The What and Why of Blogging

What Is A Blog?

Unless this is your first trip to the World Wide Web I'm pretty confident you've surfed a few blogs and have a general idea of what they're all about. Having said that I think it's worth while laying some common ground even if only to provide context for the rest of the lesson.

Lee Lefever has put together a fantastic series of videos as part of his Common Craft series and you're going to see a few of them in this lesson, starting with this "Blogs in Plain English" video.

Blogs in Plain English

So a blog is simply a website with a set of tools that allow you to produce and share (syndicate with RSS) content across the web quickly and easily.

There you have it, nothing too magical about it right? WRONG! The magic is in how you use it and that magic comes from a technology called RSS.

RSS - The Tie That Binds

As you saw in the "Blogs in Plain English" video one of the most powerful features of blogging comes from how easily we can share our content with others. This sharing, or syndication, is done through the super cool technology called RSS, or Really Simply Syndication, which is found in all blogs and can be identified by the little icon you see to the left.. 

RSS is simply an agreed upon standard format for sharing information between different applications. Although RSS is not a technology specific to blogging, it's a technology supported by virtually ALL blog platforms. In fact, RSS is used in many diverse ways and is often thought of as the tie that binds different applications allowing them to work together like in ways only constrained by the imagination.

So why is RSS so often thought of as a blog technology? Mostly because of the incredible popularity of RSS Readers, such as Google Reader, which act as aggregators bringing together all of your favorite blog content into one easy to use place.

If you're new to RSS, and/or have never used an RSS reader, check out this video and you'll soon understand the power of RSS and why it's central to the web 2.0 movement.

RSS in Plain English

RSS readers provide significant leverage of your time and have really helped propel the popularity of blogging as an information distribution medium.

If you're not using a blog reader and are not subscribing to your favorite blogs then START NOW! The time savings you will experience will be significant and will allow you to consume more info in less time leaving you free to tackle other more important money making tasks. It's a no brainer right?  ;)

There are a great many ways in which the RSS feed from your blog can be integrated with other applications, including most social network based applications like Facebook.com, Squidoo.com and Twitter.com. I'll demonstrate this later in the lesson when I talk about putting your blog to work.

Why Is Blogging So Powerful?

Now that we have some common ground for what a blog is, and the RSS technology that is the magic behind a blog, it's probably easy to see that blogs are an excellent tool for generating traffic and capturing leads.

Traffic Generation

Traffic generally comes from two sources, search engines and backlinks from other websites. Fortunately, the two work hand in hand.

Getting listed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) depends on a number of factors including, but not limited to, how fresh your content is and the number of incoming links you have to your content.

So building massive numbers of backlinks not only drives traffic directly through those links, but also improves your search engire ranking considerably.

Blogs are a killer tool for generating traffic because

1. You can produce "fresh" content rapidly
2. Google, and other search engines, are addicted to fresh content and will index your blog quickly and often if you post regularly (i.e. 2-3 times per week)
3. RSS syndication allows you to extend your content reach significantly creating massive backlinks to your posts which in turn further helps your search engine rankings

Remember that the success of Google, or any search engine, lies in its ability to deliver the most "up-to-date" and "relevant" search results. Blogging makes it easy to provide this up-to-date material, and proper use of keywords in your posts will ensure its relevance.

Think of a blog as like having your own article directory like ezinearticles.com. Except that you control exactly what is published since you make the rules and, unlike article directories, you're free to create affiliate links, add pictures or video as you see fit.

When you syndicate your blog via RSS your content will appear on other websites. Most importantly though, the titles of your posts will become backlinks back to your blog, and any links in the posts will obviously point to where ever you want them to. If your posts contain links to other content you own then you're building additional backlinks there as well. In essence, your blog combined with RSS gives you the power to create "relevant" backlinks with incredible ease.

Because of the enormous popularity of blogging there are countless services designed to promote your blog material absolutely free (technorati.com, feedburner.com, mybloglog.com etc...). And fortunately you can automate the use of many of these services providing additional leverage for your time. All you have to do is post! More on these services in the section on Putting Your Blog to Work.

Capturing Leads (Asset Building)

A successful business obviously needs sales and cash flow, but it also needs to build its assets if it is to be worth anything beyond tomorrows sales figures.

The importance of this can not be overstated!

Aside from the real estate value of your blog, which is largely based on traffic and Page Rank, a perhaps more important measure of the value of your business is the number of leads you have access to through your mailing list and RSS feed.

In the RSS in Plain English video I showed you earlier you saw how RSS readers allow people to subscribe to your blog and receive regular updates whenever you make a new post. These are captured leads, actual assets, and they're worth a fortune!

