Blogging

Ah, niche sites – how I love thee!  I have always been in love with the idea of small, targeted sites that just sit out there and work FOR you.  And yep, I sure loved their results before Google unleashed all those Penguins and Pandas!  Such cute animals… why’d they have to make them have [...]

The Telegraph reports that Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and Inferno hangs upside down to get the creative juices flowing again when he has writer’s block. Writer’s block is sure to paralyze you at some point during … Continue reading →

No one starts their blog with the intention of getting rid of it. Somewhere along the way, though, it’s perfectly normal to feel as though your website is no longer worth maintaining. What should you do then? If you’re smart about the way you build your website from day one, your blog will have accumulated enough value so that you can easily sell it for profit. While many people are surprised to hear that blogs can be bought and sold, website marketplaces are a growing segment of the web economy: one marketplace alone, Flippa, has sold over $100,000,000 in websites. So how can you make sure that your site grows in value from the start? 1. Start with a great niche What should your website be about? For the greatest longevity and value, your site should be about something that will interest many people. Our data shows that sites about sports, health and cars sell for the most money. On the other hand, sites about Internet marketing and technology tend not to do as well. Finding a niche may take you some time. Here are some of my favourite ways to come up with new niche ideas: Notice what bothers people around you. What are their pain points, what irritates them in daily life, and what can you write about that will help? Use Google Trends to measure relative interest in a topic over time. Ideally, your niche of choice should be trending up over the last few weeks, but not have such sudden growth that its popularity won’t last. Find out what people are passionate about. This is why sports is such a great topic: sports fans are always interested in their teams, and there is always new topics to cover in that area. There are other niches, like bands, hobbies or shopping, that cause a similar reaction. You should also have a personal interest in this niche: it’s hard to sustain the work that comes with building a blog if you don’t know anything about your topic, or if you just don’t care. 2. Invest in content With the almost-daily updates to Google‘s ranking algorithms, the only constant way to get to the top of search results is to spend time on quality content for your blog. This means that each post should be unique, interesting, and written with care. Google has many ways of detecting what counts as quality content, including grammar, sentence complexity, duplicate content and reputation of the author. If you decide, one day, to sell your website, these are the same things that smart buyers will be looking for: quality content, great spelling and grammar, and guaranteed uniqueness for each article. The days of autoblogs, which published automatically generated content to hundreds of websites at a time, are long gone. Your content should also extend to your readership: the more work you put into building a community around your website, including on Facebook, Twitter, and through comments, the higher your site will be valued by prospective buyers. 3. Choose the right monetization method Whether or not you started your blog in order to generate revenue, the #1 thing that will matter to buyers is going to be how much money your site is making every month. Even a few dollars per month in advertising or affiliate revenue can be enough to show a buyer that the site has potential for growth. There are three main ways to make money from a website: advertising (usually through a platform such as Google AdSense), product or service sales (where you directly sell a product or service to an end user), and affiliate sales (where you direct buyers to someone’s site, and get a percentage of the sale). Each of them can be used on its own, but sites that use a combination of these methods are typically seen as more valuable. This is because each monetization method can be unstable. When combining two or three, you guard yourself against losing all revenue if one monetization method fails. We have been selling websites on Flippa for almost four years. In that time, we have seen trends in website v

