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Posted: 24 Jul 2008 10:03 PM CDT

Yaro Starak has just published an audio interview with one of his former students (and now a coach) from BlogMastermind Alborz Fallah.

Alborz is behind a car blog here in Australia - a blog that has enabled him to grow his blog to a point where it’s been valued at over $5 million - have a partnership with Yahoo, take on investors and more. It’s pretty impressive since he only started blogging in 2006!

This guy is getting luxury cars to review, is competing with the biggest car sites in this country and employs 6 full time staff.

Here’s the interview (there’s a transcript too) - it’s a great story with tips on writing content, finding readers and more.

PS: having just listened to this for the 2nd time what shines through to me is Alborz’s passion for his topic and his believe in writing amazing content. I think these things are central in what he’s achieved - great stuff.

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How to Make Your Blog More Personal

Posted: 24 Jul 2008 01:55 PM CDT

It has been a while since my last video and in this one I’ll show you the reason why - my son Henri who arrived just a few weeks ago has been taking a lot of my attention of late.

In this video I want to talk about adding a personal touch to your blog and want to introduce you to some of the ideas that I cover in my previous series - Adding a Personal Touch to Your Blog.

I’m not talking about starting a personal blog where you share lots of personal information - what I’m focusing on here is building a blog that connects with people in a more personal way around your niche topic.

Over the last few years of blogging I’ve found that readers really respond well to when you approach your blogging in a more personal way.

Some of the ways you can add a personal touch to your blog include writing in the first person, blogging with emotion, sharing stories using humor, talking about real life activities, using bylines, featuring video and images, being honest about your mistakes and failings, taking personal notice of readers and blogging with a conversational voice.

When you do these types of things over the long haul readers get to a stage where they feel that they ‘know’ you and a blog becomes more than just a place where you dispense information and it becomes a place where people begin to connect.

I’d love to hear how you add a personal touch to your blog in comments below.

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TeachingSells to Close Doors 31 July

Posted: 24 Jul 2008 07:40 AM CDT

One of the best courses that I’ve personally participated in on the topic of teaching people how to make money online is TeachingSells - and it’s about to close it’s doors to new members (in just 7 days).

Every time I come to write about TeachingSells, its creators have added new courses/modules to it.

They’ve now completed adding this content and it stands as 10 courses with a series of bonus modules added (you can read about them in the closing doors announcement). There is so much rich content in this resource that every time I visit it I feel like a kid in a candy store - picking up profitable idea after profitable idea.

The 10 central courses are:

How to Create Content That Sells
How to Effectively Market Interactive Learning Environments
How to Create Killer Multimedia Content with Quick and Easy Tools
Seven Profitable Business Models for Interactive Content Developers
Your Blueprint for Building Membership Sites with Open Source and Low-Cost Software
Educational Marketing: Persuasive Promotional Content That Prompts Action
Advanced Positioning and Creative Adaptation Strategies
Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites
Multimedia Storytelling - When the Medium is NOT the Message
Launch Strategies for Membership Sites and Training Programs

In addition there’s a great forum, library of resources and the support of great instructors - all with a money back guarantee.

If you’re not familiar with TeachingSells the best place to start is by downloading this free report that takes you through some of the principles behind it (the report itself is well worth the read even if you don’t invest in the actual course).

This is not a course about blogging for money - but it’s one that will help you extend what you’ve learned and achieved with your blog and take it further.

Doors close on TeachingSells at midnight on 31 July. Brian Clarke (one of it’s founders) writes that it will re-open at some point but it’ll be at a higher price point and in a different form.

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Google’s Knol - A Wikipedia Killer or a Blog Killer?

Posted: 23 Jul 2008 09:33 PM CDT

Is Google’s Knol an attack on Wikipedia or Could it hurt Smaller Publishers like bloggers more?

So today Google finally opened up and launched Launched Knol (it’s been coming for a while) a place where people can publish ‘authoritative articles about specific topics’. It’s like Wikipedia in that articles can be edited by others - but changes need to be approved by the authors of the articles. Articles can be monetized in a revenue share arrangement where Google and the authors share income derived from articles.

My Three initial reactions to Knol

Google Competing with it’s Partners

My mind goes back to sitting in the offices of Google in Sydney where in a presentation by a Google staff member (a fairly highly ranked one) I heard him say that Google was not in the content business and didn’t ever want to compete with their publishers sites. He said that they were in the business of organizing the world’s information and not creating it. There was a murmur in the room at the time and a few raised eyebrows because we’d been hearing about these kinds of new products emerging from Google where they not only organize information but host it on their own properties. It’s a fine line - increasingly so with Knol.

