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Home Bases and Outposts - How I use Social Media in My Blogging Posted: 06 Oct 2008 04:08 AM PDT Lately I’ve been pondering the part that social media plays in my blogging business. This post is an attempt to make some sense of it. I’d value your thoughts in comments to help me take these half thought through ideas to something more concrete. Those who have been following me for a while know that I not only spend a lot of time on my blogs but also invest significant time on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…. (the list could go on). What’s my strategy? Why invest so much time into sites that I don’t actually own? To be honest there are days when i wonder if I have a strategy at all. There’s so much I don’t know about social media and how it fits into what I do - some days it just feels messy. However in the midst of it all there are moments of clarity. Home Bases and Outposts Today I was watching a video of a presentation by Chris Brogan and a short segment of it resonated strongly and put words to the way I use social media. He talked about: Home Bases Outposts Passports He’s used these concepts numerous times on his blog before (here and here for example) but today it got my attention a little more than previously - particularly the idea of the ‘Home Base’ and that of the ‘Outpost’. A home base is a place online that you own, that is your online ‘home’. For me I have two home bases - ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. For me my home bases are blogs but for others they will be other types of websites. Outposts are places that you have an online presence out in other parts of the web that you might not ‘own’. I’d previously being using the word ’satellites’ to describe this but I think ‘outposts’ works better. Outposts will mean different things to different people and businesses. Here’s how it looks for me as I think about my home base of ProBlogger. As you’ll see, most of my ‘outposts’ are social media sites - however for others an outpost could also include forums, other community sites and even the comments sections of other blogs. Each of the outposts that you see above are places that I have accounts and am attempting to grow my online presence (some better than others). These ‘outposts’ are sites where I: add content build relationships test ideas grow a profile listen experiment make connections try to be useful play Out of this combination of activities many things come. Relationships, ideas, traffic, resources, partnerships, community and much more emerge from the outposts - much of it making my home base stronger. Two Way Streams and Outposts Taking on a Life of Their Own The outposts do drive some traffic back to the home base, but many of the benefits are less tangible and have more to do with building the brand and influences of my blogs. Also worth noting is that the outposts don’t just feed the homebase (it isn’t just a one way thing)- but the homebase feeds the outposts and sometimes the outpost seems to take on a life of its own and becomes the real place of action where without really trying a community emerges. For example this week I discovered that a small (but growing) group of ProBlogger readers had been interacting with my content and one another on my Facebook Profile - despite the fact that I’d not spent more than 20 minutes on Facebook in the previous three months. Just the fact that I link to Facebook and pull in my Twitter activity means that the ‘community’ there has sprung up (now that I’m aware of what’s going on I can participate and feed the community. This Post is Half Finished I laugh when people occasionally refer to me as a social media expert. You see while I’ve managed to grow a reasonable social media presence over the last few years there is still much to learn. As a result I’d love to here your thoughts on what I’ve written and how you see and use social media in your blogging and business. Your comments will take this post a step closer to completion - looking forward to how it ends! Share This

How To Get Free Books To Give Away On Your Blog Posted: 05 Oct 2008 07:40 AM PDT One of the most successful ways to bring in new subscribers to your blog is to give away a bonus when people sign up. If you’re like most people, you haven’t had time to write a great book to give away as a sign-up bonus. Well, today I’m going to show you two very easy ways to get such a book: Create your own with an e-book template Use someone else’s book that is in the public domain (you’d be amazed how many great books are out there for free!) Create Your Own eBook In 48 Hours With An E-book Template About a year ago I stumbled across these excellent e-book templates which were being given away by Eben Pagan (he is a successful internet marketer and deserves all the credit for these, I didn’t create them!) They have a professional design in nine different colors, come with instructions, and make it super easy to get a book done quickly. Here are the steps which I’ve personally used to create an eBook in less than 48 hours: Use a “top 10″ formula. Writing a book from scratch sounds hard but anybody can come up with 10 tips in their niche. Even if it ends up being only 20 or 30 pages that’s ok for an eBook. Create a catchy title based on the top 10 theme, such as “10 Ways To Raise Your Grades By Studying Smarter, Not Harder” or “10 Secrets To Making Money Online” Come up with the 10 tips by brainstorming and looking at the best posts on your blog. Put the tips in a logical order and include several sub-points under each one. Now plug your tips and sub-points into the template and write a paragraph or two under each one (copy and paste text from blog posts you’ve already written when appropriate). Summarize your main points in an introduction and conclusion and you’ve got a book! Use Adobe Reader to convert it to a PDF for distrbution. You should also familiarize yourself with Microsoft Word’s “styles” to keep your formatting consistent. If you want to change how a subheading looks, for example, you shouldn’t change it manually. Instead, you should edit the “subheading style” and it will apply your changes to all the subheadings. This will save you a lot of time down the road. Finally, upload your PDF to your server and find a way to automatically send your eBook to new subscribers. In Feedburner you can include this link in the confirmation email (login to Feedburner and go to Publicize -> Email Subscriptions -> Communication Preferences). Similar options exist for Aweber and other newsletter providers. Some people also include the link in the bottom of every RSS post. Second Option: Get Free Books To Give Away! The second, and perhaps easier, method is to use a book that someone else has already written. There are an amazing number of books in the public domain (and also under the creative commons license, more on this later) which you can give away on your site. For example, in my niche of entrepreneurship, I paid good money for three books years ago that I heard were excellent: Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth. Imagine how surprised I was to discover that all three of these books were now available online for free! I found PDF copies using the method I describe below and started giving them away on my website. My subscribers started going up immediately! So how do you find these books? Well, according to Wikipedia… In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain. In addition, works published before 1964 that did not have their copyrights renewed 28 years after first publication year also are in the public domain… Many books which are not in the public domain can still be found under the creative commons license. The Creative Commons license is somewhere in between a full copyright and a public domain work. Many times, the work can still be given away for free, but you are not allowed to sell it and you must pay attribution to the original author. This still works fine for our sign-up bonus however. I’ve had the most success finding public domain and creative commons works at a site called Scribd.com. They have tons of PDF’s of various works. And it’s easy to see the the copyright at the bottom of each page. Many of them use the creative commons terms like “attribution” (meaning you must keep the original author’s name in there) or “non-commercial” (meaning you can’t sell it). It’s probably a good idea to familiarize yourself with these terms by visiting the creative commons definitions page. Once you’d found a PDF you like, you can download it directly from Scribd.com and use it in the same way described above. Conclusion Now you have no excuse NOT to give away a great sign-up bonus for your new subscribers! Set aside some time this week to get this together, and start watching your subscriber numbers climb! To get more tips like these, check out Brian Armstrong’s blog at StartBreakingFree.com. It’s full of great advice on how to quit your 9-to-5, start your own business, and achieve financial freedom. He’ll even send you 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth for FREE when you subscribe, instantly delivered to your inbox! Share This

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