As bloggers there is nothing we want more than to increase the amount of people who are accessing our sites and signing up to our mailing lists. There are plenty of ways to increase these numbers but many of them are slow, ineffective and cost a lot of money. One of the most powerful and effective ways to grow your audience is through the use of social media and building promotions around your site. An excellent way to do this is through the use of a contest on your site. The concept is simple… people enter their email, get put on your mailing list and can share with friends on their social networks to increase their chances of winning. Well, it sounds easy enough in your mind but the process is actually quite complex. There are many services out there that provide you will tools to set this up on your own, but you are still going to need a nice prize to get any attention and traction on your site. This is where Incentivibe.com comes in. An awesome service for building your subscribers while also providing all of the tools and even the $500 sponsored prize as well! Here’s a breakdown of how it works. Incentivibe provides you with a simple WordPress widget that loads the contest right onto your site. You can use it as a lightbox or popup on the bottom right hand corner of your page. What’s even more important than the sponsored prize and the signup process is that you also won’t have to worry about things like legal terms, whether its Facebook approved or not, announcing the winner and delivering the prize. All of these features are provided by Incentivibe. I’m currently running a sponsored contest using Incentivibe on one of my other sites right now. The promotion is for a $500 gift card, which is great because it’s a new site and doesn’t have a ton of traffic at the moment. This means I would much rather pay $24.99 for the service and a $500 prize than have to flip the bill and send out the prize myself. You can see a list of some of the other prizes you can list up for grabs on your site below. So how can Incentivibe offer a $500 prize for only $24.99 you ask? It’s actually quite simple and smart… Instead of offering just one prize for one site, Incentivibe is able to pool a bunch of their member sites together and contribute one huge prize that is spread among the entries of all these sites. This is why you will see your site name as the “co-sponsor” on your contest entry form. Awesome Prizes & Viral Tools = Success We all know that people like to enter contests and giving up your email to get a free ebook or win a prize is nothing at all. Throw in some amazing tracking tools and an easy to use entry form and you have a clear winner. Incentivibe has been doing a ton of case studies and research on how they can further improve their results and what their service is doing for other sites. I highly recommend you take a look at their post on Marketing Profs, which shows how they were about to generate 3-7 times more email subscribers than pages without contests. After that you can take a look at their post on Unbounce’s blog that goes into some heavy detail on how minor changes with images and words can greatly impact the signup right on your site. Really cool stuff! How to Create Your Own Sponsored Contest Right Now The best way to take advantage of Incentivibe and all the features I’ve mentioned above is to sign up for a free 14 day trial on their site. The best part is that you don’t even need to provide a credit card to sign up! Try out their service, create a quick contest and throw it up on your site and see how it performs for a few days. As mentioned, it’s very easy to create the contest and install the WordPress widget. Remember how I was talking about the importance of adding subscribers to your mailing list? That’s extremely easy to do to. All you need to do is sign into your Incentivibe account and link it up with y

Some estimates say over 3 billion emails are sent every single day. That’s over 3,000,000 emails per second! Email has become the backbone of any successful business in 2013 and it’s no longer acceptable to do everything “offline.” Whether you’re in sales, business-to-business, or a client-facing position, sending endless unanswered emails can be a frustrating endeavor.Here are 8 ways to ensure your emails get opened, read, and replied to.8. Keep it short.There’s no better way to be sure you won’t get a response than to ramble on endlessly. Remember that many people check emails on their phones, so keep your email as short and mobile-friendly as possible. Depending on your relationship with the recipient, forgo things like an intro/salutation so they feel free to shoot off a casual response back.7. Put a question in the subject line.Particularly if you’re emailing someone who may not be expecting to hear from you, asking a question in the subject line can encourage opening. Think, “What time works for you?” rather than, “What does your business need?” The more specific the better.6. Send it at the right time.Don’t blindly sent out emails at 3:00am on Sunday…they’ll get buried at the bottom of the inbox. Try and plan your email when you know the recipient will be in front of their computer – Tuesday at 2:00pm or maybe mornings before the day gets busy.5. Copy someone senior.This rule is a bit tricky but works well when used correctly. If you need a response from someone regarding something specific, copy other people on the email (the best case is someone you both know already.) You’ll have instant credibility and the recipient won’t want to look lazy by not replying, but be sure to address the body of the email directly to the person you want to respond.4. Offer an incentive.Whether it’s a newsletter, a coupon, or a free consultation, offer a reason to reply! Make sure it’s something the recipient wants and be clear in the very first sentence or two what you’re offering. Skimming is going to happen regardless of what you write, so plan ahead for it.3. Say you’ll follow up.The threat of an unwanted phone call or an endless stream of emails is enough to make many people respond. Mention something specific in your email (i.e. “I will call you at 11:00 tomorrow if I haven’t heard from you”) and make sure your follow up is another form of communication, if possible.2. Actually follow up.When you say you’re going to follow up, do it! Put it on your calendar and don’t let it slide. Not only does this show persistence but it proves you’ll keep checking in without a response. One or two voicemails is enough to make most people respond back.1. Ask for a response.Sometimes it really is that simple! If you don’t ask questions or as specifically for a response in your email you’re unlikely to get answers. Make your intentions known to the recipient and if they’re worth doing business with, they’ll get back to you.Ryan is a Product Manager at BizShark.com, with 5 years experience in online marketing and product development.  In addition to web related businesses, he also enjoys the latest news and information on emerging technologies and open source projects.

