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When DIY Blogging isn’t for You: 5 Alternatives to Self-Hosted WordPress

Here on ProBlogger, we’ve always recommended self-hosted WordPress (aka WordPress.org) as the very best platform for blogging.

And with good reason.

Many of the world’s largest blogs and websites run on self-hosted WordPress. Thousands of plugins and themes are available – many for free, although there are lots of premium options too.

And a self-hosted blog gives you full control and plenty of flexibility.

But for some bloggers, self-hosted WordPress might not be the best choice.

You may just want a blog you can use as a personal diary or writing outlet. You may not have the budget for buying domain names and hosting. Even if you do, the thought of settin them up and installing WordPress may seem overwhelming.

Sound like you? Then you may want to look at other options.

(That being said, if you want to build a profitable blog then choose the self-hosted option so you don’t have to migrate everything down the track.)

Which Hosted Platform Should You Choose?

Although there are other platforms that you can install on your own website (where you pay for a hosting account through sites such as Bluehost, Siteground and WPEngine),

But in this article we’ll be looking at hosted blogging platforms.

With hosted blogging platforms, the company hosts your site on their servers – just as Facebook and Twitter let you set up pages and accounts on their sites. And if you want a custom domain name, you can register it through them too.

Which means you can get all the advice, help and support you need from one place–the blogging platform company.

The five platforms we’re covering in today’s post are:

WordPress.com (where the basic plan is free)

Blogger (where the basic plan is free)

Wix (where the basic plan is free)

Weebly (where the basic plan is free)

SquareSpace (where the basic plan is not free. Instead it’s $16/month or $144/year).

But before we start, keep in mind that your site could disappear from any of these platforms if:

your blog violates the company’s rules

the company goes bust

The company has a major problem or outage.

WordPress.com: What to Expect

Find it at: WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a good choice if you’re thinking of upgrading to WordPress.org (self-hosted WordPress) in the future. It functions like a cut-down version of the self-hosted WordPress, and you can transfer your blog from one to the other. Here are WordPress’ instructions on how to do it.

WordPress launched in 2003, and the company is not only well established but also well regarded in the blogging world.

What You Get With the Basic WordPress Plan (Free)

A free domain name (of the format yourname.wordpress.com).

3GB of storage space. (You can upgrade to a paid plan for more.)

A selection of free themes (sometimes called “templates” or “layouts”) for your website. And you can switch themes at any time without losing your content – even if you’ve been blogging for months.

“Jetpack Essential Features”, which offers features such as SEO optimisation, site statistics, anti-spam and more.

Limitations on the Basic WordPress Plan

You won’t have a custom domain name (i.e. one without “wordpress.com” at the end). To get one you need to upgrade to a “personal” plan, which is currently $48/year.

Your blog will show WordPress’ branding and ads. To remove them you need to once again upgrade to a “personal” plan, which is currently $48/year.

You can’t run your own ads. To use ads from the ‘WordAds’ program you need to upgrade to a “premium” plan, which is currently $94/year.

You can’t install plugins or upload custom themes. To do that you need to upgrade to a “business” plan, which is currently $300/year.

Here are the different WordPress plans and their features.

Blogger / BlogSpot: What to Expect

Find it at: Blogger.com

If you want to set up a simple blog quickly, Blogger might be the best choice. It has limited features (which can be a drawback), but it can also be helpful if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by choices.

They offer only a free, basic plan: you can’t upgrade to anything fancier. Again, this could be a drawback or an advantage depending on your blogging needs.

Blogger (aka BlogSpot) is one of the longest-running major blog platforms. It’s been around since 1999, and was acquired by Google in 2003. If you already have a Google account, you simply log in with that and create your blog.

What You Get With Blogger (Free)

A free domain name (of the format yourname.blogspot.com).

The ability to run ads (and it’s easy to use GoogleAds on your blog).

Posts and pages no larger than 1MB, with images uploaded to Google Drive (15GB limit).

A number of free themes to choose from, as well as the ability to buy and upload premium themes. You can switch to a different theme at any time.

Limitations on Blogger

You can’t install plugins, so there’s no way to extend the functionality of Blogger.

If you want to add a custom domain name, Blogger won’t charge you. But you’ll need to buy it from a domain registrar and do a bit of technical setup.

Wix: What to Expect

Find it at: Wix.com

Wix has a simple drag-and-drop interface so you can easily design your pages. If you find WordPress and Blogger daunting or confusing, Wix could be what you’re looking for. It’s designed to create websites rather than blogs specifically, so it’s not so blog-focused as WordPress and Blogger.

Wix was founded in 2006, and acquired DeviantArt (a popular online community for artists) in February 2017.

What You Get With the Wix Basic Plan (Free)

A free domain name (of the format yourname.wix.com).