Captured leads not only provide stability for your business, but they reduce your cost per transaction and in turn raise your profit margin significantly. Here are a couple scenarios to drive the point home

1. Imagine you spend a year building a kick ass business with great search engine rankings driving tons of traffic. The money is rolling in, you're ready to buy that new BMW and all is just roses.
   
   You wake the next day to discover Google has changed it's ranking algorythm and you're no longer ranking. The traffic and all the associated money has dried up in a heart beat.
   
   Unlike the guy next door who didn't bother to build lead assets, you go to your blog and fire off a blog post which instantly gets your message out to your 4000 subscribers and before you know it the traffic and the money starts to flow again.
   
   Of course you don't stop there because you have a mailing list with an additional 6000 members who you quickly send out a promotion to and again the traffic and money train starts rolling by days end.
   
   Your leads are assets and they have value that is not under the control of anyone, not even the mighty Googles of the world.
2. Remember that every sale begins with a lead, and every lead has a cost associated with it. You may not realize it at first, but your absolute biggest expense (especially for those using PPC) is the cost in both time and money of generating leads.
   
   For argument sake imagine I make 1 $50 sale for every 30 people who see my pitch. That's 1 sale for each 50 leads. Now if it costs me $10 to generate 50 leads then I'm spending $0.20 per lead.
   
   If I'm not capturing that lead as a subscriber to either my RSS feed or my mailing list then that's $0.20 spend for a one time contact with my lead. Each and every time I want to get my message in front of someone I'm going to have to spend $0.20 to do it.
   
   If on the other hand I've been capturing leads and have 2000 subscribers then I can easily get in front of them for no additional cost (except maybe a small amount of time to write the blog post or email).
   
   So if I now write a new blog entry and 30% of the 2000 people read (600 people) it I've just saved 600 X $0.20 = $120! And that's no chicken scratch. If I write 16 blog posts a month I've saved 16 X $120 = $1920. Get the picture ;)
   
   Great, you just saved a fortune! But lets look at how much you just made. At 16 blog posts a month and each blog post being read by 600 people, or message has reached 16 X 600 = 9600 leads! Since we're contacting subscribers we know that many of these contacts are the same lead so it's unlikely in this case that we'd have the same conversion rate of 1 sale for every 50 contacts like in our original scenario, so for arguments sake let's say we make 1 sale for every 150 leads that read the post.  That translates in to 9600/150 = 64 sales. At $50/sale we just made $3200!
   
   These numbers are for illustrations purposes to make a point, and the point is if you want to build a real business you need to capture leads and getting people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a great way to do it.
   
   If you're thinking these numbers don't apply to you because you're using free methods and not PPC then you're mistaken. There is always a cost. There's the cost of hosting, there's the cost of tools and learning material and most importantly there's your time. Your time has tremendous value that should never be overlooked. If you can show me a faster, cheaper way to contact thousands of poeple in the few minutes it takes to write a blog post or email then you need to call me!
   
   Lastly, in case you're wondering, building a subscriber base isn't as difficult as it might seem. There are many techniques for doing this fairly quickly, especially when using mailing list signup forms which will be the topic of the next lesson.

One of the very best ways to reduce the overall cost per sale is to capture your leads so you can contact them again and again without having to incur additional costs.

When someone subscribes to your blog's RSS feed they're no longer simply a passing tourist, they're now a captured lead, an actual asset that has value. Of course what you do with this lead now that you've captured them makes all the difference between making money and not making money. Simply put, you need to ensure you treat your leads with respect if you want to keep them.

Lead management is very important and will be covered more fully in the next lesson on mailing lists, the ultimate form of lead capture.

Setting Up Your Blog

Choosing a Blog Platform

I know this may anger a lot of people, but I highly recommend Wordpress for all your blogging needs. This is not only my own humble opinion, but the opinions of a vast majority of professional bloggers and marketers alike.

In the beginning of the course I mentioned Blogger and that I used Blogger because that is in fact what I did use when I created my first successful campaign which this course is based on. Although wildly successful, it was still my first campaign and I chose the easiest and cheapest (free) blog platform available.

Since that time I've come to see how much more powerful Wordpress is and that Blogger will not likely be able to match the Wordpress capabilities and flexibility for a very long time. As a result I spent many hours converting my old Blogger blog over to the new Wordpress platform and, although it was a pain in the ass, it was well worth it.

Let me breifly explain some of the differences that make all the difference.

Blogger

The appeal of Blogger has always been its simplicity. Blogger is hosted so you don't have to mess around with the details of installation and setup, and you don't need a web hosting plan. You simply create a free account at Blogger.com and start putting together your blog much like you would a squidoo.com page. For the most part it is point, click and promote.

