specifically, I want to tackle a question from a reader who has been blogging for a while without monetizing but is wondering which income stream she should try first. I’ll suggest 6 income streams that I see bloggers often starting with and at the end nominate my favorite one that I think can be a good place to start for many bloggers. So if you’ve been wanting to start monetize your blog - whether you’re a new blogger or an established one - or even if you’ve been monetizing but want to add another income stream - this episode is for you. Links and Resources on 6 Recommended First Income Streams for Bloggers Facebook group ProBlogger Event Dallas, TX Coupon code SUCCESS17 you’ll get $50 off Is it Really Possible to Make Money From Your Blog? My Tips for Making Money As a Blogger Through Affiliate Marketing How to Make Money With the Amazon Affiliate Program How to Develop a Product to Sell on Your Blog Nikki Parkinson from Styling You, Shares How She Built a Business Around Her Blog Amazon Associates Program Commission Junction ShareASale LinkShare/Rakuten Commission Factory AdSense Mediavine Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good morning and welcome to episode 198 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to create amazing content that’s going to change your audience’s life in some way and to build profit around your blog. In today’s episode, in episode 198, I want to talk to you about that topic of making money from your blog, building a profitable blog. Most specifically, I want to tackle a question from one of our readers from the Facebook group who’s been blogging for a while now without monetizing. She has actually built up a bit of an audience, some archives of content, but is wondering which income stream she should try to add to her blog first. In today’s episode, I want to share with you six different income streams that might be a possibility for this particular blogger. These are six income streams that I see bloggers often starting with. At the end of presenting the six, I want to nominate my favorite one that I think could be a good place to start for many bloggers. If you’ve been wanting to start to monetize your blog whether you’re a new blogger, or an established one, or maybe you’ve been monetizing for a while and want to add another income stream, this episode is for you. You can find today’s show notes where I will be listing some further reading and listening over at problgger.com/podcast/198. Also, you can join our Facebook group and connect with other bloggers on this same journey of monetizing their blogs. The Facebook group is over at problogger.com/group. Lastly, if you are in America, in the US, check out our upcoming Dallas event which I will be co-hosting. We’ve got a great lineup of speakers including Kim Garst, Pat Flynn, myself as well as a range of other bloggers and online entrepreneurs. You can get the details of this event which is happening in October, I think it’s the 24th and 25th of October. You can get those details at problogger.com/success. If you use the coupon code SUCCESS17, you’ll get $50 off over the next couple of weeks but don’t wait too long on that because that discount won’t last long. All those details will be on the show notes today. I think it’s time we go into today’s episode. I got a message from Danielle who’s one of our Facebook group members this morning. She said in her message and she gave me permission to share this, “I saw your recent Facebook Live on how to make money blogging....

A Free Tool to Create Videos For Your Facebook Page This episode is presented by The Success Incubator - a brand new event I’m co-hosting this year for ProBlogger readers and online entrepreneurs. Today I'm announcing 3 great speakers - Pat Flynn, Kim Garst and Andrea Vahl (more details here). Save $50 with the coupon code SUCCESS17. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you a free tool that I’ve been using over the past few weeks to create videos for my Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and other social media profiles that is getting crazy amounts of reach. It’s a tool that enables you to take a blog post that you’ve already written on your blog and to repurpose it into a short video to promote that blog post! Yep - you heard me. This tool takes a blog post you’ve already written and with a little help from you (just 10-15 or so minutes of work) it will create you a short video that you can then use anywhere you like to drive people to your post. I’ve been doing these videos for a week or so now and some of them are getting a lot of reach on Facebook. In fact I’m not the only one. One of our Facebook group members messaged me this morning about a video she created with this tool and on her FB page of just 20,000 followers she has had a video get over 300,000 views in 24 hours! So if you want to create great short videos for your FB page in just a few minutes - this episode is for you. Links and Resources mentioned in todays show Success Incubator (use coupon code SUCCESS17) Facebook Group Lumen 5 How to Create Amazing Videos on Your SmartPhone And here are some examples of the videos you can create with Lumen5. Firstly - here's one from my Digital Photography School Facebook Page. Here's one from the ProBlogger Facebook page. Lastly - here's another from Vanessa's facebook page. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. It’s Darren from ProBlogger. Before I get into today’s episode, I want to let you know about a brand new event that we’re running this year in Dallas, Texas on the 24th and 25th of October. This is our only US event this year. I’m really excited about what we’re doing. The event is called The Success Incubator. I’m co hosting it with another group of people who’ve been running another amazing event called The Digital Collab. The Success Incubator is for bloggers, online entrepreneurs, anyone who really wants to build a business online. It’s being held on the 24th and 25th of October in Dallas, just before the FinCon conference, which is another great conference, by the way, that I am speaking at this year. I’m really excited today to announce three of our speakers, our keynote speakers for The Success Incubator. Firstly, there’s Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, who will be a no stranger to most listeners of this podcast. He delivers amazing practical value. He’s built an amazing business. Secondly, there’s Kim Garst, founder of Boom! Social and someone who is just brilliant, particularly when it comes to Live video. That’s what she’ll be focusing her session on as well. And then there’s Andrea Vowell who is one of my favourite speakers. She’s a very funny person but she’s also very experienced in social media and will be speaking about Facebook Advertising. There’s more speakers to be announced in the coming weeks but I’m so excited to have Pat, Kim, and Andrea joining us. I’m also very excited to offer you as a ProBlogger podcast listener a special little discount code. You can get $50 off Success Incubator over the next week or so if you head over to problogger.com/success and use the coupon code, it’s really important that you get this right, SUCCESS17. When you go to problogger.com/success, you’ll see there more details of the event and you can get that $50 discount as well.

