Ah, I thought that might get your attention…..
Yes, what blogger does NOT want to make money from their hard work? Oh what’s that? You’re independently wealthy and just doing this for kicks n’ giggles? That’s nice for you. Now go sit in the corner with my other imaginary friends.

But for those of you that would at least like to make a little cupcake money….

The most important thing you can do is ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING PEOPLE CAN CLICK ON THAT WILL EARN YOU MONEY!

‘Duh?’ You say? Perhaps not. Most of the people that I talk to who would like to make money from their blog, are not offering anything that actually enables that to happen. Take a look at your blog. Is there anything that can be clicked on that results in money in your bank? I’m talking about something glaringly obvious, not a tiny paragraph of text hidden on your ‘About’ page that says you accept advertising.

No matter how brilliant a writer you are, people don’t tend to go around giving out money unprompted. You need to have some kind of structure in place that enables this to happen. So this might be an area of discomfort for some folks – you want to make money, perhaps have some sponsors etc, but you also feel reticent to make such a bold gesture. Perhaps you think it’s a little declasse to actually ask for money. Well you’ll have to get out of your comfort zone on this one.

So it’s time to really think about how you may want to make money from your blog and take some steps towards implementing that. I mentioned a few strategies in my WordCamp presentation – Treat Your Blog Like A Business. This is clearly not an exhaustive list, but just a few seedling ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Google Adsense is where a lot of people start because it’s easy to set up. To make any real money you typically have to have a lot of traffic and you will get the best results only with pretty aggressive ad placements, which can be a turn off for some bloggers. You’re also making money from people leaving your site which seems counter-intuitive if you’ve put in a lot of effort to get readers and keep them there. However, for some people Adsense is a good place to start – the barrier to entry is very low and when you see the first few cents show up in your account, no matter how small, it helps you get motivated to try other things.

Advertising
A lot of bloggers may have something on their site that says they offer advertising, but a passive approach rarely works to bring the PR people knocking on your door with money. You have to get out there and actively pitch your site to companies you think would be a good fit. See who’s advertising on other sites and/or make a list of some local companies that you think would be a good match. Remember that when you approach these people you have to have your offer nicely packaged – you are essentially selling your audience so you must know who you are reaching and describe the benefits of reaching them for the potential sponsor. If you don’t fancy yourself an ad salesperson, you can also find ad networks in your niche that do the selling for you – you just stick the ad code on your site.

Create & Sell A Product
Is there a product, such as an ebook that you could come up with and sell directly from your site? What knowledge or expertise do you have that you can package in written format? This is where you have the greatest opportunity to make profit. Ebooks are easy to create and sell – it’s as simple as creating a .pdf. You can then use a service like E-Junkie to help you sell, or WordPress users can install a simple shopping cart plugin like Cart66 to enable sales. Video products are another option if you’re more comfortable with that format.

Affiliate Links
If you don’t have your own product to sell, the next best thing is to sell someone else’s. I’m not talking so much about the Amazon-style affiliate programs here – some people do make money from those, but the commissions are typically quite low. A better bet may be to look for products by other popular bloggers who probably have  more generous affiliate programs.

Now I’m not saying you’ll immediately be raking in the dough – that’s definitely not the case and you’ll probably make chump change at the beginning. What’s important is taking that first step toward the goal of monetization. When you see those first few cents come in ,it changes your mindset. It lets you see the possibilities and motivates you to do more. Experiment and try different things to see what works for your blog and your audience. Rather than throwing a million different things on your site at once, I would focus on one tactic for perhaps a month at a time and then compare earnings.

header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eejaehee/4889580551/in/photostream/

What have you tried, if anything, to monetize your blog? Share your experiences below!

The first step in any new project is often the hardest. At the beginning, the idea exists only in your mind with no tangible manifestations of it, and therefore no “proof” that it can be achieved. Our human nature is vulnerable to self doubt and fear, making our seedling idea susceptible to “it’ll never happen” or “it won’t be successful” types of thought patterns.

