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Thursday, January 22, 2009

ProBlogger - Latest Posts

How to Create a Blogging Plan and Actually Reach Your Goals This Year

Posted: 21 Jan 2009 06:21 AM PST

This post is part of the series (by Hendry Lee) about how to survive the blogging evolution in 2009. If you haven’t done so, you want to read the previous article about my take on niche blogging trends. It was based on analysis rather than predictions. That is important because if you ask me, I’d choose to base my business decision on sound strategies than pure speculations that may or may not work at all.

The future of niche blogging, as it always has been so, is about gradual growth. Bloggers who have found that out and focus their efforts on long term strategies will reap the benefits and those who tried to hit a home run may end up wasting a lot of time, effort and perhaps also a small fortune.

For this reason, whether you are just planning to get started in 2009 or you already have a blog, I present you with a comprehensive list of steps, tips and strategies that if carried out correctly, will propel your blog to a big success this year and beyond.

I’m the first to admit that very few of the strategies below are entirely new, but I’ve done my best to emphasize on current and upcoming trends in order to maximize results. Bloggers are already swamped with things to do and failure to prioritize can make a difference between taking your blog to the next level or let it fade into oblivion.

Getting Your Plan in Order

As the saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Despite what others have said about blogging, it is still a complete strategy that needs planning. It is my intention to get this time of the year to help you get your house in order and create strategies to go forward.

New year for many people is a great way to get a brand new start, but there’s nothing more common than broken new year resolution in the first week of January. Although the majority of people abandon their resolutions within days of making them, that doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort.

A plan, when accomplished, lets you feel good about yourself. It also puts you in a position to set and achieve higher goals.

What I learned throughout the years is that, resolutions don’t have to be declared during a special occasion. So, even if you are late, every day is still the best day to make a decision about the direction you want to take your business.

Just that no matter what you do, plan ahead!

The Art of Setting Realistic Goals

To help you gain perspective about planning, allow me to be upfront about it. Just recently I read in an Internet marketing forum a post from a newbie about his plan for 2009. He was quite knowledgeable about the latest buzz words like social media, Twitter, and so on, of which I saluted him for his broad range of knowledge about Internet marketing. However, when the post came to the part about goals…

Here’s a partial list of what he included as the goals for 2009:

Start writing a novel and finish it.
Be completely debt free.
Earn $300,000 online by launching 3 more products.
Start a blog and grow traffic to 3,000 visitors a day.
Fulfill a dream of owning a boat.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t try to discourage by saying those goals are too good to be true. In fact, many individuals are able to set higher goals and get them all.

I’m also not oppose to goal setting at all, but at the same time I don’t think that new year resolution is made to be broken.

One particularly important factor of goal setting is to be realistic. Your goals need to put yourself outside of your comfort zone, but not too much that you feel unrealistic about them. For instance, without staffs or at least virtual assistants that help you with various tasks, creating and marketing products will consume a large portion of your time already, let alone launching three products, maintaining a blog and writing a novel in the same year.

To quote Jim Rohn, “Most people overestimate what they can do in their first year, and greatly underestimate what they can do in five years.”

The point is, by all means set a longer term goals but refrain yourself from aiming too high a goal at first.

Starting a blog with the intention to making money blogging is still possible but it takes more dedication than ever.

An extreme example may be a blog called Bankaholic by Johns Wu. BankRate acquired his blog for up to $15 million in October 2008. At that time, he had only been blogging for that blog for a bit more than two years.

As a solo blogger, this is a huge amount of money but I bet he didn’t make $7.5 million in his first year of operation. Traffic and revenue grew gradually and when the right time comes, the blog bloomed.

I hope I got the point across well about setting realistic goals. Each time I talk about this, some people defend their goals aggressively as if I am going to take their dreams away. Deep down inside every one of us, we still want to believe that overnight success is still possible online. No wonder, everyone seems to fall victim of one type of scam or another.

But I digress…

So, How’s a Blogging Plan Looks Like?

It doesn’t have to be tens of pages. After all, this is not a formal business plan. When it comes to starting a blog, most people don’t start out by hiring people to blog. By keeping the operational team small (or most likely a solo player) this type of business doesn’t need venture capital to finance.

My personal business plan adapts the popular one-page business plan format.