Here's a brief list of pros and cons for the Blogger platform

Pros

1. Hosted solution requires no installation or hosting plan
2. Simple to use
3. Free

Cons

1. Hosted solution reduces its ability to integrate into larger website
2. Not open source means less flexibility
3. Not open source also means few third party plug-ins available to enhance the blog. This is hugely important since the third party plug-ins provide a significant amount of power as you'll see with Wordpress
4. If you want to make other files available for download (i.e. pdf, mps etc.) you still need a web host to store them since you don't have access to store additional files on Blogger
5. If you grow beyond the basics and want to migrate to a professional platform like Wordpress you will lose all of the Google Page Rank you've spent months building up. Basically there is no way to redirect your Blogger traffic to your new blog location while maintaining the Page Rank and Google juice you've built up in the search engines. 301 redirects do not work.
6. Does not provide the flexibility needed for the best search engine optimization (SEO)

In the past Blogger was always a first choice among people who were less technically inclined simply due to the fact that Blogger takes care of these details for you. However, this argument has become less compelling in recent years as newer versions of Wordpress are much friendlier than they used to be.

The only other reason one might choose Blogger would be the fact that it's free. Having said that, making this decision based on money is a bad idea when you realize that it will only take you 1 sale of whatever you're selling to cover the cost of your web hosting and Wordpress setup. So in my opinion I don't believe money should even be a factor in choosing a blog platform.

Rather than dwelling on Blogger any further I'd much rather spend the time talking about what Wordpress can do as opposed to what Blogger can't do.

Wordpress

As already mentioned, Wordpress is by far the number one choice for professional bloggers and marketers alike. The reason being is that Wordpress is an open source platform providing the flexibility to do things you simply can't do with other blogging platforms.

In the past less technically minded people shied away from Wordpress because you had to download the software and then install it on a web hosting account requiring knowledge that went beyond what the casual web user had. This is now largely a non-issue since many web hosting companies provide a script (the fantastico script) that makes installing a Wordpress blog a simple point and click procedure.

Here's a brief list of some of the pros and cons for Wordpress

Pros

1. Open source makes it very flexible
2. Thousands of additional (and free) third party plug-ins and add-ons enhance its ability to get noticed in the search engines and ultimately pull in massive quantities of traffic as a result
3. Can be installed on web host with a simple click of a button using the web hosts "fantastico" script
4. Feature set is very web 2.0 friendly making it easy to integrate with other social media sites
5. Web posts can be easily optimized for search engines (SEO) with special plug-ins
6. Easily create custom SEO friendly urls for your posts
7. Literally thousands of free themes to choose from giving you the look and feel most appropriate to your needs
8. Themes are completly customizable
9. Because the blog is hosted on your web hosting account you can more easily store additional files (like pdf or mp3) for download in your blog posts
10. Supports ping backs and track backs. This is a huge backlink building feature you will come to love
11. Support for ping lists which will automatically notify the various blog search engines as well as your subscribers when new posts are published. This is a huge time saver since you'll spend less time at places like www.pingomatic.com
12. Has a feature called "pages" that allows you to use Wordpress to create web pages within your blog much like regular web pages. This lets you build a full traditional website around your blog eliminating the need for a separate website.
13. Very Fast
14. OH yeah, and it's FREE

Cons

1. Wordpress is vastly more feature rich than Blogger meaning there are many more knobs and buttons you can tweaked and set. Therefore there is a slightly larger learning curve, but the learning curve does not really get in the way as far as getting a basic blog up and running quickly
2. Although Wordpress itself is free, you do need a web hosting account to host your blog. Keep in mind that a web hosting account offers far more than simply a place to put your blog. It gives you a home to grow your business. And believe me, as you grow your business you will need this. I highly recommend Bluehost.com at just $6.95/month.

Lots of pros and not too many cons. Such is Wordpress.

One thing I want to point out is that there is a free hosted version of Wordpress at Wordpress.com that you can use to try out Wordpress. Unfortunately the free hosted version has some limitations in that they don't allow you to install just any third party plugin like you can on your own hosted Wordpress site. Perhaps the biggest roadblock for affiliate marketers is that they DO NOT allow blogs with affiliate links. This is a choice on their part to specifically prevent affiliate marketers from inundating them with marketing blogs. Having said that, wordpress.com it's still a good way to check out the Wordpress platform if you're still unsure.

Web Hosting for Wordpress

If you have a web hosting account that supports Wordpress you can safely skip this section.

Putting Your Blog To Work

Ok so now that you've got your blog up and running it's time to put it to work. I'm going to start with some general blogging tips, then I'll cover some tips specific to your blog posts, then a series of resources that will put the fullpower of your RSS feed to work, and finally I'll discuss the campaign structure and how to drive your article directory traffic with your blog.