This is what makes our first steps so important. The first step marks a decision, a new direction; it declares that we will go forward despite our fears or self-doubt. The first step gives us momentum and belief in our project, whether its starting a personal hobby blog or an entire new business. I work with a lot of new bloggers and hopeful online entrepreneurs who come to me because they have a gap in their technical knowledge and that is preventing them moving forward. For some people the act of contacting me and setting up an appointment is an important step for them in signifying their commitment to their idea, and getting the knowledge they need in order to implement it. The lack of technical knowledge is often one of the first blocks people come up against and fortunately it’s one of the easiest blocks to remove, but often lurking behind it are mental blocks that are more entrenched.

So it’s important that the first step in your new project be small, easily identifiable and quickly achievable, and that it is followed with some equally small and manageable next steps to maintain momentum.

This is really productivity 101 – your to do list needs to be small, specific bites, not big fluffy ideas.

“Start a blog” is not a good first step – there’s so much that goes into this, that having that phrase staring up at you from the to-do list is likely to paralyze you with overwhelm

Here’s what your to – do list for starting your website could look like:

1) Purchase domain name
2) Purchase webhosting
3) Install WordPress
4) Choose a theme
5) Write a blog post
6) Write an About page
7) Set up Google Analytics account

etc…

It’s crucial to keep taking small next steps. You may need help from a friend or professional to keep you on track. I work with lots of people to provide support as they get their ideas in motion. My assistance is not only technical, but personal. I help make the project real and I provide them with the next steps which gives them a clear path forward. Once they see that they can do it, that they are now a (cue angelic music and shining lights..)…Blogger, they gain momentum to move forward independently. In my experience, dogged consistency and persistence are the biggest indicators of success that I see – the willingness to take next step after next step.

Whatever your idea or project – if you are not making progress, identify that manageable, small next step and get support if necessary. Your tiny next steps are what will get the idea out of your head and into the world, and make your vision a reality.

What step do you need to take next?

**header image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/lonnypaul/5906770832/

Although WordPress allows for some image editing capabilities, it’s not ideal to upload large images into your WordPress admin and use that for re-sizing or cropping images. You’ll end up storing a lot of extra images on your server and over time it could affect the performance of your site.

It’s much cleaner to do your image editing outside of WordPress and upload images at the size you need them. This is especially true if your theme features a slider, or uses featured images that need to be very specific dimensions.

Image-related terminology

When dealing with images for the web there’s a few concepts you should become familiar with.

Dimensions – typically expressed in pixels, for the web. So if your theme says you need an image of 500 x 200, that would mean 500 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall. This represents the size of the image as it appears on your screen.

File size – This is the amount of disk/storage space the file takes up. So the bigger the file size the more space on your server it takes up, and the longer it will take to load on the web page. The file size is often proportionate to the dimensions and resolution of an image, but an image can also be compressed so that the dimensions remain the same, but the file size decreases.

If you take an image right off your digital camera, it’s likely to be a few MBs which is too weighty for use on your website. The optimal size may depend on exactly how the image is being used, but I generally tell people to shoot for around 30kb. If you have some type of portfolio site where you will be showcasing larger images, but perhaps only one image per page, you could go for a higher size – maybe up to 100kb. But if you have multiple images on a page, as many WordPress homepages do, the lower the number, the faster your site will load.

Dpi – dots per inch. This relates to the resolution of the image – the higher the dpi, the higher quality of image you have. 300 dpi is a print quality image and is generally overkill for the web. Typically higher resolution images have a larger file size, so reducing the dpi to 72 for the web is usually an easy way to cut down on the file size.

File formats
Generally on the web you’ll be using .jpg, .png and perhaps .gif files. If you want to super-geek out and find out the difference between all three, you can do so here.

Image Editing Tools

Online Editors

Picnik.com – an online editor owned by Google. It’s intuitive to use and integrates with Picasa should you use that service.

Pixlr.com – this is a very nifty and easy site to use. If you just need to do basic things like re-sizing, cropping and even some basic effects, you can use their Express version.

Both Picnik and Pixlr work in a similar way. You just upload your image, edit using their website interface, then download the edited pic to your computer.

Programs

Adobe Photoshop – the big momma’s house of image editing. Unfortunately it costs a pretty penny unless you have friends who are generous with their software (I’m not of course advocating bootlegging…..)