Blogger Nikki Parkinson Shares How She Built a Business Around Her Blog In today’s episode, I have recorded an interview with one of Australia’s better known bloggers - Nikki Parkinson from the style and fashion blog - Styling You. I first met Nikki at one of our first ever ProBlogger events. While a newish blogger at that time she stood out to me as a blogger to watch - partly because of her journalistic background (she was one of the first journalists I’d seen make the switch) but also because she was someone who was blogging ‘smart’. Most bloggers, back then, were blogging from the heart - blogging just because they had something to say - but Nikki even back then was not just interested and passionate about her topic - she was being smart and strategic with her blogging (at least, that was the impression I got). Nikki started Styling You in July 2008 and today - 9 years later - she’s not only grown her audience, but she’s built a pretty amazing business around her blog. Nikki has written a book, launched her own shop, is an ambassador to numerous brands and has her own paid membership program for readers. In this chat, we go right back to the beginning to talk about how she got started, the mistakes she made and the things she did early that paid off. We talk about her approach to writing, where she gets her ideas for content from and her approach to planning content. I found this fascinating because her approach to planning was very different to what many bloggers teach. We talk about how Nikki built her audience and how to stand out in a competitive niche. Nikki talks about how she’s not just built a large audience - but how she’s built such an engaging community. We talk about her private Facebook group and a strategy she’s using not just to build her group but one that simultaneously builds her email list - really smart. We also talk about how Nikki monetizes - how she made her first dollar, how she works with brands, how she built her membership program and a little about her ‘shop’ where she sells the products she writes about. Nikki also talks a little about the ‘free stuff’ that brands often send bloggers and how she’s turned some of those approaches into paid partnerships. Lastly we talk about productivity and scaling her business by hiring a team to help her. If it sounds like we cover a lot of ground in this interview - you’re right - we do. The cool thing is that while Nikki’s blog is a styling blog for women, I think most of what we cover is really relevant for most niches. So grab a cup of your favorite beverage and settle down with a blanket in your favorite bean bag, or get your hiking shoes on and get ready for a long walk or get that massive pile of ironing that you’ve been ignoring ready… let’s spend the next hour or so with Nikki Parkinson from Styling you Oh - and her dog decides to join us at the end :-) Links and Resources Mentioned on Today’s Show Styling You Sign Up for Nikki’s Facebook Group CoSchedule Listen to our episode on CoSchedule in episode 195 ProBlogger Facebook Group Join the video challenge in our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, and a job board as well as a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog, to grow your audience, to create some great content for the audience and to build some profit out of that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I have recorded an interview with one of Australia’s better-known bloggers, Nikki Parkinson from The Style Blog and Fashion Blogs Styling You. I first met Nikki at one of our early ProBlogger events. It must have been 2011,

Using CoSchedule as a Blogging Tool In today’s episode, we’re going to take a deep dive into a tool we’ve been using on ProBlogger for the last 18 months that has been incredibly useful for our team both as an editorial calendar tool but also to help us with our social media promotion of content. The tool is one that you may have heard of - CoSchedule. We installed CoSchedule a year and half ago now as our editorial team began to grow and as we began to get a bit more organised with the ways that we schedule and share content and since that time it’s become more and more central in what we do. In fact, it’s gradually taking over from some of the other tools we’ve been using to share content onto social media. To help me run through the tool I invited the General Manager of ProBlogger - Laney Galligan - onto the show to take me through it. Laney has taken over not only the management of the business side of our event and whole business but recently has taken the editor role at ProBlogger and uses CoSchedule as part of that all day every day - and as you’ll be able to tell - she loves this tool and is doing things with it that I didn’t even know it could do. In this chat Laney shares: What CoSchedule is We look at how we’re using it (and discuss a little of our own approach to planning content on PB) Her top 10 features of CoSchedule What she doesn’t like about it The pricing options of and whether we think it’s worth it for different types of bloggers. Resources on a Tool to Revolutionise Your Blog's Editorial Schedule and Social Sharing Facebook group CoSchedule PDF of Words that Can Work Well in Headlines CoSchedule's Headline Studio tool Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 195 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to start an amazing blog, to create content that changes your reader’s lives and to make a profit from that blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to talk a little bit about a tool that we’ve been using on ProBlogger for the last 18 months that has been incredibly useful to us, to me, and my team, both providing us with an editorial calendar but also with the social media promotion of our content. The tool is one that you have probably heard of before because it does get mentioned from time to time in this podcast. It’s a tool called CoSchedule. We installed this tool about a year and a half ago now as our editorial team began to grow and as we became more organized with the way we planned our content, the way we scheduled our content, the way our team worked together, and also the way we were sharing our content. Since that time, it’s become very central in what we do. In fact, it’s gradually taking over from some of the other tools that I’ve previously been using to share social media content. To help me run through this tool and to go deeper with it than I could, I’ve invited my team member, the General Manager of ProBlogger, Laney Galligan, onto the show to take us through what CoSchedule does and some of its features. Laney will be familar to many of you who’ve been to our events, she has directed our events for several years now. Over the last couple of years, has taken on more and more management roles at ProBlogger. She actually is our General Manager now and manages the whole business of ProBlogger but in the last few months, she’s also taken on more of the editorial role at ProBlogger as well. As a result of that,

