Whether you’re a new internet marketer or a SEO or PPC affiliate looking for sources to generate traffic and convert that into profit, chances are you’ve either explored or are harnessing the traffic and profit potential of blogging.
In the last 2 years, since I’ve been growing my internet business, two key steps:
1) posting quality content and
2) achieving authority status in the niches I operate
have played a key part of my success.
Successful, long-term blogging goes beyond just harvesting the most popular and/or profitable tools from keyword tools and bashing out keyword-dense content.
It should also encompass planning skills and management skills to be able to publish original, quality content a year, two years or longer down the road.
What most marketers may not realize is that following a step-by-step system can greatly reduce the amount of effort needed to blog prodictively and effectively.
The Secret Blog Weapon coaching program I’m launching today is a result of more than a year’s worth of research into the most relevant topics and techniques new and experienced bloggers need to have at their fingertips, together with a system designed to either kickstart your blogging efforts or bring them to a new level.
What I’ve done my best to achieve has been to:
Identify critical skills that bloggers need to possess (and develop them if they don’t already have them)
Organize your blog effort around a proven system to maxmimize your results
Create a system to build a brand and effectively use this brand to build your business
You can find more details about this comprehensive 6-month program at: SecretBlogWeapon.com
A couple of days ago, Michael Gray AKA Graywolf posted a controversial post “Is the BlogHer Conference Guilty of Sex Discrimination” – lambasting the event for not including male speakers (although they were welcome to ask questions during the sessions and speak at open mic sessions).
While I won’t go as far as to call BlogHer founders Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins “evil and sexist pigs”, it’s worth looking at whether Michael is justified in his accusations.
I took a look at the BlogHer 08 brochure, a massive 50-page PDF including the conference schedule and speaker profiles and the lack of male speakers stood out.
Is it wrong for an event to exclude male speakers?
I guess it would be easy for conference organizers to point to speaker submissions or to a speaker email link and say that they’re opening the doors to male presenters. It’s another thing to go out and proactively seek out and invite qualified presenters outside of your normal demographic (eg: mommyblogger, seo experts, ppc specialist, daddy bloggers, etc).
A couple of hours ago, Super Affiliate Ros Gardner and Anik Singal launch Blog Classroom.
If you’re a new or experienced blogger, and you’ve seen the pre-launch publicity and watched the set up videos, you might be wondering “So what? I know how to use Fantastico and do a 1-click install of WordPress”
As a blogger who’s been posting regularly since July 2006, I’ve found that know most of the info regarding how to set up your blog, how to optimize it for search engine indexing and SEO…BUT the content that I’m looking forward to checking out is where Ros and Anik will be giving your their take on how THEY generate traffic and monetize their blogs.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from participating in a number of closed-door masterminds, it’s that often just ONE strategy or tip could be responsible for doubling or tripling your results in your business. It’s not just any old tip either, but hearing from someone who’s experienced and has done it before (they’ve done it multiple times in most cases), can help unlock the bottleneck you’re facing in your business.
So yes, I’ll say that if you have ONE takeaway from any book, course or program that helps you bring your business to the next level, it will have been worth it.
The other advantage of a program that has a webinar component (Blog Classroom has 4 webinars scheduled) is that you get to ask your burning questions during the question-and-answer component (it might be a live Q&A session or via emails).
Here is a predictor of success – you can either wait for the presenter to give their presentation and ask a question based on their content. OR you could find out the topic ahead of time, do your OWN research, maybe even do some testing BEFORE the call, and get specific advice on how to enhance your efforts.
That’s the difference between waiting for something to happen and MAKING THINGS HAPPEN. Which camp do you want to be in?
My buddy, Amit Mehta and I have spend the last 2 weeks brainstorming on how we can add value to the Blog Classroom course, and we’ve come up with a booster “4 part Advanced Blogging Strategies Webinar Series”
Here is what we will be offering:
Little Known & Unorthodox Techniques to Quickly & Easily Explode Your Blog Traffic
How to Create a Fanatical Reader Base that will come Back to your Blog Again and Again, and Tell Other People about Your Blog.
Why Most Bloggers Fail and How to Avoid Falling in This Trap
How to Leverage Your Blog for Massive Profits & Not Just People Clicking on Adsense Ads
You’ll be getting the technical skills on the nuts-and-bolts of blogger from Blog Classroom, we’ll be equipping you with the inner game/mindset skills as well as some of our own techniques to bring your blogging to the next level.