Google’s Penguin 2.0 update rolled out on May 22nd and there has been a lot of discussion about site owners losing search traffic. This got me thinking – not everyone follows Google’s updates and most drops in traffic tend to go by without the site...

A couple of weeks ago I came across an online course about web security. The price tag was right on top of the sales page: $1500. Quite expensive, but I decided to skim through the information anyway. The course runs for 12 weeks, and every week you have two live online sessions with the instructor, where he will present the content of the course and answer to questions as he goes along. On top of that there are practical assignments every week (i.e., students will need to either defend or attack websites, sometimes real ones), and a test in the end to ensure you learned all the essential stuff. The instructor was pretty qualified, and he also guaranteed on the sales page that if you passed the test at the end of the course he would be glad to refer you as a “security consultant” to any of his contacts. Guess what. After I was done reading all the information I was sold! I didn’t enroll right away because the next session coincides with my vacation, and I’ll be away from the computer, but I am definitely signing up for the next one. Here’s what convinced me: The content will be delivered live, so you can ask questions and interact with the instructor There are practical tasks and assignments from day 1, so you’ll actually learn to do the stuff The overall topic of the course is in high demand and has a lot of real-life applications Once you are done with the course you might even be able to land a gig thanks to a referral from the instructor The instructor is qualified and has a lot of credibility in his area What I found interesting is that this model is different from the traditional online courses we see around. Usually they cost a lot less (e.g., from $50 to $300), the lessons are all recorded in advance, and you pretty much need to sort things out yourself. With this premium model, instead, the instructor ensures that you’ll learn, apply and so something useful/profitable with the stuff you’ll learn. If you are an expert in a certain field that is in high demand I think you should consider creating an online course with such premium structure. Sure, it will take some work to get things in place, but once you have it launching it should be both profitable for you and worthwhile for your students. Original Post: Premium Online Courses – The Way To Go?

A few days ago we published a post on ProBlogger titled ‘Forget about Marketing: Concentrate on Blogging‘, which led to some interesting discussion on Twitter and in the comments. I love the points author Nicholas Whitmore made in the post but I wanted to give a few thoughts, based on my own experience, on developing great content and promoting your blog. Nicholas wrote some great arguments for focusing your energy on writing great content as the central way of growing your blog. He writes: “When you write and publish awesome content on your blog, good things will come your way.” I completely agree with this sentiment. As a blogger your #1 focus needs to be on producing content that is useful, engaging and of as high a quality as possible. Without it, all the marketing you might do will be wasted as you’ll just be directing people to something that is of no value to them. As Nicholas goes on to write: “When you write and publish boring content then spend hours on end building links to it, trying to force people to your website, good things will never come.” Again, I agree with the sentiment expressed here. However, on Twitter a discussion among some of my followers highlighted that some bloggers differ quite a bit on how much effort should be put into promoting a blog vs developing content for it. On one hand, there were certainly people who felt that if you build a great blog that it markets itself. On the other hand, there were people who felt that if you didn’t get out there and market your blog you ran the risk of all your hard work in developing great content going completely unseen. While I think we all agree that the content on your blog needs to be of a very high focus, I’m also of the belief that if a blogger wants to grow their readership they also need to put effort into promoting that blog. I like the idea of the marketing being taken care of by your visitors, if you have good enough blog post. In my experience, there are things you can do to promote your blog to help speed the process up, without compromising the quality of your posts. In the early days of my own current blogs (here on ProBlogger and at dPS) I estimate I probably spent almost as much time writing content as I did working on growing the readership. In fact, I’m sure there were some weeks where I did spend considerably more time promoting my blog than writing content! In short, I don’t see marketing and creating content as mutually exclusive – both are really important to me. How did I grow my readership (or market my blogs)? I recorded a webinar last year on this very topic with a load of tips in it. You can listen to it and see the slides here so I won’t rehash all of that but here’s a summary slide of the points I talked through. You can see that my process actually talks about the content that you develop as being a part of finding readers for your blog (both in points 2 and 8). But by getting off your blog to promote what you do you are certainly able to significantly grow your blog. For me, I’d say that the balance of creating content and promoting has changed over the life of my blogs over the years. This is probably partly because the life cycle of a blog but also due to my own personal circumstances and how much time I have available to work. That said , I would always prioritise both on a daily basis… and would probably also add in that I prioritise other things too such as ‘engaging with readers/building community’ and also a focus upon ‘monetization’ (without which I can’t sustain what I do). Where is the Balance of Promotion and Content Creation for You? I’d love to hear how others get this balance right in your blogging? Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Content Creation vs Content Promotion: Where is the Balance?