5 Blogger SEO Tools In today’s episode, I’ve got Jim Stewart from StewArtMedia back on the show to talk about SEO tools to help you to rank your blog higher. I had Jim on the show back in episode 94 to talk about the biggest mistakes bloggers make with SEO and since that time have had a lot of questions in the Facebook group about what tools to use in SEO. So in this episode we talk a little about the most commonly advised tool - the Yoast plugin, as well as two great browser extensions that are useful in SEO. We also talk about Google’s Search console and how it’s really an essential thing all bloggers should be using. We then talk about the paid tool that Jim recommends to help you find broken links, identify duplicate content, build sitemaps and much more. In passing we talk about an issue that faces many bloggers - what to do if you’ve got multiple posts on the one topic competing with each other in Google! Lastly we touch on Google’s most recent updates and how they are impacting bloggers. You’ll want to listen to this part especially if you do affiliate marketing! Resources on 5 SEO Tools for Bloggers Yoast SERP Trends Stylish Browser Extension User Styles maker of Stylish Google Search Console Screaming Frog Jim’s Site Jim’s Course Jim’s Facebook Group ProBlogger Facebook Group Listen to our previous interview with Jim on the 5 Mistakes bloggers make with SEO and what to do about them Link to the article Jim mentioned on setting up the Stylish extension Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there, my name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you to grow a blog, a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I’ve got Jim Stewart from Stew Art Media back on the show to talk about search engine optimization tools to help you to rank higher in Google. I had Jim on the show back in Episode 94 to talk about blogging mistakes or mistakes bloggers make from an SEO perspective. Since that time, we’ve had a lot of questions in our Facebook group and via email about tools to use in SEO and that’s what today’s show is about. We talked about five different tools that you can use in your blogging to help you to rank higher in Google, particularly. We talk about Yoast, the most common tool that gets mentioned. A little bit about how to set that up and what to particularly pay attention to. We talk about two browser extensions, free browser extensions that are both useful in SEO tools that Jim uses every day in his own SEO. We also talked about Google Search Console and how essential it is for bloggers. I know it can be quite overwhelming, Google Search Console, but it is so important to have it set up and to be monitoring that. Then, we talked a little bit about a paid tool that Jim recommends to help you find broken links, identify duplicate content to build sitemaps, and a lot more. Towards the end of the conversation, we talked a little bit about a really common issue that I find a lot of bloggers are facing. That is when you’ve been blogging for a while and you have posts, multiple posts that are all trying rank for the same search term. Jim gives us some ideas on what we can do there to help one of those to get a higher ranking. Lastly, we talked a little bit about Google’s most recent updates and how they’re impacting bloggers. If you are an affiliate marketer, if you’re doing any kind of affiliate marketing, you want to listen to that last part of the interview as well. It’s not a long show today. You can find it over on iTunes as well,

Prolific Content Creation With Kelly Exeter In today’s episode, I want to explore the topic of prolific content creation by interviewing one of my favorite online buddies - Kelly Exeter about her experience of creating content online. Many of you will be familiar with Kelly because she’s been a regular contributor on the ProBlogger Blog where she writes about blog design and creating content, she’s presented an episode of this podcast back in episode 119 where she talked about how to choose a WP theme and she’s presented numerous times at our ProBlogger events. I first came across Kelly when she was wearing her hat as a blog designer (she designed Vanessa’s blog) but since that time, I have watched her put on many other hats. Kelly blogs regularly and is a great writer. She co-hosts two podcasts, and edits the FlyingSolo website while still being able to write 3 books in the last 3 years. So today, I sat down with Kelly to explore a few aspects of her journey. We start off tackling a question I get asked a lot - how personal should you get on a blog? Kelly used to get very personal but lately has changed her approach. We then talk about Kelly’s writing process where she talks about another change she’s made - moving from being very structured to learning how to use ‘free writing’ techniques. My favorite quote from this section - let yourself write crappy words We touch on editorial calendars, what to do when you start second guessing yourself in the writing process and how she goes about researching her posts. Then we talk about her experience of writing books and how to go about writing those longer writing projects. We also talk about podcasts - why she started, what that workflow looks like and how it’s different and compliments blogging. And lastly we talk about how to be a prolific content creator. Kelly reflects upon some of her systems and routines and techniques for getting so much done. We talk burnout, personality types and how to become a more disciplined person. If you think that sounds like a lot of ground to cover - you’re right! I originally thought about splitting this episode into 3 shorter episodes as we do shift from one topic to another a little but the more we talked the more I realised how some central themes wove through all of the topics. So settle in - this episode is perfect for those of you who like me take have a long walk each day - or maybe a long commute. There’s a lot of value here! Further Resources on How to Become a Prolific Content Creator (an Interview with Kelly Exeter) Kelly Exeter So you want to write for Flying Solo Take your writing from good to great in 6 steps Kelly’s Posts on ProBlogger How to Decide on a WordPress Theme for Your Blog Facebook Group ProBlogger Event Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to episode 193 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you to create an amazing blog, a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to explore the topic of being a prolific content creator by interviewing one of my favourite online buddies, Kelly Exeter, about her experience of creating content online. Many of you will be familiar with Kelly because she’s been a regular writer on the ProBlogger blog for a year or two now where she writes on blog design and creating content. She’s also presented an episode of this podcast, you might remember back in episode 119, I let her take over the show for the day. She talked about how to choose WordPress theme that is going to be effective for you. She’s also presented a number of times at our Australian ProBlogger even...