Back in 2006 Google CEO Eric Schmidt was famously quoted as saying that Google was not a media company - “But that doesn’t make us a media company. We don’t do our own content. We get you to someone else’s content faster.”

Hmmm.

There’s a lot of talk going around the blogosphere today about how Knol is a Wikipedia killer - but I wonder whether it could ‘kill’ (or perhaps maim would be more appropriate) a few smaller publishers before they really hurt Wikipedia.

Update: for more thoughts on this see Journalistopia.

I can only imagine how highly Knol articles are going to rank in Google’s search results in a year or two. Wikipedia makes it difficult enough for a publisher to grab the number 1 ranking for many terms in Google simply because of it’s size and the number of links pointing at it - have we just seen the launch of a product that will mean #1 and #2 positions are generally taken?

Spam Haven?

I can almost hear the blackhat community running over to Knol to see how it can be manipulated. I’m sure Google have safe guards in place - but where there’s a will there’s a way.

Pro-Knolers

I’ve come across a number of people lately who have gone full time (or close to it) using Squidoo to publish articles and monetize them. They’ve build up profiles and search rankings for their Squidoo pages to the point that they’re able to generate significant incomes via advertising and affiliate revenue. I suspect we’ll see the same with Knol.

It’s going to be an interesting one to watch!

What do you think about Knol? Is it something that could help or hurt your blogging?

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Follow These Twitter Users - They’re Just Like You

Posted: 23 Jul 2008 02:48 PM CDT

ProBlogger reader - I’d like to introduce you to some new friends - around 700 of them (and counting).

Over the weekend, on a whim, I started the ProBlogger Social Media Love-In as a way of linking you as readers of this blog together via social media. In that post I invited you to submit your social media profiles in comments and then to start be-friending one another.

The response was swift and overwhelming with around 700 people participating.

Reports started tricking in of people getting a lot of new friends and making all kinds of useful connections. The ProBlogger community spun out to all kinds of places as people began to connect and start working together on sites like Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Myspace, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Digg and more.

As I began to watch what was happening I began to ask myself how I could make the long and scattered list of profiles more helpful. Some readers were content to surf down the comments list and start adding friends - but could the information be presented better?

I got in touch with Lara and asked her if she wanted a couple of days work to organize the lists. She agreed and today we’re rolling out a group of Twitter users (the most popular profile link left).

Lara has created a page of 538 Twitter profiles here.

Yes - that’s 538 ProBlogger readers who want to connect, work together and learn from one another.

As I was scanning down the list today it struck me that almost everyone on this list has a blog and as a result the collective influence that we have as a group is quite amazing. If on average we connect with 100 people a week each we’re influencing 53,800 people each week. I suspect the number is far greater than that because there’s some pretty significant bloggers on the list.

As I’ve mentioned on the twitter list page - over 500 people is a lot to follow on Twitter so you might not end up following them all - but do try to add as many as you can and see which ones connect with you most to stick with.

In the coming days Lara will compile more of these lists (one for each type of social media and one more miscellaneous list) so if you’re not a twitter user hopefully there will be a great list for you in the days ahead.

Missed Out On Submitting Your Profiles?

If you missed out on the 24 hour window where we allowed people to submit profiles don’t worry. The beauty of this project is that by befriending others who did you’re still going to make some great connections. We might open this up again at some point in the future but in the mean time I’d start with the lists that we’re publishing this week.

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A Secret to Sustain Yourself as a Blogger

Posted: 23 Jul 2008 09:00 AM CDT

Today I want to talk about an issue may seem more suited to a ’self help’ blog than a blog about blogging - but it’s something that I think is pretty important you want to be a successful blogger. It’s something that is so important that it can make or break you.

Sustainable-Blogging
Image by *nathan

However - while it’s crucial to sustaining successful blogs for the long haul - it’s got very little to do with blogging itself.

It’s got nothing to do with writing good content, nothing to do with building readers to your blog, nothing to do with SEO, ad optimization, social media or anything like that.

It has nothing to do with any of that and everything to do with a very personal part of you.

Let me explore it with a question:

Where do you get your personal worth from?

OK - some of you have your cursors hovering over the ‘back’ button in your browser - “this is not going to help me make my blog better” you might be thinking…. but humor me for a moment or two because what I’m exploring here is the reason that I see many bloggers give up blogging.