GIMP is a free download. Supposedly it works on both MAC and PC, but the installation appears to be much simpler for a PC.   They also have some handy tutorials to get you started.

Preview (MAC) – If you are lucky enough to be a MAC owner, you more than likely have the program Preview already installed on your computer (check your Applications folder) . This handy program does the basic resizing, cropping and filesize optimizing that you typically need for WordPress.

Need images?

While Google Image search provides access to a vast selection of images, you should be careful about using anything you find – you could be violating somebody’s copyright. Here’s a couple of places to find royalty-free images (assuming you are not selling the images, just using them in blog posts):

PhotoXpress.com

Flickr.com – after you type in your search, be sure to click on Advanced Search at the top , then check “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content”. This will enable you to find images that people don’t mind you using, as long as you provide attribution in the way of a link back to the Flickr page. Each image on Flickr has a License section in the right column where its owner can designate how they allow the image to be used, so be sure to pay attention to that.

* header image courtesy D Sharon Pruitt

Here’s a couple of simple truths about blogging:

There is no ‘secret’ to the success of your blog.

There’s barely anything new at all to be said or read on the topic of blogging.

Once you’ve got a solid grasp on the fundamentals, it’s all about execution – gathering more and more information ends up being crippling and getting in the way.

Information Overload

As bloggers and business people, our Twitter streams, Google Readers and Facebook News Feeds are likely filled with all kinds of tempting headlines about secrets and methods to success – whether that’s getting subscribers, readers, traffic, you-name-it – there’s a ‘secret’ and a ten-point plan to getting it.

Except there’s really not. When you click on those links, how often do you actually find something new you can use? Personally, I find that to be rare. Yet we keep on clicking. Somewhere in our ‘lizard brain’ (as Seth Godin would say), we are looking for easy & magical answers.  We’re looking for something ‘out there’ which will save us from actually doing the work, and that will have instant and incredible effects.

Stop Hiding, Start Doing

These days there’s little that’s truly new on the topic of blogging, but even when you come across new information, or a new tactic to use, how often do you actually implement it consistently? Or are you just gathering the information but just sitting on it?

Here’s what’s most likely happening when you keep clicking on those enticing articles:

You’re hiding from what you most need to be doing – it’s probably the thing you most fear, but the thing which will actually get you results:

Creating content
Building your audience
Writing a blog post
Creating a product
Optimizing your site
Researching keywords…
…or taking whatever that next useful action is for your site

It might not sound glamorous but nothing can replace taking steps like these…

…not even clicking on that enticing Twitter headline that  promises some new knowledge or tip

I promise, THAT tip is NOT be the missing piece that suddenly makes your site successful!

What Works Comes From You, Not Them

Information gathering adds to our sense of self, makes us feel like we’re doing something, makes us feel like it will be useful. While we can certainly learn from those who are more successful than ourselves, the only thing that moves us forward is taking what comes from within – our own thoughts, insights, knowledge, and putting it forward into the world – out there, if you will. The information does nothing if it just sits in your brain, or in your browser bookmarks.

From Consumption To Creation

Here’s a few things I try and do to break my ‘info addiction’:

Figure out what the next step I can take is which will move me forward. There are often many. Pick one and DO IT.

Limit my information gathering time, and create more regular time for writing and/or marketing.

Keep tabs on a few select blogs or sites that frequently provide great content, and don’t worry so much about the rest.

Likewise with Twitter, I keep a couple of lists of people I get valuable info from and pay attention to those.

I don’t ‘like’ every page on Facebook, only ones I’m interested in hearing from.

I try and place my focus on creating content and not just reading other people’s.

I keep in mind the larger vision I am working towards, which provides motivation.

I keep a close eye on when procrastination arises – there’s a fine line between reading a useful article and getting sucked into the internet rabbit hole – stay alert!

I keep a running list of next steps I could take, that way, when procrastination rears it’s head, I can look to my list and just pick an item to work on.

What do you do to keep moving forward?

