(Part 2 in a series of 2)
In the previous lesson, we talked about how a blog can be integrated into your online business, and I covered several ways of monetizing your blog.
Today I’m going to be covering the most important aspect of blogging for your business…
(Watch this video…)
Main points:
4) Influence, authority, and positioning
For most businesses, these are THE greatest assets that you can gain from your blog.
Rich Schefren: you need to become a maven in your market.
Frank Kern: you need to be a celebrity in your marketplace.
You want to position yourself and your products in the top of your prospects’ minds.
5) Selling your blog.
-Create a blog with… good content, loyal readership, steady traffic, decent Pagerank.
-Investors, entrepreneurs, and aspiring entrepreneurs buy websites…
-If your site is valued over $100k, consider a broker
-Do it yourself:
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/
http://www.businessesforsale.com/
Ebay
-Some marketers also “flip” blogs. (buy ugly ones and make them nice)
(see examples on video)
-John Chow vs. Shoemoney vs. Darren Rowse
– On the one hand, branding your blog with your own name, image, and personality can give you an edge over the competition. On the other hand, it can also make it harder to sell.
– If your priority is selling your blog, you need to take this into consideration, but for MOST people I would recommend going for a strong personal brand.
Action steps:
1) Decide what the primary objective of your blog is going to be.
2) Think about how you will monetize it.
3) Start blogging!
I’ve been teaching a lot about building your website. But what if you don’t want to build it yourself? The next lesson is for you!
As always, you are welcome to post your questions and comments below.
If you have a blog, this would be a great time to show it off! Feel free to tell us your blog’s primary objective, or you can let us guess 🙂
Have a great day!
As always great information. What I like most is your simplicity. I have a lot better direction of what I want and feel more capable of making it happen.
Thanks Mark
When trying to create value(monetary) for your site – how effective is using a blog to create a membership site?
I would think, depending on the niche that it would add some extra value when trying to use a broker.
Eric-
These are great discussions to have. I appreciate your desire to help folks lay a good foundation as you presented in today’s lesson.
Would you agree that one other advantage of *not* personally branding a site, is the ease of utilizing guest bloggers, or even a team of writers, for that matter, should your desire be to publish a lot of content without having to produce it yourself?
Very insightful as per usual – I am looking forward to lesson 39 🙂
Eric, thanks for this powerful video. Indeed you are truly a blessing.
Warrior Forum and Digital Point are tow other places you can sell your blog. Great video. Thank you.
Hi, Eric.
Personaly, I find that bulding a “face” (becoming recognized, as an authority) is a “must be” for no matter if one want to build sites/blogs to sale`em later or to be more or less own brand support.
In fact, once one have a branded site (sites) – mean is allready “somebody” – and whisper in proper places that he/she just got the http://thisIs_a_veryLong-and_obscure.nonsenseDomainName.com .. booooom! the trafic and all other cash generating stuff .. 🙂
I think using a blog for a membership site is a great idea. In fact, I’m very much considering turning Eric’s Tips into a membership site. There are WordPress plugins that make it easy, such as WordPress Wishlist
And if your site has recurring subscription income, it greatly increases the value of your site to an investor.
Thanks T. I would definitely agree to an extent. On the one hand, a personally branded blog can still utilize guest bloggers, and I’ve seen it done. But the main blogger still needs to make a lot of posts otherwise the personal brand will get watered down. However, a personal blog could also utilize ghost writers which would allow you to publish a lot of content without writing it. But overall, yeah I’d say a non-personal blog facilitates guest bloggers better.
The majority of the TOP blogs in the world (from the technorati 100) are non-personal blogs with multiple bloggers. Top 5 currently… Huffington Post, Engadget, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Lifehacker…
So if you have a business plan to become THAT type of blog, it can obviously be a very good (and profitable) route to take. But for *most* people, I think they have a better chance of becoming an authority in their niche with a personal blog than they do of ever making it to the technorati 100 with a group blog.
So that’s why it’s really a matter of priority.
Thank you for the great info. My son has been telling me to personalize my blog. I have just decided that I would rather brand it in a way to sell it.
Had a quick question for you. What are your thoughts with using a “Pen Name” with your blog? I feel like I’d like to keep some anonymity, but I also worry that people will think less of me for not using my REAL name. Do you think that this defeats the purpose by someone building their brand on false info?
Hey Eric,
Thanks for a couple of great lessons on monetizing your blog. Your comparison of the first three blogs with Gary Vaynerchuks was perfect for making your point on Influence, Positioning and Authority. Your motivation for establishing yourself as an Authority is certainly working.