The Things Successful Bloggers Do to Build Their Blogs Into Businesses In today’s lesson, I want to talk about some of the things that successful bloggers are doing to increase the conversions of their website. This episode is inspired by a post we had on the ProBlogger blog this week from John Stevens who shared 9 conversion habits of the world’s most successful bloggers. I want to pick up, highlight and expand upon 3 of the points John mentions but also want to share something I’ve noticed about many of the social media marketing bloggers that I follow that fascinates me. Resources for 3 Key Things Bloggers Do to Grow Their Blogs into Businesses Join the ProBlogger Group for goal planning, a new live streaming tool, SEO, affiliate marketing, video and more! The 9 Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers How to increase the signups to your email list How to create an optin to increase signups to your email list How to create a start here page for your blog Michael Hyatt Smart Passive Income Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good day there! My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create content that will change people’s lives and to hopefully make some money from your blog as well. Learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today is episode 192. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about some of the things that successful bloggers are doing to increase the conversions on their website and to guarantee their success not only as bloggers to build an audience but also to help them to build a business and to make money from their blogs. This episode is actually inspired by a post we had on ProBlogger, the blog this week, it was a post from John Stevens who shared Nine Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers. It’s a post that I’m going to link to in today’s show notes because it’s essential reading for anyone who does want to monetize their blog and to learn this stuff. In today’s episode, I want to pick up on three of the nine points that John mentioned. I want to highlight them, expand upon them a little bit, and talk about why I think they are so important. At the end of this episode, I also want to share something that I’ve noticed about many of the social media marketing bloggers that I follow, these people who are experts in their fields, who are doing something a little different to what John says in his post. By no means am I saying John’s wrong, but there’s also something else that I’ve noticed about these other bloggers and I want to highlight that at the end of today’s show as well. You can see John’s post over in today’s show notes, there’s a full transcription of the show as well over at problogger.com/podcast/192. I’ll highlight John’s post there. Also, check out the Facebook group, the ProBlogger Community Facebook Group. You can go to problogger.com/group. This week being the start of May, we’ve been talking in the group about our goals for the month. We’ve been doing some accountability there. I also share the new tool I’m using for live streaming on Facebook which is just blowing my mind, really affordable tool. We’ve had discussions on SEO, affiliate marketing, video and much more so we would love you to join the group at problogger.com/group. Let’s get into today’s show. Last week on ProBlogger, we published a fantastic post by John Stevens, a guest post. It was titled, as I said in the top of the show, The Nine Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers. In this post that John wrote, John analyzes how some very well-known bloggers have built successful businesses around their blogs. He talks about these nine habits that they’ve gotten...

Making the Most of Tools, Apps and Services to Create Visual Content for Your Blog In today’s lesson, we’re going to talk tools for creating great visual content for your blog. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring different types of content that you can use on your blog. In episode 187 we talked written content, in 189 video content and back in 180 we talked about live video. Each are important types of content to be able to create for your blog - but one that is increasingly important today is visual content. When I was looking back at some screenshots of my very first blog from 2002, recently, I was amazed by how boring it looked. Not a single post in the first few months of my blogging used even an image - it was purely text. Today, the web is a much more visual place and I can’t remember the last time I published content without at least one form of visual content in it. Visual content helps you to stand out from the crowd, it gives your content personality, it makes it more useful and it increases the chances of it being shared. The great thing is that we’re operating in a time where there are so many great ways to create visual content. There are so many tools and services available to us - so many that it can be overwhelming to know which ones to use. So in today’s episode, I asked Peg Fitzpatrick to come on the show to talk to us about her favorite tools, apps and services. We talk about apps and tools for creating great content, great sources for free stock photos, a tool that will help with the sharing of your visual content and one for organising all of the visual content you create. As you listen you might want to have today’s show notes open where I list all of the tools, apps and services mention. Resources and Tools for Creating Great Visual Content for Your Blog Join our Facebook Group Adobe Spark Canva Ripl Giphy Skitch Adobe Draw Adobe Color Eye Dropper Chrome Extension Libre Stock Unsplash Big Stock Photo Stocksy Trello Social Warfare Plugin Peg’s blog Peg’s post on visual style guides Peg’s post on using Trello Is written content dead? How to create great video content How to create great live video How to Life the Quality of your Blog with Embeddable Content Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow the audience to your blog, to create content that’s going to change that audience’s life in some way and hopefully make a profit from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about tools that you can use to create great visual content for your blog and for your social media. Over the last few weeks and episodes of this podcast, we’ve been exploring different types of content that you can use on your blog. In episode 187, we talked about written content, perhaps the most obvious type of content for a blog. In 189, I talked about video content and had a great interview with Justin Brown on how to create great video content. Even back in episode 180, we talked about live video and how to create a live video particularly for Facebook. Each of these types of content is really important to be able to create for your blog today. But one that’s increasingly important today is visual content. It can actually be used in a lot of the other types of content as well. I looked back the other day at my first blog and some screenshots of it from 2002 and I was amazed at how boring it looked. Not a single post on the front page of that blog in 2002 had even any image in it, it was purely text. Today,

How to Move Through Failure in 6 Steps In today’s lesson, I want to talk about failure in business and how to move through it. I’ve been asked questions on this topic a number of times in the last few weeks and while it’s a topic most of us probably don’t want to have to learn about - it’s something that we all will need to deal with at one point or another because it’s a part of any business story. We all fail - in fact failure is an essential part of any startup and if you’re not having it it could be a sign that what you’re doing is not pushing hard enough and that you’re spending a lot of time in your comfort zone. SO in this episode I’m going to give you 6 things that I try to do when facing failure of different sizes. I think they’re relevant for the small fails and mistakes that happen to us regularly but am particularly thinking about some of those big ones too! Further Resources on How to Overcome Failure in 6 Steps Facebook Group 3 Questions to Ask When Facing Fear Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 190 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow your audience, to create amazing content, and to hopefully make some profit from your blog. Learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about failure, failure in business particularly, and how to move through it. I’ve been asked questions on this topic a number of times over the last few weeks and when I hear the same question more than once, I often pick up my ears and it often turns into a podcast and that’s what I want to talk about today. It’s something that I guess most of us don’t really want to have to learn about. We don’t want to have to learn how to move through failure but it is something that we will all need to deal with a one point or another, both in our personal lives but also as part of a business story and our blogging journey. We all fail. In fact, I think failure is an essential part of any start up, any business. If you’re not having times of failure, if you’re not having things where things don’t succeed, it’s possibly a sign that what you are doing really isn’t outside of your comfort zone and perhaps you’re not pushing things hard enough. In this episode, what I want to do is give you six things that I try and do and I emphasize try here because there’s a right answer when it comes to failure and there’s an actual answer, so most of us swing from the good things through to the unhelpful things. Those are six things that I try to do when I’m facing failure or mistakes of different sizes. I actually think most of what I’m going to share today is relevant for the small failures we have, those things that just don’t go right from day to day but also those bigger things as well. I’m particularly thinking of those because some of the questions I’ve heard over the last week have been on those bigger failures. You can find today’s show notes with the six points that I’m going to go through as well as some further reading over at problogger.com/podcast/190. Also, check out the Facebook group at problogger.com/group where there’s some great discussion going on at the moment. We’ve seen a lot of new members over the last few weeks. Let’s get into today’s show. Like I said in my introduction today, I’ve had a number of questions on the topic of failure recently. Willie over in the Facebook group asked just a few weeks ago, how would you recover from a massive failure? And then Max also messaged me and gave me permission to share his question. He said, “I’ve just had a big failing in my blogging business and I feel unable to move on.