* header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2594661429/

Avoid the 6 month blog fizzle-out, or the non-starter by being prepared for what’s to come in your new incarnation as: A Blogger. I wrote a guest post for She Takes On The World with some pointers on the topic. Set yourself up for success – read the whole article at She Takes On The World

*header image courtesy Shutterstock

If you’re blogging you want readers to be able to keep up with what you’re writing, right? Here’s an overview of some of your options for enabling readers to subscribe, along with pros and cons of both.

Via RSS feed

RSS forms the basis of most updating systems. Every blog has an RSS feed (simply the output of your blog) which automatically updates when you publish new posts. For WordPress blogs, the feed is usually located at: yourdomain.com/feed. Visitors can use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to many different blog RSS feeds and receive all the updates in one place. Here’s a shot of my overflowing Reader with a few of the sites I subscribe to:

As a publisher you can use Google’s Feedburner service to manage your RSS feed.

Pros – Feedburner is pretty easy to configure and you can implement it with the help of a plugin. Feedburner also provides copy/paste code to place icons on your site to advertise your feed. Feedburner formats your feed cleanly so that it displays nicely in browsers (try looking at a raw RSS feed in Chrome….it’s unreadable) &  feed readers and the subscribe options are clearly presented. You’ll also be able to get stats on the number of subscribers you have and the click activity on your feed.

Cons – RSS isn’t really a mainstream concept yet, so if your audience is not particularly tech-savvy, they may not understand how to use RSS or may not have any kind of feed reader.

RSS updates via email

This is probably a more effective way of delivering blog updates since people generally check their email frequently, and even if people aren’t familiar with RSS, they use email every day.

Feedburner also provides this service – subscribers will receive an email each day that you produce new content.

Pros – It’s easy to implement – you activate the email option in the Publicize menu and then grab the html code for the subscription form and paste it into a text widget on your WordPress site. Emails are sent through Google’s servers so won’t put any strain on yours. Since Feedburner offers regular RSS subscription along with email, it becomes easy to offer both options to your readers.

Cons – You can’t decide how often the emails are sent – daily is the only option. While you may think it’s important that people are notified of your new post as soon as possible, others may find a daily email to be overkill, especially if you post frequently. However emails are only sent on the days that you publish something new.

WordPress Plugin

Subscribe2 is a WordPress plugin that will send notifications via email to subscribers when you post new content.

Pros – Subscribe2 comes with quite a lot of configuration options, so the service is quite comprehensive. You can control frequency and format your emails with more flexibility than Feedburner.

Cons – the emails are sent via your own server so if you are lucky enough to have hundreds or thousands of subscribers you may run into some limits from your web server regarding the numbers of emails they will send per hour etc. By default the email generated by Subscribe2 does not include an unsubscribe option making its compliance with SPAM laws questionable. It also does not, by default, come with a sidebar widget making implementation not particularly intuitive, especially for a beginner WP user.

3rd Party email providers

Both MailChimp and AWeber offer RSS to email services which means that they can automatically send out an email based on your RSS feed, to subscribers. If you’ve set up Feedburner to manage your RSS feed, you would provide the email service with your Feedburner address from which they will generate the email. You can format the email template with great flexibility and branding, just as you would when sending any other email blast.

If you are using your blog to promote your business, or if developing an email list is part of your marketing strategy, this is the method I would recommend for providing blog updates via email to your readers. Using a service like this will ensure that all your emails are compliant with spam laws, and they provide a powerful way to manage your lists and get statistics. Instead of having your email subscribers split up between Feedburner and your regular email database, this way you can have everything in one place and can take advantage of grouping and segmenting your email lists and all the other powerful features these services provide. Both have WordPress plugins for integration.

MailChimp – This is my preferred service. Their interface is easy to use and they have a lot of great support information on their site. They are a ‘freemium’ service so you can have up to 1000 subscribers for free, after that you pay a monthly fee. They are also very proactive about adding new features, keeping up with the latest in social media integration etc.

Aweber – You’ll see a lot of internet marketers using this particular service. Their list of features is mostly comparable to MailChimp but they have no free level of service and their interface is a little slower and clunkier to use.

If you are a casual blogger or don’t need an email list for marketing purposes, this method would probably be overkill and I’d recommend using Feedburner.

Questions? Confusion? Let me know!