The plan consists of five major parts, namely:

Vision. Your vision should answer the questions of who is your target audience and what you will offer.
Mission. Be concise and clear instead of clever. Use this part to clearly convey your unique value proposition.
Objectives. What are you trying to accomplish with your blog? How do you know if you’ve accomplished your goals? Objectives are your milestones. They may not be the end-goal. As you reach your objectives, you may have higher-level objectives.
Strategies. What are your strategies to accomplish the objectives above? Being strategic means working on your blog based on certain principles and values. That also helps you focus on reaching your vision and mission.
Actions. This part outlines your actions that support the vision, mission, objective and strategies.

Personally, I prefer to create a one- to two-year plan. Beyond that, it is hard to predict the right strategies because of the rate of changes happening online. Ask any blogger if she still follows her plan two years ago when she got started. I bet the answer is no. A plan needs to be flexible to new strategies but nevertheless you need it to stay focus so that every day you do something to move yourself closer to the objectives.

A plan should allow you to quickly glimpse through it, perhaps on a daily or weekly basis. For me it is a reminder about where I want to go and avoid spending time on whichever activities that don’t benefit my blogging business on the long run.

Note: Darren has written a blog planning post and his steps are very similar to mine. Seems like we adapt the same concise system for planning.

Focus on Your Blogging Business Model

If you see it from the publisher’s standpoint, a blog is nothing more than a publishing tool. It helps you get content online. In other words, instead of focusing on the intricacies of getting a piece of content online, you can concentrate on content production and promotion.

Based on that, there really is more than one way to create a blogging business. I’ve written about 8 blogging business models in the past. If you are confused about which way to go, that post certainly can help.

The fact that you can combine one or more of those into your blog means there are really many ways to create a business based on a blog.

Before you go ahead and get your first message out, it is necessary that you pick the right business model and focus on it.

For instance, if the affiliate model suits you best, your strategies should revolve around content creation, relationship building with both merchants and your audience, trend spotting, etc.

I won’t get into much detail in this post, but those by themselves already demand much of your precious time. By working closely with a merchant, for example, you will be able to spot new products and help them test new ad creatives.

And if this is how you strategically separate yourself from your competitors — by building closer relationship with merchants, get new updates of products before anyone else, able to request for higher commissions, etc. — you should be prepared to help those select merchants.

Just so this is clear, testing and tracking new ad creatives and at the same time work on your content creation and promotion may already overwhelm most affiliates.

Remember that with more samples, testing will be scientifically more accurate. Perhaps you also want to help the merchant test email offers. For that, you’d better have built quite a significant amount of prospects or customers and send e-newsletter regularly.

If you are not prepared strategically, most likely you will not be able to take this route by doing it yourself, especially if you still have to struggle through technical stuff to get things done.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to scare you off but just because publishing with a blog is easy doesn’t mean that you are able to throw a few content pages and ads out and immediately earn money that way.

More and more it will be about optimizing your sites to get more traffic and then convert those visitors into paying customers. That separates the winners from the average and if you start doing it right now, you will be on the right track to dominate at least a segment of a larger niche.

When it comes to link development, a fellow blogger I know of spend eight hours per week to create highly linkable content. If you think you can do this in 10-20 niches, you are stretching yourself too thin.

Think outsourcing is the answer? Think again. Outsourcing is another buzzword nowadays. It can be a very solid strategy if done right. However, it also requires that you are good at managing resources as a project manager, not to mention that most people don’t have enough fund to hire others at the beginning.

Just as an example, if you seek for a professional help to create a linkbait plan — consulting, not actually creating the linkbait — expect to pay between $750 to $2,000.

So, that depends on your plan and strategy and I hope I drive the point home that planning has to come first if you are going to get significant result this year. Competing is still possible if you pick the right field to play and take massive actions.

I hope by now you agree that hiring $5 article writer is not the only thing you’ll need to get tons of links and traffic. You need much more than that.

And that’s what you should expect if you are to build a business.

Review

Many bloggers avoid planning because it is boring. However, by approaching it from the correct angle, this can in fact turn into one of the most exciting part of your business.

When you are just about to launch a blog, usually the excitement fills in the atmosphere. Planning is the stage when you can see your dreams and goals come into fruition, at least in your mind. With strategically created plan, the only gap that separates you from achieving your goals is action.

For you who are a bit desperate right now because of the hard truths that I revealed above, don’t give up! It is still possible to grow a blogging business, just that the model may be much different from what’s in your mind. But still, working from home or from any of your favorite place, doing what you enjoy and making money from it is still an attainable goal if you finally direct your efforts on the right track.