Removing the Barriers to Create Video Content on Your Blog In today’s lesson, I’ve got some very practical and actionable information for you on how to shoot great video for your blog using your smartphone. As I’ve mentioned a few times lately in episodes - video is becoming one of the hottest types of content online. While the written word isn’t going anywhere video content helps you to grow your reach, stand out from the crowd, make a connection with your audience and is highly shareable. We’ve all heard about the opportunity but if you’re anything like me - you have a few questions, challenges and barriers that stop you getting into video. I don’t have the right gear! I don’t feel comfortable in front of camera? I don’t know the first thing about the technicalities of shooting and editing good video? Recently at SMMW I bumped into a fellow Aussie by the name of Justin Brown who was doing a workshop on how to create great video using the camera that most of us already own - the one in our smart phone. Justin teaches how to create great online video at his site - primalvideo.com I heard so many great things about Justin’s workshop that as soon as I got home I decided to get him on the podcast. I just finished our interview and I’m so excited by what Justin shared. Over the next 35 minutes Justin is going to remove all of the barriers to getting into video that I just mentioned. He’s going to tell you what gear you need (your smartphone is #1). We talk affordable options for mics, lights, apps etc. He shares tips on getting comfortable on camera. Tips on how to set up your shot - we talk framing, lighting and more He gives tips on editing your videos - he suggests apps and software as well as how to approach the edit And we finish up by talking about how to export your video so it’s ready to be used online. This is a highly practical interview that we designed to help you to create that first video. Tools and Apps mentioned in this episode: Microphones: Lavalier: BOYA BY-M1 (approximately $20) Shotgun: RODE VideoMicro (approximately $59) Wireless: RODE Wireless Filmmaker Kit (approximately $399) (not mentioned but a wireless option) Lighting - Portable: YongNuo YN300 Air (approximately $40) Aputure Amaran AL-M9 (approximately $45) Lighting - Studio (not mentioned but worth checking out):: SOFTBOX: StudioFX Lighting Kit (approximately $79) LED: StudioPRO S-600D Dimmable 600 LED Kit (approximately $426) Wide Angle Lens: Techo Universal Professional HD Camera Lens Kit (approximately $16) Tripods (not mentioned but worth checking out): SMALL: Arkon Tripod + Phone Mount (approximately $20) MEDIUM: Velbon EX mini (approximately $35) LARGE: Slik Video Sprint 2 (approximately $152) Monitoring Software (PC/Mac) Reflector 2 Filming Apps: iOS: FiLMiC Pro Editing Apps: iOS: iMovie iOS: Pinnacle Android: Cyberlink PowerDirector Link to Justin’s site - Primal Video Justin’s YouTube account Join the video challenge in our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to episode 189 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, I’ve got some very, very practical and actionable information for you on how to shoot great video for your blog using your smartphone. As I’ve mentioned many times over in the last 100 or so episodes, video is becoming one of the hottest types of content online at the moment. Whilst we covered in episode 187 the written word isn’t going away anywhe...

The Pros and Cons of Having More Than One Blog In today’s lesson, I want to talk about having more than one blog on the go at once. Regular listeners of this podcast know I have two main blog - ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I’m fortunate enough to have been able to build them up so that either one of them could be a full time venture which is great - but having two businesses to focus upon not only comes with some benefits - but some costs. In this episode I want to share: The story of how I built them to the point they’re at today The pros and cons of having more than one blog or business Some tips on juggling two things like this at once Lastly - today’s episode is proudly presented by this year’s ProBlogger events. This year we’re holding three events - one in Brisbane Australia, another in Melbourne Australia and a third in Dallas Texas. These events are designed with very similar goals to this podcast - to help bloggers to grow blogs with world changing content, with lots of readers and which are profitable. All of these events will have some amazing teaching from experienced bloggers (people like Pat Flynn who i speaking at our Australian events) but also have opportunities for masterminds and really drilling into the blog and business that you have to help take it to the next level. If you’re interested in the Aussie events head to problogger.com/events and if you’re interested in the Dallas event head to problogger.com/success but please don’t wait too long as these events are selling quickly and the early bird price ends in the coming weeks. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to another episode of the ProBlogger podcast, this is episode 188. For those of you who are new to ProBlogger, ProBlogger is all about helping you to start a blog, to grow your audience of your blog, to create content that’s gonna change that audience’s life and hopefully to make some money from your blog as well. You can find out more about ProBlogger and what we do at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to address a question that I’ve been getting quite a bit lately and that is, “How do you juggle two blogs and should you have two blogs?” A lot of regular listeners of this podcast know that I do have two main businesses and they both center around blogs. It’s ProBlogger which you are listening to right now, which is a blog podcast event and numerous other things. And then there’s Digital Photography School, which again is a very similar model in many ways. It’s centered around the blog, and then there’s ebooks and courses and other aspects of that business as well. I’m fortunate enough to have been able to build up these two businesses so that either one of them could really be a full-time venture, which is great. It also presents with some interesting challenges, to say the least. Having two businesses comes with benefits but it also comes at a cost. In this episode, I wanna share with you the story about how I built up these blogs to the point that they’re at today, the pros and cons of having more than one blog and business. And then for those of you who are considering juggling two businesses like I am, some tips on how to do that and how to approach that if you do decide to do that. Lastly, today’s episode is proudly presented by this year’s ProBlogger events. This year, we are holding three events over in Australia; Brisbane, Australia, and Melbourne, Australia and the third event in Dallas, Texas in the United States. These events are designed with very similar goals to this podcast, to help you to grow your blog with world changing content, to grow your readership and to build profit around your blogs. All of these events have some amazing teaching from experienced bloggers like Pat F...