General Blogging Tips

1. Blog often. By this I mean at least 3 times a week if you want to keep your readers, and Google, coming back for more. I've been a little negligent in my own blog so do as I say not as I do ;)
   
   If this sounds like a lot of work then no worries because shortly I'm going to show you some tools and techniques you can use to help you put out content quickly when you're short on time
2. Be sure not to turn your blog into a marketing blog. HUH?
   
   Believe it or not people are not coming to your blog because they want to be marketed to. They're coming because their is a hope and an expectation that they're going to learn something beneficial to them.
   
   Make sure that all of your posts are informative and that MOST of them do NOT contain a blatant marketing pitch. A good rule of thumb is every 4th post can be a marketing post while the others are educational in their own right.
   
   This does not mean the the non-marketing posts can't mention a product and contain an affiliate link. It means the post should contain information that the reader can use on it's own and that the affiliate link is more subtle, without a blatant call to action.
   
   It's all about managing the readers impression and building an expectation of usefulness and not just sales pitches. It's this expectation of usefulness that keeps then subscribed to your blog or mailing list.
   
   A good approach is to use the non-marketing posts to provide additional material that might help them get more excited about the product or help get more out of the product if they were to buy it.
3. Create internal linking within your blog. Linking your various related blog posts together is not only good for the reader but it's great for the search engines too. Of course you should only do this when it makes sense so don't force it.
   
   This should be done mostly with non-marketing pitch posts. With the marketing posts you don't want any links other than your call to action links. of course it's always good to have your other posts link to the marketing post, just not the other way around.
4. Pingbacks & Trackbacks
   Don't be affraid to link to other blogs within your posts. Many people are so worried they might provide an escape route for the reader to someone elses blog that they simply don't link to other blogs. This is a big mistake you need to avoid.
   
   Blogging is a web 2.0 community tool whose power lies in sharing and the sharing goes both ways.
   
   With Wordpress when you link to another Wordpress blog a ping is sent to that other blog post automatically informing the other blog that someone is talking about their blog post. This is called a PingBack. This ping will show up as a comment on the other guys blog post, complete with a backlink to your posts. You might leak traffic, but you're sure to get traffic back and possibly some Google juice to help your page rankings for that post.
   
   Older Wordpress blogs and non-wordpress blogs use a adifferent mechanism called TrackBacks with similar effect. Checkout the video below for a demo of Trackbacks. The video is worth watching even if you're using pingbacks because the concept is the same,it's just that pingbacks are more automated.

Understanding Trackbacks

Blog Post Tips

1. Make sure your blog posts are on topic for your blog. A general blog about a million different things is not going to attract or retain readers
2. Like article writing, your title needs to be compelling enough to draw readers in to read the full post
3. Again, like article writing, you need to use keywords appropriately in the title and body text
4. If you're using the ALL In One SEO plugin then you should ensure the description text for your post is also catchy since this is what will be displayed in search engines. It needs to draw them further into the article. A good way to do this is to pique their interest and then hint that the answer will be found within
5. Images are always useful but not for every post. If you have a post that you want to really push on the various social bookmarking sites or places like Digg.com then an image is a good idea since Digg will take the image and use it as an icon for the post
6. On the posts which are intended to be more marketing in nature be sure to use a "call to action". Basically a link that tells them "Click Here" or "Get The eBook Now" etc ... It's basic marketing psychology. Tell people what to do and your sales will increase
7. Like the bio box in an article posted to an article directory, if you want someone to click through one of your links (ie. An affiliate link) be sure to create some curiosity to encourage them to do so.
   
   For instance, at the end of a post you might want them to click through to the affiliate sales page so rather than just placing a link, a better approach might be a link that goes something like this (notice the call to action is also our link)
   
   Producing video on a shoestring has never been so easy. Click Here to and I'll show you how

Promoting Your Blog

OK so we've got our blog set up with SEO friendly permalinks to make the Google and Yahoo search engines happy and we've got our ping list in place so the blog search engines are notified whenever we add a new post.

What else should we be doing to promote our blog? Well there are countless things we can do to promote our blog but, as I mentioned in the begining of this lesson, it's important not to get get bogged down in things that are time sinks with little benefit.

When looking at promotion techniques it's always a good idea to try and focus on techniques that offer some sort of leverage for your time since time is often our most scare resource.

Most of the techniques, services and tools mentioned in the remainder of this lesson require some time investment to set up but require little effort afterwords. So if it seems like there's a lot of work to set all this up just keep in mind the work is on the front end and the backend is where you'll get it all back in multiples.

Here are some services you should definitely be using with your blog.

Feedburner.com