Plus, I’ve just saved you time and money buying e-books and jumping from one thing to another every two weeks. By starting now and focus your effort on one thing, you will be way ahead others by the end of this year.

In the next few posts, I’ll go into more specifics about activities related to blogging, including content production, optimization and promotion. If you are still unsure about the strategies and actions to go to where you want to be, those articles will be of help.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about make money blogging on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog - Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to his blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

Paper Money - A US Real Estate Bubble Blog

The Almost Daily 2¢ - Twin Peaks!

Posted: 20 Jan 2009 11:02 AM CST

Subtitle: The (Suckers) Rally Has Left the Building?

And a very weak rally it has been… amazingly weak given all the talk of the new administration and its historically gigantic government bailout of everyone and everything… even some bears thought we might have reached the bottom…

But, alas it looks as though 'tis over.

If the contagion of (well founded) fear from yesterday's RBS (NYSE:RBS) $41 billion loss didn't drive the nail in the rally's coffin, then today's nearly 50% opening drop of State Street Corp (NYSE:STT) should more than complete the job.

Banks and financial stocks as an aggregate are now well below their November 20 lows and, like a giant cement block shackled to the broad indices, will likely pull down the rest of the stock market to a dramatic re-test and failure.

Yet CNBC's Bob Pisani still opines of a market "over sold" condition.

Fat chance.

In fact, it's becoming more obvious to me that we are firmly on the path to a 70%-80% peak decline for the S&P.

That would bring the broad index to a level of roughly 300 - 500… a startling level for sure… yet would anyone really be surprised?

Make no mistake… we are in the midst of a generational decline.

A long unwind of massive debt and delusion that even the federal government cannot prevent.

2009 will be a year of somber awakening to the harsh reality that our economic troubles are more complex and intractable than is now expected.

While many pundits still believe that a significant component of the decline to date is attributable to sentiment and psychology, this year we will all agree that something truly fundamental is afoot.

As regular readers know, I have been following along the stock market decline for about a year now with this recurring "Twin Peaks" post whereby I simply charted some very basic technical analytics (somewhat ala the amazing Louise Yamada mixed with a couple of my own inventions) which compared the underlying average movement of the current S&P/500 index to its performance during the unwind of the "dot-com" collapse.

Be sure to study the charts well as they present several different ways of capturing market volatility and together compare past market performance to what we are seeing today.

I will continue to post the comparison to the "dot-com" era bear market for posterity but now that we have broken through the 2002 lows all technical similarities going forward have ceased… we are firmly in uncharted territory as the two bust eras are now one.

The "Percentage Up-Down" chart clearly shows that we have just entered a period of REAL volatility BUT also leads one to believe that we may have a long way to go in this market shakeout.

The "Up-Down Daily Closings" chart seems to indicate that although we have seen increased volatility and significant declines, we have yet to match the distribution of daily up closings and down closings (inverted red line).

Study the following image (click for very large and clear version) of the S&P 500 index from 1995 to today then read below for the technical blow by blow.

What follows below is now just maintained for old times' sake… the second peak was obviously real and this series of posts identified it roughly a year ahead of time.

Now that we have entered effectively into uncharted territory, we are at a loss for historical comparison.

THEN (1998 – 2000 Top)

A. October 1998 – S&P 500 gives early warning sign by crossing its 400 day simple moving average (SMA). Notice also that the 50 day SMA breached the 200 day SMA.
B. October 1999 – S&P 500 gives a second signal by crossing its 200 day SMA after a solid twelve month expansion. 50 day SMA touches the 200 day SMA.
C. Three prominent but decelerating peaks set up the top.
D. Between second and third (last) peak S&P 500 index breaches 200 day SMA. After the final peak S&P 500 index breaches the 400 day SMA.
E. 50 day SMA heads down fast and crosses the 200 day SMA. (Cross of Death)
F. 50 day SMA crosses 400 day SMA. (Cross of Far More Death)
G. 200 day SMA crosses 400 day SMA. (Cross of Fiery Gruesome Death)

NOW (Today's Top)

A. June 2006 – S&P 500 gives early warning sign by crossing its 400 day SMA. Notice also that the 50 day SMA breached the 200 day SMA.
B. March 2007 – S&P 500 gives a second signal by falling near its 200 day SMA after a solid nine month expansion. 50 day SMA similarly depressed.
C. Three prominent but decelerating peaks set up the top.
D. Between second and third (last) peak S&P 500 index breaches 200 day SMA. After the final peak S&P 500 index breaches the 400 day SMA.
E. 50 day SMA heads down fast and crosses the 200 day SMA. (Cross of Death)
F. 50 day SMA crosses 400 day SMA. (Cross of Far More Death)
G. 200 day SMA crosses 400 day SMA. (Cross of Fiery Gruesome Death)
H. Down Down we GO! (Uncharted Territory)

