I’ve been a writer all my life (I wrote my first short novel when I was eleven years old) and a blogger since 2001. I had the most awesome neon green and royal blue Xanga site you have ever seen!
My love affair with the blogosphere has waned in recent years though. Since I started in marketing professionally a few years ago, either the amount of crap writing and production has increased, or I have become pickier and pickier with less patience for content that adds to the noise instead of the signal.
I have also noticed that it is easier to complain about things that annoy you than to change them.
Today I put that to an end.
I am announcing that I have started writing an ebook – Blog Marketing For Winners. The name may change, but the crux remains the same – good marketing is how you know if something you are investing time into is worth continued investment or not. With that comes measurement of effectiveness, which we will also cover.
This book will not be about why you should blog to market your business. That’s a separate discussion. This book is for serious bloggers, from a serious blogger.
If you’re interested, sign up here.
I plan to talk about:
- The importance of vision;
- Driving traffic to your site through social media;
- Special bonus – Why your Facebook friend count doesn’t mean crap;
- Driving traffic to your site through search engines;
- Alternative ways to spread your content, including the OpenGraph of Facebook;
- Finding and tuning your audience;
- Measuring Your Success.
Why This Book?
The impetus for this ebook is threefold.
I’m Tired of Bad Content
First, I am tired of the bad content on the Internet, especially a lot of the stuff I see in SEO/online marketing circles. Many of you are quite simply not being thought leaders – you’re writing safe content that I hate reading. It’s time to stop that.
I believe that if you properly spread the word about your site though, you’ll either a) start writing better content, or b) stop writing and do something more productive with your time. So I want to teach you how to do get your blog in front of others.
Good Content is Powerful
Second, I believe that content is powerful, and I want good content to be surfaced. I want those producing content to build an audience of engaged followers who will share their stuff with reckless abandon because they believe in the cause.
Not Everyone Can Succeed
And thirdly, I’ve decided to write this book because I don’t want everyone to believe that they can have a successful blog when it comes to numbers and money. Not everyone can make thousands of dollars a month through a blog, and that’s ok. I want to give people a realistic view of how hard it is to build an audience, and show that it takes time and a lot of hard work.
Why Should We Listen To You?
As I said earlier, I’ve been blogging for years and have gotten better with each blog that I’ve started. I’ve always been able to build an engaged audience on any site that I’ve started and blogged on consistently. Here are my traffic stats for the past year and a half since I started this site:
Here’s my organic traffic growth on this site:
Here is my RSS subscriber list:
Here’s my Twitter following growth over the past 18 months:
The proof is in the numbers.
So that’s my goal. I’ve started writing and I’m pretty excited about where it could go. If you want to sign up to be informed when I get to launch (I may contact you before then to ask for your help), please do so right here:
Thanks everyone! I’m both stoked about and scared by this new challenge!