These are excellent lessons you are giving us for free. Glad to count myself as one of your fans.
Mike
Thanks.
I will think about this for future blogs as I want to set up many niche blogs which can be sold, but also have a computer repair business that needs a new blog.
I also want to start a new business custom designing blogs and headers which will need to be branded for recognition.
Eric, authority and influence goes back to having the right niche. I’ve been asking myself what I want to be when I grow up. I’m 51 and still don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is that you’ve opened my eyes to review what I’m doing. It’s not all about making money right away. My first niche was to be Make Money Online from a newbie perspective.
I’ve gotten away from that in away and was looking for the easy button. I’m back on track there – hey I’m an Authority on being a newbie in IM and can share my experiences while I learn it too.
I’ve started another blog on Home and Family Info something that I think I can be more of an Authority on http://www.homeandfamilyinfo.com – work in progress. Do you think it’s to broad of a topic.
Sorry for rambling but this video was one of those ahhh I’m starting to get it.
Thanks agian,
Luca
Wow!
We are really learning, specially
those like me who are starters with
wordpress. It’s real good insight.
Thanks
Great question.
In general, I think it’s OK to use a pen name as long as you’re not doing it to defraud or deceive. There are certainly hundreds of famous authors, actors, and other celebrities who use pen names, stage names, etc.
As far as branding, it should be fine. You would simply brand your pen name as you would your own. Although if you’re actually doing business under a fictitious name, it could be tricky to remain truly anonymous, as most places require you to register trade names.
There are definitely some grey areas though when it comes to marketing with pen names.
One question I would ask, is what is your reason for wanting to remain anonymous? If the reason is because you’re selling something or marketing in such a way that you wouldn’t want anyone to know it’s you… then you should seriously consider whether it’s a business you really want to get into.
Another area that I think gets VERY grey is creating fake personas for use in marketing online.
The concept itself is legal… after all there are all sorts of mascots, spokespeople, actors, and various personas that represent all sorts of companies in TV commercials, print ads, etc. It’s called advertising.
But that line between advertising and reality really gets blurred online, and some marketers have taken it to far.
I do not have the answer as to exactly where that line is.
But certainly the line is crossed when a marketer aims to deceive.
So in summary, I think pen names are great. A pen name still has a real person behind it. In other words, the pen name is telling YOUR story. It’s just a nickname.
But for those who create fake personas NOT tied directly to a real person… I’d proceed with much caution.
Eric,
I was trying to change my WP extension(/)from:
http://instanttrafficpaysites.com/tips/
to:
http://instanttrafficpaysites.com/blog/
I went into my Admin area under settings and changed the extention to blog and clicked update,however now when I try and login to WP admin area or view my WP template online, I can’t view either. It was fine until I tried to make the change…now I really don’t know what to do. Can’t sign into the WP Admin area to make corrections. Sorry,but would appreciate any help you can give.
Best Regards,
Gary
Hi Eric,
I would go in the Authority way as it establishes me as a leader in my niche.Having an authority blog will lead me to venture further into my niche.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks,
Kannan Viswagandhi
Branding yourself as expert in the niche you promote will increase the credibility and trust. Visitor will more incline to buy from the people they trust.
To Your Success
Bryan Hee
I stumbled upon your blog on lesson #37. I’m glad #38 is already here because I was curious to see you take on GaryV. I’d like to add that Gary has a brick & mortar wine store that has been the basis for his business. His blog was in support of it. If you watch the Affiliate Summit West Keynote Speech on Ustream he talks about this.
As well, Gary’s exponential success has been based on his customer service & response rate. I’ve met him in person & interviewed him. He speaks with such passion & tenacity about his business. And one of the main things he has done throughout is respond to all of his emails & comments. It’s inspiring to listen to him talk.
I recommend for those interested in learning more about @GaryVee and how he handles social media http://blog.affiliatetip.com/archives/affiliate-summit-west-2009-keynote-address-by-gary-vaynerchuk-transcript/
Also you can search for his FOWA 2009 keynote.
Or you can watch the interview video with him on my channel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxUhlbgvy3g
Thank you Eric for great info! I hope this helps as well. Now let’s CRUSH IT (a la Gary V)
Eric,
I apprecite all that you send, however what does one like myself who is a newbie to computers and does not know what a Blog is or how to create it no less understand the procedure?
I am a health practitioner and would like to have a Blog (whatever that is) and how to promote via the internet. While I do fine in my nutritional profession I want some residual income but most that I see on the net are just a bunch of BS. I got burned some and my attorney recovered my investment. So I ask you — how can you help someone like me?