What the Future Looks Like for Written Content In today’s lesson, I want to talk to you about written content vs other mediums and respond to a few questions I’ve been getting lately about which medium is best to focus upon and to answer the question - is the future of written content dead! Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes (look for episode 187). Events: Before I get into today’s show though I’ve been hinting for a few episodes now that I’ll have some news for you about this year’s ProBlogger events in Australia and the USA - and how you can get early bird tickets to both. Today I’m pleased to announce what we’re doing: In Australia - we’re running two events. We’ve got Pat Flynn coming out to speak in both Brisbane and Melbourne on two consecutive weeks. Brisbane is 29-30 July and Melbourne is 5-6 August. There’s two options with tickets in both cities. On the Saturdays we’ll be doing a larger single stream day with 7 sessions. Pat, myself and some other special guests will be teaching on how to monetize blogs. We’ll be talking monetization models, content, traffic, engagement and conversion. On the Sundays there’s an option to upgrade your ticket to come to a mastermind day. These will be much smaller (32 people) and give you an opportunity to really drill down into your own blog and business and to talk with both Pat, myself and some other experience bloggers to brainstorm, strategize and plan how to grow your business. These two Aussie events are already selling quickly - the Melbourne mastermind is already sold out but there are tickets as I record this for day 1 in Melbourne and both day 1 and the mastermind in Brisbane. Check out the Aussie event at problogger.com/events, where for the next week or so you can save $100 when you get an Early Bird Ticket. If you’re in the US, I am co-presenting/hosting an event in Dallas on 24-25 October. I’m doing this in partnership with the Digital CoLab and we’re calling it the Success Incubator. This event will be a combination of very practical/actionable teaching but also a chance to really drill down and mastermind/discuss your business in round table sessions. We’ll be announcing more details about speakers and agenda in the coming weeks but have put tickets on sale for those of you who are keen. We have a limited number of tickets and they’re already selling fast. You can see what we’re planning and grab your ticket at: problogger.com/success, where there’s currently an Early Bird ticket available that saves you $50. OK - that’s enough about our events - let's get into today's show where we’re going to talk about the place of written content in blogging today. Mentioned in todays episode - A series by Colin Gray on Content Stacking. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to episode 187 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind the ProBlogger.com – blog, podcast, event, job board and series of eBooks all designed to help you, as a blogger, to grow your audience, but first, to start you blog, to grow your audience and then to create some amazing content that’s going to help people to improve their lives in some way. This is going to make the world better but also, hopefully, be sustainable for you to build some profit into your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk to you about written content versus other mediums, other types of content. I want to respond to a few questions that I’ve been getting lately about which medium is best to focus upon and if there’s any future in the written word. Is the future of the written content dead? That’s the question I had a few times at Social Media Marketing World last week.

How I Write a Blog Post - My Step-By-Step Process Today, I want to walk you through my step by step process for writing a blog post! I get asked about this regularly over in the ProBlogger podcast listeners Facebook group. So today I put together some notes on the workflow I use and want to run you through. Before I do - and speaking of the Facebook group - I wanted to let you know that I’ve shared some exciting news with members of that group in the last week - particularly about an event that ProBlogger is involved in running later this year in the US. We’ve not fully launched the event yet publically but if you’re curious about coming to an event that ProBlogger is collaborating on - head to the Facebook group and check it out. But enough of that! - let’s get into today episode. Further Resources on A Step-By-Step Guide to How I Write a Blog Post How to Craft a Blog Post - 10 Crucial Points to Pause Episode in which I talk about avatars How to create great blog headlines How to use mindmapping 7 Steps to Editing Blog posts Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good day, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 186 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow that blog’s audience, to create some really useful content for that audience and to make some money from your blog. Today, I want to walk you through my step by step process for writing a blog post. I get asked quite regularly over in the ProBlogger podcast listeners group on Facebook about my writing process. Whilst I’ve talked about different aspects of my process, various episodes of this podcast, I’ve never really gone from start to finish. Today, I want to walk you through it. Before I do, I just did give you a little hint, that we’ve got some events coming up with ProBlogger. This year, we are planning to do an Australian event. In fact, there may be more than one, we’ll let you know a little bit more about that in the coming weeks. But we also, this year, want to do something in the US because we do have so many of our readers of ProBlogger, listeners of this podcast in the US.and speaking of the Facebook group - I wanted to let you know that I’ve shared some exciting news with members of that group in the last week - particularly about an event that ProBlogger is involved in running later this year in the US. This year, we are planning an event in the US. Whilst we’re not quite ready to launch details of that quite yet, I'm working with some partners on this particular event, we have let some details slip out in the Facebook group. We wanted to do a bit of a soft launch. If you’re curious about coming to an event in the US, go join the ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Facebook Group. Do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger Podcast Listeners and you will find the group. Join and you will find some details in there. By the time this episodes comes out, you may even be able to pick up an early bird ticket to that event. If you're curious about coming to an event in the US, check out the Facebook group. If you're in Australia or willing to come to Australia later in the year, stay tuned, we’ll let you know a little bit more about that. But enough of all that, enough of me teasing you about events. I know I’ve been known for doing that. I want to get into today’s episode. Let’s get into talking about my writing process. Ben over in the Facebook group today asked me this morning if I could talk a little about how I go about writing blog posts. He particularly wanted to know how I outline my posts and then how I go about ordering the writing process; when do I write headlines, introductions, and that type of thing.