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/postaletrice/3402584092/

*This is a guest post from Steve Mellor, a writer who shares his insights into an effective process for bloggers*

If you’ve been following Lucy’s advice, you should already have your blog online. I’m sure it was as much of an achievement for you as my first site was for me. Now you are tasked with the job of filling it each day. Lets face it, we all have too much to do already. How do you fill your blog?

Before You Begin

There are a few things that you should know before you start blogging. It’s the basic stuff I tell business people who want a website.

1. You have 8 seconds to grab your reader or they will leave your site.
2. People don’t care about your company, they just want to solve their problem.

The interesting thing about these two sentences is that acting on the second will negate the first. If you create a blog post that is not focused on your company, but rather what your company can do for your customer, then your readers attention will automatically be grabbed.

With that in mind, lets get to…

Writing it Down

Writing is actually three activities:

• Research
• Writing
• Editing

It is a common mistake to try and do all three of these activities at once. The human brain likes time to process information so the best thing you can do is split the activities over three days.

Day One

This is where you research our article and, for ten minutes only, search google for articles related to your topic. You want to look for the ‘How To’ guides and ’3 Steps to’, that sort of thing, because those will directly address the problems your customers are facing. Pick one as a topic and make notes about each of the articles. Give it a quick read through when you’re done and then put it away.

Day Two

Today you will be writing. Don’t look at the notes from day one because your brain has already precessed your research and it can now recall the important bits of information from yesterday.

Take a stop watch, sit at your computer and write, solidly, for 10 minutes. Then stop.

This is a process known as Freewriting and it is tremendously powerful. It doesn’t matter what you write or how bad it is, give yourself permission to write badly. If you can’t think of something to write, write gibberish instead. What are doing is slowly training your brain for the process of writing and, eventually, the words will just flow. Even at the start of this process, you’ll be amazed at how much you can write down in ten minutes and at how good it is.

It sometimes helps to clear your mind before a freewriting session but don’t be tempted to look at your notes. Your brain already knows the relevant information. From a neurological point of view, you are allowing the creative side of your brain free reign to talk about the topic, whilst tuning out the editing part of your brain that would usually stop you from writing.

So effective is this process that even someone who is not a natural writer (I don’t believe in natural writers but that’s a different topic) can do it with ease. We are, after all, social animals and ones that communicate naturally from an early age. That’s what we’re tapping in to here.

Day Three

This is the editing phase. Take what you wrote yesterday and correct the problems. Check spelling and grammar, go back over the notes you took and make sure you’ve left noting out. Remember, your blog need only be a few hundred words each day but you will end up writing much more with the freewriting system. Your article is finished when the errors are corrected.

Putting it all together

Finally, run these processes together. Each article takes three days to write but there is nothing wrong with writing three articles at once. Start off by writing, move on to editing. You’re not editing the work you’ve just written but rather the work you did the previous day. It is important to give your brain a day between each step. Then, do ten minutes research for the following day’s article and you’re done.

Thanks for reading ;-)

About the Author

Steve started writing in his early teens, at first tackling music and soon moving on to comedy, which he also performed. It wasn’t long until he started writing for other people and soon became a contributor to several shows on radio as well as a published writer. During this time, he completed a degree in Multimedia and started working as a professional web designer, balancing his professional life between writing and web design.

He now works full time in web design as well as running a podcast for aspiring writers at http://writersroom.podbean.com.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/klytemestra/101561441/

What are they?

Essentially both are forms of notifications or communications between blogs.

For example, if I write a blog post and in it I link to a blog post on another site, an excerpt of my post containing the link will show up on that blogger’s site in their Comments section, along with a link back to my post. Since trackbacks are handled through comments, the blogger gets to moderate it like any other comment. So he/she will be able to see that I referenced their blog and if they approve the comment I now have a link from their site to mine. This is a trackback.

Here’s an example from my music blog, beatlife.net. In this case I used the trackback simply to give credit to the other blog as the source of my post. I wrote a post (excerpt below) and I linked to a post on another blog – HoneySoul.

The author of HoneySoul approved my trackback so below you see an excerpt from my post listed in her comments. The white text at the bottom is a link back to my post.