Charles Attal
Thanks. I’d recommend starting with lesson #33 if you want to set up a blog:
But keep in mind that these lessons are sequential, so if you missed any before that, you should go back and watch them to make sure you have the requisite knowledge going forward.
I do believe my lessons can help almost anyone start an online business, but you have to go through all the steps. I’m putting forth my best info, so if it’s not enough to help someone start an online business, they probably aren’t the right kind of person for it. But I hope you are!
did you also actually change the name of the directory via FTP? Do that…
Thanks so much Eric…it worked like a charm and everything is back on track now.I probably should have just thought it through rather than being on the verge of freaking out…lol. Appreciate your help and input though 🙂 🙂 🙂
Great tips. Only thing I would put Problogger on number 1 as it drives at least 600% more traffic than Shoemoney or John Chow combined, not to mention the content quality you get on Problogger is light years away from Shoemoney blog (guy can’t speak properly or spell) and John Chow? Well nothing to learn from his blog other than read about his daily life. Lame.
Very rich lesson. Full of insights.
Deserves to be watched time and again.
Thanks for compiling all these nuggets
for non paying students
Great Stuff Eric. Your content is excellent.
Great information, can you please suggest if i need to remove anything on my site. i may consider selling it after getting good page rank and traffic.
Thanks in advance
Please check the site which i forgot to add in my above comment.
If your’re goal is to be a guru, you probably should go the branding route, but if you just want to make money and not necessarily be in th spot light then a branded domain is not pertinant. Most gurus have a branded site that serves as a hub with links to all of their unbranded sites.
Thanks once again for the valuable information.
i have themed my blog on personal experience of self-development. Also written my ebook on the same topic and selling it on the site. Now hopefully I can create visitors to the site. http://www.gerrysavage.com
Eric,
Nice to see you started to use Twitter. I think you will like it. I am now following you there. Thanks for all the great lessons, It has helped me out a ton.
Eric,
This blog is supposedly getting 850,000 hits per month! Does that seem likely, or is it just hype?
http://www.pcmech.com
Hits does not necessarily mean unique visitors. It appears they are getting about 120k visitors. So it’s definitely possible they’re getting 850k hits (file requests), and it’s even possible they’re getting 850k page views.
Hi Eric, I would like to thank you for this awesome course it really has been a god sent although I am only supposed to be on lesson six I decided to advance my learning because I have seen many courses that promise to deliver all you need and this is the first one that seems to be full filling that promise. It seems like your courses stop at number 38 and I imagine there will be more to come in the future you have done a great job of sorting out the pieces of website hosting and creating websites for me. But here is my problem as much as I would like to take advantage of this unless I know how to create a squeeze page with a form box and get that information to my contact manager along with a gateway page that may relate to questions on the form box along with a merchant account on my gateway page and then a follow up thank you page and all that being intergraded to my website so I hope that some of the courses in the near future will contain this information because I’m anxious to get my business making some money. Do you know of a paid course that is not too expensive that may provide me with this information and if not could you let me know if this is something you are going to cover and approximately when. Thanks for all you have done and I look forward to all that you will do.
There will be about 100 lessons, and yes I will be covering squeeze pages and list building.
I would recommend signing up with Aweber. Use their tutorials to see how to set up your squeeze page, and then talk to their tech support if you need help figuring out how to pass the information on to your contact manager. They have experience integrating with many platforms.
Thanks for your update I will look forward to those lessons as far as Aweber my primary business has autoresponders built into my back office management system that will allow me to connect my website form box to my autoresponders I’m just not sure how to make that connection and the script to create the form box but if this is all that I need to do I will probably have to hire a webmaster to complete that site. Once again thanks for all your help.
Hi Eric, I really have enjoyed your lessons so far–great info! I do have a question however, I have a website that has been up and running for a month now but I am not sure what would be the best method to get traffic to it. I have tried Webtraffictonight ( a Paid Traffic )company but I have some suppositions that this is not a good company to have for web traffic. My web host has recommended Web Traffic Machines. I have a feeling that you may know something about this company. I would appreciate any advice on this that you could provide.Thanks
Wow!
1) Finally I am up-to-date
2) 37/38 are great lessons, I pick up a lot of good ideas, now is the right time to apply them, I’ll do this and I’ll continue to work on the membership site
3) The package for membership is awesome, thanks again, but I have some questions, and they don’t have a help desk.
I hope you can give me a hint – the way in which they explain is that we have different levels of Membership site: free, bronze, silver, gold, diamond, and we have a different script/template for each of them, and is clear what we have to do to have just one level on the membership.