How to Apply for a Blogging Job In today’s lesson, I want to talk about finding a job as a blogger - particularly how to apply for a blogging job. Back in 2006 I noticed I started getting a lot of two types of emails: People wanting to hire bloggers would email me asking if I knew anyone suitable for a blogging job that they had. Bloggers would email asking if I knew anyone looking to hire a blogger. After months of getting these kinds of emails and manually playing matchmaker I decided it would be easier if I just created a place for people to meet one another. I started the ProBlogger job board where those looking to hire bloggers could advertise their blogging job opportunities and bloggers could apply for the jobs. While it started slow with just a new job every few days - since 2006 we’ve had well over 10,000 jobs listed! These days there’s usually 1-5 new jobs listed on the boards - with some days as many as 10 new ones going up. Late last year we redesigned the job board and added some new categories. Now you can not only advertise to find a writer but there’s the ability to find people to work as editors/proofreaders, ghostwriters, promoters/marketers, copywriters and more. I use the job board to advertise for writers on my own photography blog several times a year and we always find great candidates but every time we do it highlights to me that some people could do with some help in putting their application together. So in today's episode I want to give you some tips for applying for a blogging job. If you’re looking for work at the moment - this is the episode for you. Further Resources on How to Get a Blogging Job Job Board RSS Feed for the Job Board Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 185 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I am the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start your blog, to grow your audience, to create great content, engage with that audience and hopefully make some money from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all we do over at problogger.com. Just look at the menu at the top and you’ll find all of the different things I’ve just mentioned. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about finding a job as a blogger, particularly how to apply for a blogging job. Back in 2006, I noticed I started getting two types of questions quite regularly from readers of ProBlogger. Firstly, there was one group of bloggers who wanted to hire someone to work for them. Either as a writer, an editor or in some other aspect of their business and these people would email me and go, do you know anyone who’s suitable for this type of job? The second type of email were from people looking for work. People saying I want a part time job, I’m building my blog, I need to pick up some other work. Do you know anyone wanting to hire someone like me? I realized I was good at playing the matchmaker and I used to try and match people up and look through the emails I was getting from people wanting to hire and try and match them up with a people looking to be hired but it was a bit of a clunky process. I decided it would be a lot easier if I just created a place where people could meet one another. I started the ProBlogger Job Board. This is a place where people looking to hire bloggers could advertise their jobs and people looking for work could apply for those jobs. It started in 2006, I can’t remember exactly when in the year but it started very slowly. I remember going to a few of my friend’s and saying, hey, do you want to advertise for free on it? Just to get some jobs out there and I think it launched with five or six different jobs.

Strategies to Increase Your Blog Earnings In today’s lesson, I want to talk about two things I’ve been doing on my main blog to increase the profitability of the blog - both have been working really well! I’m going to talk about 3 income streams in particular - AdSense Ad network (although this will be relevant to other networks too), Affiliate promotions and selling our own products. So if you want to increase the profitability of your blog - this show is for you. Further Resources on 2 Blog Monetization Strategies that Have Increased My Blogs Earnings by over 40% AdSense New Ad Placement Guidelines Facebook Group UPDATE: it's been a couple of weeks since I made some of the changes mentioned in this episode and we've now completed some of the extra AdSense tweaks to ads shown to those on desktops. The results have been better than expected. While I talk in this episode about 40-50% increases in earnings my AdSense earnings are over 100% higher than last month. In fact here's a graph of my weekly AdSense earnings over the last 12 months. You can see there's natural variation week to week but since making the changes we've seen two great weeks of increased earnings. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there! It’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 184 of the Problogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, which is a blog, a podcast, an event, a job board, a series of ebooks and numerous other things all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to create great content that’s going to change the world in some way and make your audience’s lives better and build that audience to the point where you are able to make a profit from your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at Problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to get a little bit personal. I want to talk about some other things I’ve been doing over the last month or so to increase my blog’s income. To increase the profitability, particularly of my main blog, Digital Photography School. In particular, I want to share with you two different strategies that I’ve been working on with my team there that have worked well. I am actually going to talk a little bit about three different income streams. One of them is AdSense, the Google’s Advertising Network. Although what I’ll share will probably be relevant for other advertising networks too. I want to talk a little bit about affiliate promotions and also selling our own products. If you monetize your blog in any of those ways, today’s episode will be relevant for you. “What are you doing on your blog this year that you’ve never done before?” That was the question that I asked in the ProBlogger podcast listener’s group on Facebook this week. The responses that you, as a community, shared with me were fascinating. The reason I asked that question is that I’ve become more and more convinced lately that many of us as bloggers fall into patterns and habits as bloggers that can limit what we achieve. One of the things I strongly believe and I’ve always believed this but I need to relearn it again recently, is that if we want success with our blogs, we need to be willing to do new things, to experiment. If we want to increase traffic on our blogs, we need to promote our blogs in new ways. We need to let that evolve. If we want to build income on our blogs, we need to constantly be trying new things in that area too. You’ve probably heard the definition of insanity that often gets attributed to Albert Einstein. He was said to have said the definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I’ve heard that quote attributed to numerous people but whoever said it, smart person because there’s truth there. If you want to experience new,