If you want traffic AND increase your blog income, you MUST make sure you are in the Advanced Blogging Strategies Webinar series.
To qualify to receive this bonus (limited to the first 30), you will need to sign up through this:
and forward your sales receipt to Support [at] AmitMehtaReveals [dot] com.
All emails will be checked for time stamped and the first 30 receipts sent to Amit or myself will qualify for the bonus (we’ll send you acknowledgement within 48 hours of sending out the email]
Here is a podcast we did regarding successful blog strategies:
I first got to know Ros Gardner through her book, the Super Affiliate Handbook, when I got started a couple of years ago.
So it was refreshing to hear her presentation at PPC Classroom Live! in Vegas last December where she talked about her network of sites, including her first foray into internet marketing, dating site Sage-Hearts.com.
[Incidentally, I was listening to a recording of the late Corey Rudl’s talk at Yanik Silver’s 30th Birthday Bash celebration about 5 years ago, where he was talking about Ros earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a month back then (which would’ve been about 2003!)]
If you didn’t make it to PPC Classroom Live! you would’ve missed out on the fact that most of her traffic is generated organically and free and her affiliate margins are pretty high.
What’s her secret? She primarily uses blogs as her online platform of choice, plus techniques – often overlooked by pure play SEO and PPC marketers – like email marketing and other social marketing techniques of choice.
Whether it’s her Net Profits Today, Sage Hearts or another site from her network, I’ve noticed that she’s primarily using WordPress.
It’s a good step that Anik Singal and Ros are launching the 2.0 version of Blog Classroom, so you can also check out how wordpress significantly reduces the learning curve to building your online presence (especially if you’re technicially-deficient like me.).
Anik and Ros have put up a number of tutorial videos up, and you can check them out.
PS: My buddy, Amit Mehta and I will be conducting a series of training session to incorporate branding and monetization into your blogging efforts.
Note: must sign up via either of our blogs to qualify for the bonus.
If you’ve been following the developments on the WordPress blog, you’d know that the new official release of WordPress 2.5 is out.
Besides better image handling – the new version has a pretty comprehensive built-in gallery (WordPress head developer honcho Matt Mullenweg did a preview screencast of the new gallery), it also has features like an enhanced in-built tagging feature, integrated analytics (so you get a better idea of your traffic picture without having to go to Google Analytics), a redesign of the user interface that should allow for more intuitive posting.
What’s uncertain is if embedding videos and other code requires having to muck around with the blog settings, because WordPress hasn’t really “played nice” with PHP, javascript and flash files in it’s previous incarnations.
Also, there’s a big question mark about the compatibility with WordPress plugins (generally developed by third party and independent developers) designed for earlier versions of WordPress.
–
So the $64,000 question (or perhaps in today’s context, the $1million question…) is (more…)
If you tried to access this blog over the weekend, you might’ve noticed that it was up and it went down at times. I’m glad to say that we’ve moved the blog from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server and for the most part the bugs have been ironed out. (barring some file permissions and folder permissions).
[Note: the “broken database” comments you see are part of some inherent bugs in the WordPress 2.3.X series, but the comments are still going through]
In addition, we’ve ported over a couple hundred megs of content and if there’re broken graphics or missing MP3s or videos, drop us a line at the contact form.
Here’s one blogging tip:
If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve put the blog in a /blog/ directory and have the index.html be a “directory” page.
Yes, you can do it with one of the WP plugins to have your “landing page” be a “page”, but it’s not the same thing…
Back on the blogging front…
There could be a number of major enhancements in store, though we’ll likely start at the end of tax season (it’s a scramble filing tax statements from multiple companies and checking for regulatory compliance).
But while our tech team doing planning for the year ahead…
Are there any “wishlist” items you might like to see on this blog?
What’ve you enjoyed reading?
What’s the single post or page you’ve found the most useful OR enjoyed OR both?
A couple of hours ago, Super Affiliate Ros Gardner and Anik Singal launch 
Here is a predictor of success – you can either wait for the presenter to give their presentation and ask a question based on their content. OR you could find out the topic ahead of time, do your OWN research, maybe even do some testing BEFORE the call, and get specific advice on how to enhance your efforts.