What if, I want a membership site which is free for the beginning or for a specific group, and in the same time I want to offer an upgrade to silver and an upgrade to gold for people that want them. It is not clear how I can accomplish this in the same membership site. I have to load all 3 levels? Where, how to connect them etc. you got the idea?
I think this is a legitimate question for a lot of users of the package. By the way, I am using the free script they offer in the package, maybe this scenario cannot be accomplished with that script, and I have to buy other one. What is your advice for this scenario?
Regards
Michaela
Gary:
You are really, really lucky to have contacted Eric with this issue. I had the same problem a few weeks ago and asked Host Gator for help. Unfortunately, they misunderstood my problem and ended up erasing my entire database. Please remember to backup your blog to your computer on a regular basis. I’m so glad you didn’t lose your blog.
Can you explain the steps to changing the extension via FTP? I never thought to do it that way and Host Gator failed to advise me. Can this be found in one of your prior lessons? I’m terrified of starting a new blog for fear of messing things up again. Thanks for another great lesson.
I did not cover it specifically in a lesson, but the instructions for moving wordpress to another location/directory are here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
Yes you can use the Memberfire script to run a membership site with multiple levels.
I personally use amember, so I’m not familiar with all the intricacies of Memberfire, but I think the way that particular script works is you have to install each membership level seperately as explained here
As far as connecting the membership areas, I think the best way would be through links on the access.html page which is mentioned here
However, I think this script is better suited for single-level membership sites. For multi-level, I think Butterfly Marketing or Amember would be better.
In general, I don’t recommend those paid traffic sites because the quality of the traffic is usually not good.
Yes I am affiliated with Web Traffic Machines and I do recommend them. They are a good solution for those who want to use software tools to build links and create their own traffic.
My other recommended traffic sources are PPC, affiliates, and opt-in lists. I’ll be covering traffic generation methods later on in the lessons.
In general I would not recommend hosting your own list, particularly if you plan on growing it to any large size.
If you do need help, I do recommend Rentacoder
Hello eric;
Thanks for all your lessons…but
is no more lessons?
100 lessons?
Don’t leave us like that man
Thank you again.
Don’t worry, there will be 100 lessons. It’s just taking me longer to create them than I anticipated 😉
Hi Eric,
I am slightly lagging behind in the lessons as I am hard pressed for time. Well, is it mandatory that I sign up for a paid web hosting for C-panel access to install wordpress? is there no other alternative? If it is so, then one would be forced to shell out those extra dollars and it would be tough for newbies like us that are yet to see even a penny so far? How is it expected of us to regularly invest in webhosting just for the sake of control panel access? or have I understood the concept wrong? Please clarify.
Alternatively I have two blogs in blogger, but of late, when I am trying to post in my blog area, my system indicates an error report and asks me to shut down. However, when I am in an external internet cafe, I am able to log into blogger.com. The problem arises when I want to access indoors in my house. Why it is so?
God bless you Eric.
Murthy.
God bless you.
Murthy.
Hi Murthy, I do recommend getting your own website on your own domain. I explain some of the reasons in lesson #23:
Free blogger blogs can be a good supplemental strategy for your business, but it’s better to invest the majority of your efforts into a website that you own, rather than one owned by Google (Blogger).
So it’s not for the sake of control panel access. It’s for the sake of building an equitable business, and for branding your business.
Back in lesson #8 I talked about requirements for starting an online business:
I recommended having a minimum of $200 startup capital. You can get a domain and web hosting for under $100/yr.
If you’re not comfortable making the investment yet, then you could go through the product development process first to make sure you’re going to have a product to sell, then go back to the website development lessons.
Eric–you had shown one of many Joel Comm’s website (lobster) in your previous video. Isn’t that website/blog considered a splogging?
And Joel Comm also sold lots of Adsense Templates with articles. I think thats also encourages to create a splog…
Can you clear that up please?
That particular site is not a splog. It has content that they created, and they are monetizing it in a couple of ways. It’s actually a good example of a small niche website that you can “set and forget”. In other words, it wouldn’t be the backbone of your business, but you can build small income streams by setting up small niche-focused sites with quality content.
I was Joel’s partner on the templates, so I am familiar with them 😉 We always encouraged and taught people to use the templates as TEMPLATES to build their own unique websites. And we always discouraged sploggy behavior. The templates were designed as a short cut for people who want to set up niche content sites (like the lobster site). Of course some people did abuse them, but with any good tool comes the potential for abuse.