The 9 Questions You Can Ask to Increase FaceBook Engagement In today’s lesson, I want to give you some really practical things that you can do to increase engagement - particularly to get people to comment - on your Facebook page and if you have them - groups. Most bloggers spend a lot of time on Facebook and it’s for good reason. The amount of potential readers for our blogs who are on Facebook on a daily basis is staggering. It’s where people are online and so it makes sense to have a presence there. However using Facebook to grow your audience is getting increasingly tough - particularly if you want to do it organically and don’t have a budget to advertise. I won’t go into the reasons for this in this podcast but will say that one way to increase the effectiveness of what you do on Facebook is to put concerted effort into increasing engagement with those who already follow you there. Facebook has an algorithm with many factors that determine how widely they’ll show your updates - and one of them is how many people are engaging with your posts. If FB sees you’re getting lots of likes, shares and comments on your posts - they’re seeing what you’re doing as worth showing to others. So if you want to increase the effectiveness of your FB strategy - this show is for you. Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on 9 Types of Questions to Ask On Your FaceBook Page to Get More Comments School Mum Facebook Page Example of where I asked a question in a link post Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hello there and welcome to Episode 183 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I'm the blogger behind problogger.com; a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you start the most amazing blog, to grow your audience, to create content that changes that audience’s life in some way, and hopefully to make a little bit of money from your blog along the way or a lot, hopefully. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to give you some really practical things that you can do to increase the engagement, particularly to get more people to comment upon your Facebook page. If you have them, your Facebook groups, and other types of social media as well. Most bloggers do spend a lot of time on Facebook and that’s for a good reason, it’s not because we’re all distracted and sit there looking at cat memes all day, some of us probably do that too. The main reason I think bloggers tend to be attracted to Facebook, particularly with their blogging, is the amount of potential readers for our blog who are there at any one time on a daily basis. If you look at the stats of how many people are using Facebook, it is quite staggering. It’s where a lot of people are spending a lot of time. It makes sense for us who want to reach those types of people to have a presence in this platform. The problem is using Facebook to grow your audience is getting increasingly tough. If you’ve been blogging for two, or three, or four years, you probably have seen the changes that have happened over that time, particularly if you want to grow your audience on Facebook organically and you don’t have the budget to advertise. You can certainly reach a lot of people if you’ve got money to spend, but if you want to do it organically, it can be tough. It’s not impossible though. One of the reasons that it’s not impossible is that there are still things that you can do to increase your effectiveness on Facebook. One of those things is to build engagement with those who already follow you on Facebook. Facebook has this algorithm with many factors that determine how widely they will show your updates. One of the signals to Facebook that you are doing something worth showing to mo...

How to Create MindMaps for your Blogging In today’s lesson, I want to talk about one of my favorite techniques in business for organising my thoughts, helping me to review, plan and organise my business and to think creatively and generate loads of ideas. Today’s episode is about Mind Mapping. I want to talk about what mind maps are but more importantly I want to suggest a variety of different ways that you can use them in your blogging. I create mind maps almost every day in my business - they help me in my content creation, how I promote my blog and grow traffic, how I monetize my blog, in my design and much more. In fact - I designed outlined this whole podcast in a mindmap which I’ll show you in today’s show notes. I’ve got at least 19 ways you can use mindmaps and am going to share with you the mind mapping tool that I use (and suggest some others to check out too). Here’s the mindmap of today's show (click to enlarge): Here’s a mindmap I used as an illustration in a blog post on making money blogging. It was used on this post - https://problogger.com/make-money-blogging/ Here's a Keynote-Your Future mindmap: Here's a mindmap I made on finding blog readers: Further Resources on How to Use MindMaps in your Blogging How to Discover Hundreds of Post Ideas for your blog with Mind Mapping Problogger Podcast Listeners Facebook Group MindNode MindManager SimpleMind Cmap Coggle NovaMind MindMeister xMind Mindomo MindMaple Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 182 of the ProBlogger Podcast! My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks and real life books as well, all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog to create some content that’s going to change the world and make your reader’s lives better in some way. Hopefully, it’s going to help you to make a little bit of money from your blog as well. We do have a growing number of our audience on the way to full time blogging but the vast majority of our audience are adding an extra income stream into their lives. If you would like to do that, you can learn more over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about one of my favorite techniques in business for organizing my thoughts to helping me do reviews of my business, to plan my business and to organize my business as well as to think creatively and generate loads of ideas. In today’s episode, I want to talk about Mind Mapping. It’s a tool that I’ve used ever since I was a kid. I used to do it on a blackboard at school but today there are some amazing tools that help us to do it. I want to talk about how you can use mind maps in a variety of different aspects of your business. You can use Mind Maps in the creation of content, in the planning of that content but also the outlining of that content, in the planning in the way that you’re going to grow traffic to your blog and how you monetize your blog, how you design your blog in many other ways. In fact, right now, I am looking at a mind map. I designed this episode in the mind ap. I’m going to show you that Mind Map in today’s show notes. I’ll tell you where to find that in a moment. In fact today, what I’ve got or you is 19 different ways that you can use mind maps. I would probably come up with a 20th as I’m running along too. I’m going to show you some of those mind maps in today’s show notes. You can find them over at problogger.com/podcast/182, just see some of those examples and to get a full transcript of today’s show. Last thing I’ll mention is that the Facebook group, our ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Facebook group is going really well. This last week, we’ve had some amazing discussions where the listeners of this...