I have to say that WordPress’ documentation is a little confusing on the difference between pingbacks and trackbacks and leads me to believe they are consolidating the 2 under the name pingback. In your dashboard they will show up as “pingbacks” but they are displayed as per WP’s description of trackbacks, with an editable excerpt in your comments.

Anyway, what’s important is how you can use them.

Trackbacks can be used strategically to:

1)   drive more traffic to your site
2)   gain attention from a blogger
3)   join in the community conversation

It’s very simple, all you have to do is write a blog post that includes a link to a post by another blogger.  Now that blogger has to have trackbacks enabled, otherwise your link won’t be published in their comments.  Most bloggers do, but you can check by just looking at the comments of their posts and see if there are any. Assuming that blogger considers your trackback to be valuable, and not spammy, a link to your post shows up in their comments, as illustrated in the screenshots above. Voila, your blog is now exposed to a whole new audience, and there’s a level of validation since the blogger has to approve your trackback.

Even if a blogger doesn’t have trackbacks enabled on their site, linking to another blog can still get you noticed by that blogger since he will probably see your incoming link in his WordPress dashboard.

I want to emphasize that this has to be done in an authentic and natural way. If you try and game this method it will be obvious – your trackback comment will not be accepted and you will damage your reputation. So use this method only when you actually have something to say. Perhaps you read an opinion piece from a blogger and you want to present your own opinion, or develop the idea and conversation further.

Now the fuzzy stuff:
2) A blog can give your business a more personal voice and give a potential customer a taste of what your company is all about
a) A blog is a great way to add to and enhance your brand. It allows you to craft a more personal voice for your company, which is engaging to the reader. If a reader likes what you have to say and reads you on a regular basis they start to trust you. You can’t build that type of dynamic relationship with a static site.

b) A blog allows you to share success stories from your customers, engage with them, and get feedback through comments. Once you’ve built a decent readership a blog can be a great way to do free consumer research – test out product ideas and poll your audience.

c) You can use your blog to increase your credibility and authority in your field. By sharing your knowledge and insight through your blog you can become an established voice. You may also be able to pitch yourself as a guest blogger on other popular sites and blogs, further increasing your profile and credibility.

3) A blog allows you the opportunity to network with other people and bloggers in your field or related areas in a new way. Being part of the blogging community allows you a way to network with others in a friendly fashion, without having to push a hard sell. It’s easier to make friends with people when you have something to offer (a link exchange, good content), rather than something to sell. Bloggers often ally with each other to help cross-promote each others products.

Enough about what the blog can do – here’s what YOU have to do

1) Be willing to share and contribute free information, insight or value of some kind through your blog without expecting an immediate payoff. Blogging is not a short term strategy to win new business. You will have to give, without really knowing exactly when you’ll receive. For some people, this is an unsettling idea, but it helps if you are passionate about what you want to share through your blog so that the process of blogging becomes enjoyable in itself. Trust me, you will become addicted…

2) Be in it for the long haul.
A blog is not a quick-fix strategy. Although there is definitely a snowball effect once you really get rolling, you have to put in the time to write and promote your blog. It doesn’t happen by itself.

3) Be the master craftsperson of your public persona.
This is an area that should be carefully thought out as far as how you actually want to present yourself and your business. Yes, you want to give a personal tone to the company but that doesn’t necessarily mean posting pictures of your cat doing cute things is appropriate. Depending on the tone of your blog you are trying to portray, it may or may not be the thing to do. ‘Business personal’ (what I call the blogging version of ‘business-casual’) might mean sharing your opinion on news and issues within the industry, or giving insight into an industry conference you went to. It really depends on the type of business you are in and the public face you want to project. Remember that personality does play a part in a customer’s decision to purchase, so be conscious of how your ‘blog personality’ comes across.
I’ve come across some clients who although they ran a small business, were so successful that their customers started to think they were a big corporation. The owners decided a blog would be a good way to showcase their personalities and let people know they are still the same indie-minded gals their customers had known when their business first started.
On the other hand, some small businesses use their web presence to ‘level the playing field.’ A nicely done website coupled with incisive business commentary can give you the appearance of being ‘bigger’ than your company might actually be.
So this is an area for you to put thought into and really craft how you want to present yourself to customers and potential customers.