Let me flesh out the question with a couple more:

What makes you feel worthwhile - or not worthwhile?
When do you feel like who you are and what you do matters (and doesn’t matter)?

Here’s the thing. When I talk to people about when they feel ‘worthwhile’ or when they feel that they ‘matter’ they generally answer with one of two things.

‘When I achieve something’ or ‘when someone tells me that I am good’.

If you want to put it as an equation:

Personal Worth = What You Achieve + What Others Think of You

ie - we feel like we’re worth something when we do good things and others praise us and we feel worthless when we fail and when others tell us we’re no good.

This is an equation that most of us live by. In fact it’s an equation that we’re bombarded with day in day out through our lives. We see those who achieve and who are praised glorified on TV and are taught from a young age to aspire to be like them. We’re also taught to avoid failure and the ridicule of others at all costs.

The equation of personal worth coming from our achievements and what others think of us is something most of us fall back on automatically in most areas of our lives. Education, Relationships, Socially, Career - and for us as bloggers it is how most of us automatically measure ourselves as bloggers.

Unpacking The Equation for Bloggers

Who are the successful bloggers?

Those who are linked to, those who get loads of great comments, those who get so many subscribers that they can’t fit all the numbers on their RSS feed buttons, those who are praised by others, those who make it to the top of all kinds of ranking lists and who win awards. As a result most of us strive for these types of things and when we have success in these areas we feel warm and fuzzy inside and somehow more worthwhile as a blogger - as a person.

The problem with the equation:

The problem with rating our worth in this way (whether it be in our blogging or any aspect of our life) is that it’s something that is virtually impossible to live up to - whether our blog is ’successful’ or not. Lets look at the two areas of the equation again:

Achievement - The issue is that all of us at some point or another fail. We have days where we make a mistake, where the luck doesn’t fall our way, where the actions of someone else means we can’t perform, where things outside of anyone’s control mean that it all comes crashing down. There are times in all of our lives when we can’t achieve. As bloggers many of us are familiar with the ‘failures’. If our personal worth is tied to what we do or don’t achieve then we’re going to be set for a roller-coaster of a ride.

The Opinion of Others - Again, as bloggers, most of us know that the opinions of others are always going to be mixed. Other bloggers, readers, writers from other types of media and others don’t really hold back on their opinion of bloggers and while what they see can at times be incredibly positive and uplifting - they can be equally devastating and hurtful. Also for many bloggers the opinions of others are simply absent. As a blogger starting out seeing the ‘comments (0)’ at the bottom of every post can be debilitating. Once again, if our personal worth is tied to the words of others about us then we’re setting ourselves up for a lot of highs and lows.

When I chat to bloggers that tell me that they are finished with blogging they almost always quietly tell me that they are quitting because of a reason that fits with one of the above areas. Feelings of failure, hurt at the critique of others, disappointment at their abilities, the fact that no-one ever responded or that they felt ignored…..

It’s a familiar story for me also.

When I started blogging on a more serious level 3-4 years ago I began to notice that I had real mood swings that seemed to be tied to how my blogs were going. I remember in the lead up to Christmas 2004 when traffic to my biggest blog at the time almost completely disappeared as a result of Google reshuffling it’s index. The week that followed that event took me to a very low place and very close to quitting my blogging (I even went out and go myself a ‘real job’. Correspondingly when the traffic returned 6-7 weeks later the ‘high’ that I was on was higher than I’d felt in a long time.

I realized around this time that I was on a roller coaster ride and that it wasn’t really healthy or sustainable for me - either as a blogger of as a human being.

True Personal Worth

The lesson that I continually come back to (and I need to learn and relearn it) is to remember that my worth is not determined by what I do or what others think of me. This isn’t a good place to measure my worth as a blogger or as a human being. Self worth comes from something much deeper that those things and while we’re constantly tempted to judge ourselves this way the reality is that my worth as human beings goes beyond my RSS counter, comment numbers, number of appearances on Digg, Technorati ranking, number of links from A-listers etc.

For me my personal worth comes from a much deeper place (something that is tied to my spirituality). I’m not sure where it comes from for you (and I’m not about to push my views on anybody) but I think it’s an important area to ponder because the alternative is to find yourself on the roller coaster of the achievement/opinons of others equation.

Are your feelings of worth tied to how your blog is going? Do you struggle with this one as much as I have? I’d love to hear how you’ve dealt with the issue.

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