It seems like it’s becoming an annual tradition for a blogger or reporter on a slow news day to observe that a trend of “a-lister” bloggers are retiring from the blogging scene and one of the informal golden rules in reporting is:
- If it happens once, it’s an accident.
- If it happens twice, it’s a coincidence.
- If it happens three times, you have a “trend” story on your hands.
So 3 prominent bloggers quitting the scene within a period of 1-2 years = trend?
The one thing about the “golden rule” was that it generally applied to the brick-and-mortar context, not as much when you’re talking about 3 or more bloggers out of the hundreds of millions of blogs out there.
Statistically, even 100 top bloggers out of a universe of 100 million blogs would be 1 / 1,000,000. In decimal points that would be 0.000001% of the blogging population.
So wondering if “blogging is dead” is akin to wondering if fixed-line telephones are dead or if the fax machine is dead. Nice linkbait, but I don’t think there’s much substance or value to that argument.
Jason Lee Miller notes in his WebProNews piece that fame (or the price of it) might be the cause of (more…)
I first got to meet Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman (right) on the internet marketing forums more than a year ago. He got some attention as an active poster on the Rich Jerk forum, and for blog posts on his CashTactics blog, such as the one where he mentioned making more thant $159,000 from one of his sites. (From about 17 hours of work).
Since then, he’s published more posts related to PPC traffic generation and CPA affiliate marketing. If you’ll read some of his posts like his Questions and Answers post:
His reply to the question about what he should have known as an internet marketer starting out is frank and uncensored: “That 99% of marketers writing ebooks to sell to other marketers are nothing but forum slime who copy other people’s ideas and steal the glory to make a penny. Had I known that when I started I would not have wasted a shitload of money”
Instead, the foundation of how he determines what works and what doesn’t isn’t by reading an ebook, but by testing it out. And it’s not just posts about how he made big money either. In an update to his testing, he removed the entrecard and scratchback blog widgets because they weren’t performing.
One major lessons that internet marketers wanting to be successful from their efforts is to continually research, test, analyze new campaigns and products and services. “Failing” once does not put you out of the game.
The other point is that blogging about the experience (good or bad), helps you (more…)
I gave Shawn Collins some feedback about what I thought was some spam on one of his blogs and was trying to define what is clearly spam, and what treads the murky waters of spamdom.
Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”
That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).
What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.
I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?
If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?
Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?
Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.
Even if the blogger doesn’t (more…)
Made famous by the 2006 film, “The Secret“, the search phrase “Law of Attraction” throws up tons of results on any of the search engines.
From self-professed “Law of Attraction coaches”, to being able to gain mastery over the secrets of life, it just seems so easy and just a $19.95 shipping and handling charge away.
The essence of the Law of Attraction, though it seems somewhat hokey and new age-ish especially after being given the quasi- or even pseudo-scientific spin by para-scientents (ie: not quite “official” scientists) has its basis in books like Wallace D Wattles “The Science of Getting Rich” and Napolean Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” (although Napolean died poor…).
The major problem I have with the whole “Law of Attraction” movement is its emphasis on “thinking” and somehow attracting wealth, happiness or whatever you want to attract to you.
If it smells a little like the internet wealth programs which promise to make you untold riches while you sleep, or those weight loss programs which help you lose weight while you sleep or watch TV, you’re not too far wrong.
The fact is that success at anything – whether it’s closing a major business deal, building a successful internet business, or forming a relationship with a significant other – all require effort, and learning. There’s no 300 page PDF which will guarantee you success.
If that were so, we’d all be internet millionaires within 30 days of having started, wouldn’t we.
Here’s where I think the Law of Attraction is useful – as a starting point.
If you have a mental picture of where you want to be, who you want to be, what you want to be, you’ve taken the first step in becoming success. This is also where the heavy lifting will beging.
I get emails from aspiring bloggers who write:
“I like your blog, and I want to make a successful living from my blogging. I’ve spend hundreds of dollars buying books on blogging (ebooks and physical books), and I started a blog, but I haven’t been successful yet. Help!”
With some further probing, I find that they’ve been blogging a total of 3 weeks and have a trickle of traffic coming to their blog, and generated a total of $0.27 from Google AdSense after publishing a total of 5 blog posts.
Your actions determine your results.
Though the wishful thinking aspect of the law of attraction can give you a temporary bump in your motivation and maybe even spur you to write a blog post, or two, or three, it’s the ability to continue taking consistent, focused action that will give you results.
It’s one of the reasons why I spend a considerable amount of time developing the blog training system which I launched last month, and for a number of the motivated new and intermediate level internet marketers out there who’re looking for a system to follow and scale up their internet income, the Secret Blog Weapon could hold the “The Secret” to your internet marketing success.
The trend among some top bloggers is to publish monthly earning reports showing how much income they have generated the previous month.
While it may seem impressive to earn $1,000, $5,000 or even $35,000 a month from your blogging efforts, I feel that the raw number can be a crude way of judging the “success” of your blog and will not be as meaningful as using other metrics.
A more significant statistic is (more…)
Brian Garnder is known as the creator of the popular WordPress theme, Revolution.
In a recent blog post, he mentioned that Revolution arose out of a site design which had been rejected by a real estate client.
Good thing too, because it’s gone on to be one of the most popular magazine-style WordPress templates.
I invited Brian on to the Friday Podcast and we talked about:
- How he got started in online marketing 2 years ago
- Balancing blog design and blog usability to build user stickiness
- How you can test out new templates on your blog before you go live with them
- Tips on becoming more efficient with your blog
- Shifting his business model from a paid premium blog template now to an open source business model in November
Check out the podcast below:
Be sure to check out:
Important note: The Revolution themes will only be available till Oct 31st, so you should get them before they’re taken off the market.