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

ProBlogger - Latest Posts

21 Ways to Write Posts that Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog

Posted: 20 Jan 2009 01:49 PM PST

Write something useful
Write something unique
Write something newsworthy
Write something first
Write something that makes those who read it smarter
Write something controversial
Write something insightful
Write something that taps into a fear people have
Write something that helps people achieve
Write something that elicit a response
Write something that gives a sense of belonging
Write something passionately
Write something that interprets or translates news for people
Write something inspirational
Write something that tells a story
Write something that solves a problem
Write something that gets a laugh
Write something that saves people time or money
Write something opinionated
Write something that is a resource
Write something about something ‘cool‘

Tags: Blog Promotion, Writing Content

Setting Our Course

Most projects I take on are personal blogs, or brand new sites. Neither of which require a whole lot of planning up front. DPS was different in that it is well established and chalk full of content. Before we settled on a timeline, I thoroughly assessed every step of the project and created an outline that spanned a total of 5 weeks.

Phase 1 - Design (7 days)
Phase 2 - XHTML/CSS Templates (3 days)
Phase 3 - WordPress Development (7-10 days)
Phase 4 - Forum Integration (3 days)
Phase 5 - Finishing Touches (2 days)

The WordPress Development phase ended up taking a bit longer than anticipated, as we managed to sneak in some new features along the way. Which in turn cut down the amount of time allotted for the forum integration. At the end of it, I had to put in a bit of extra time to tidy up some display bugs (primarily with different versions of Internet Explorer, of course). But overall, we managed to stick pretty closely to the schedule and consider the launch of the new site a success.

It’s All About Structure

One of the most important and underappreciated steps in designing or redesigning any website, is coming up with a solid structure (or layout). Most people call this the wireframing stage, which has been part of my regular routine for years now. Spending a day or two to really flesh out just how you’re going to lay things out not only makes it easier for the client to get a clear picture of where things are headed, but also eases the amount of revisions in the design phase. It’s much easier to move things around and make significant changes when you’re dealing with flat boxes and placeholders.

Before the end of my second day on the project, I delivered a wireframe for the article layout which basically looks like a stripped down version of the final design. After a couple revisions, I took the wireframe and started playing with colours and styles (click image for enlarged view).

Design Direction

It’s always nice when a client gives you free reign to try new things when it comes to design. Darren really didn’t give me a lot of direction in this department, other than to see he wanted something that looked more professional and one of the main goals was to increase usability and readability.

I spent some time checking out the current trends via design showcases, and determined which routes I didn’t want to take. I also peaked around at other photography and camera equipment sites to see what related others in the same field were doing. There seemed to be a lot of stark contrast - typically, sites would be on a solid which background with one dominant colour. Similar to the previous version of DPS which was blue and white.

First on the not-to-do list, was “Don’t use white, anywhere.” With the exception highlights in some of the icons, I stuck to that. Using off-white and beige in place of #fff. It didn’t take long before I started working with some rich browns, and almost gold tones. While this normally wouldn’t be my first choice for a colour scheme, I felt with it being completely different from the previous design and out of the ordinary for this type of site, it might be just what we need for a fresh, new feel.

When Darren mentioned he wanted to split the site up into 3 separate blogs, I immediately thought of doing a unique dominant colour for each. Since “Photography Tips & Tutorials” was basically the catch-all blog and closely resembled what the previous version of DPS was, it made sense to go with blue. From there, I simply went through my colour pallete and chose some other colours that worked well with the rest of the site. Green was a no-brainer, and I wanted to use red for the “Post Production” blog. The problem there, was that it ended up being closer to pink than red, which Darren wasn’t thrilled about. When toned down to more closely match the blues and greens, we ended up with a very muddled red which is closer to brown, but still works (click image for enlarged view).

The rest of the aesthetics came together pretty easily. I decided there would be no high gloss or “wet floor” type effects. And instead opted for soft gradients which brought a warm feeling to the site that the stark contrast of the previous version lacked.

On Thursday Matt will continue to reflect upon the redesign of DPS. Stay tuned to ProBlogger’s RSS feed for the 2nd part.

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