I was inspired by Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel 2.0 that he announced recently. In short, he is creating a brand new niche website and the goal is to rank it at the top of Google in 2013 after all the changes that have taken place with SEO over the last couple of years. Pat encouraged his podcast listeners to join him and I decided I’m all in!  I think it will be an interesting and fun experiment. In fact, I’ve decided to chronicle the journey on this blog so those of you who are just starting (or are simply curious) can follow along.  If you want to keep up with everything, bookmark this URL… http://www.2createawebsite.com/nse That is where you will be able to find all the content regarding my experiment. Right now that link goes to this post, but in the future there will be a landing page with all the updates that pertain to this experiment. Do I Really Need Another Site? No, I honestly don’t.  I’m busy enough as it is. However, I think it’s a very relevant experiment to conduct since so many of you are brand new or are having trouble getting out of the gate. I think it will be cool for you to follow along and see how I handle some of the brainstorming before I begin a website.  It will be a great learning experience for a lot of you. Even if the experiment fails, there are still going to be great lessons to learn from, and I will report on my progress no matter how this goes. This Won’t Be Easy I’m not for one minute expecting this to be a cakewalk.  Yes, I’ve got some experience under my belt, but SEO has changed a lot, and you really have to take your time with the research process today. I think a big reason people fail to rank their pages is they target keywords that are too competitive. As you will learn below, I’m taking a slightly different approach so it will be interesting to see how it all pans out. The Site Will Remain Hidden I can hear some of you groaning, but keep reading because I will still be revealing a lot as you will see below. Trust me.  I debated over this a lot. I definitely think it will add to the credibility and interest of the experiment if I reveal the site, however there are a couple of big disadvantages to doing that… 1)  Competition & Copycats I’ll be honest.  I get so incredibly tired of lazy people copying my work.  If this site does take off then I want to protect my income, period. I learned several years ago that I have to keep some of my work behind the curtain because of issues I’ve had with copycats and sabotage in the past. I could really tell you some stories, but I’ll save that for another post. So as you may know, this isn’t my first hidden website and it probably won’t be my last.   However, this is the first time I will be sharing so much of my planning process publicly. 2)  I Don’t Want to Tarnish the Experiment Of course, if I reveal the site I could use nofollow links so I wouldn’t pass any of my existing link juice that may give me an unfair advantage.  However, I want to make sure this experiment is clean. If I blog about it and others happen to link to the site, those links could actually give the site a minor boost.  Again, I don’t want any outside sources giving this site any help. Plus, I won’t have to hear, “Well the only reason your site is ranking is because you have links from your existing site” or “Your subscribers have linked to your site so that gave you an advantage.” That also means I am not going to be linking this site to my Google Plus Account to keep from passing my Google Authorship / AuthorRank to the site, which could also give this experiment an unfair advantage. I want to act as if I’m starting from scratch with no online profile just like many of you. Yes, we will be down in the trenches together! So are you ready to get your hands dirty with me?   Hope so! What I Will Reveal About The Site So even

In 2010 Infinity Ward’s co-founders, Vince Zampella and Jason West were fired by Activision for misconduct. Later that year the duo returned to the industry with a new studio call Respawn Entertainment. Their first game is Titanfall which is a first-person multiplayer shooter with players either being ground running pilots or mechs. The game was [...]Author informationColby MortI have been interested in Gaming for many years and have always liked to know how to make games and software. I am currently studying and preparing for my exams in the last year of GCSE. While writing for Dragonblogger I also maintain my own gaming blog: www.irorainfo.comThe post E3 Recap #8 – Titanfall A Multiplayer Game Full Of Mecha appeared first on Dragon Blogger. Be the first to comment... Related Posts:Watch Dogs – A Life Where Everything Is ConnectedJourney Releases a Week Early for Playstation Plus SubscribersE3 Recap #6 – The Order 1886Bioshock 2 Review (XBOX360)E3 Recap #2 – Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare RSS Feed Powered by MaxBlogPress Bring My Blog Visitors Back