500MB of storage space. (You can upgrade to a paid plan for more.)

Thousands of fully customisable templates (the equivalent of WordPress’ “themes”). Or you can begin with a blank slate.

A beginner-friendly interface where you can drag and drop different elements onto your pages.

Limitations of the Wix Basic Plan

Your storage space is quite limited: 500MB. While it will be enough for many types of website or blog, videos and images will use it up quickly. To get 3GB of space you’ll need to upgrade to a “combo” plan, which is currently $120/year.

You’ll also need to upgrade to add a domain name. The cheapest way to do this is with a “connect domain” plan for $60/year. (And then you’ll need to buy your domain separately.)

Unless you upgrade, Wix’s ads will appear on your site. And the cheapest “no ads” plan is the “combo” plan at $120/year.

You can’t use custom templates – you can only choose something from Wix’s options. And once you’ve created your site you can’t switch to a new template. Instead you need to create an entirely new site and transfer your content over.

Weebly: What to Expect

Find it at: Weebly.com

Like Wix, Weebly has a drag-and-drop interface with lots of flexibility to help you design your website. Also like Wix (and Blogger), you can’t use third-party plugins to extend your site’s functionality.

But unlike Wix, Weebly lets you use third-party themes (templates) that you can change at any time – even once you’ve created your website. So if you have trouble committing to a design, or you want to try out lots of options before you making your final choice, Weebly might well be a better choice than Wix.

Weebly was founded in 2006, and launched in 2007.

What You Get With the Weebly Basic Plan (Free)

A free domain name (of the format yourname.weebly.com).

500MB of storage space (but you can get more by upgrading to a paid plan).

A number of free themes to choose from, with the option of buying a premium one.

Limitations of the Weebly Basic Plan

Your storage space is quite limited: 500MB. Again, while it will be enough for many types of website or blog, videos and images will use it up quickly. You can get unlimited storage by upgrading to a “starter” plan for $60/year.

You also need to upgrade if you want to add a domain name. (You only need to upgrade to the “starter” plan to do this.)

Unless you pay to upgrade, Weebly’s ads will appear on your site. (Again, you only need to upgrade to the “starter” plan to remove the ads.)

SquareSpace: What to Expect

Find it at: SquareSpace.com

SquareSpace is the only platform on our list that doesn’t have a free plan. Their cheapest is the “Personal” plan at $144/year.

That might put you off immediately. But SquareSpace could still be a good option, so don’t rule it out. (They have a 14-day free trial, so you can try before you commit.)

Like Wix and Weebly, SquareSpace has a drag-and-drop content editor that’s easy to use. If you don’t feel confident with the technology of blogging, it may be a good option for you. While you’re limited to their templates (which can only be customised to a certain degree), SquareSpace’s templates look very professional and slick.

What You Get With the SquareSpace “Personal” Plan ($144/year)

Free custom domain name (without squarespace.com at the end).

Unlimited storage and bandwidth, although you’re limited to 1,000 pages. (There’s no limit on blog posts.)

24/7 customer support.

Hundreds of templates you can customise and style to your own preferences.

SSL Security certificate (https://). Secure HTTP has been becoming increasingly important for Google traffic and rankings for the past couple of years. And it’s particularly important if you take credit card information or have a login option for users.

Limitations of the SquareSpace “Personal” Plan

There’s no integrated e-commerce at the “personal” level. If you want to sell products through your site you need to upgrade to the “Business” plan, which is currently $216/year).

If you want to change the CSS code or javascript for your site, you’ll also need to upgrade to a “Business” plan.

So Which Blog Platform Should You Go For?

When it comes to blogging there’s no one-size-fits-all. And if you’ve ruled out self-hosted WordPress as an option, any of these platforms could be a good fit for you.

If you want to set up a simple website quickly with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you position different elements on your page, Weebly is probably your best option. It’s cheaper than Wix if you need more than the 500MB storage space. And you can change themes at any time. (Still, if you love a particular Wix template it might be worth going with Wix.)

If your focus is on the blog itself, and you’re happy to spend time getting to grips with the interface, Blogger is a simple and straightforward option. And even though it’s free, it still has a lot of features.

If you plan on switching to self-hosted WordPress in the future, opting for WordPress.com now will make the transition much smoother in terms of both moving your content over and your own learning curve.

SquareSpace is widely recognised as having great designs. But that comes at a cost, as there’s no free option. But if you need a premium plan regardless, you might want to go with SquareSpace for its quality designs.

Ultimately, what matters more than your choice of platform is getting your blog online. You could spend months researching and trying different platforms without ever having a live blog.

Blogs can (and do) succeed on a variety of different platforms. If self-hosted WordPress isn’t for you, then any of these options could serve you well. Try a couple that seem promising, and then pick your favourite and stick with it.

I’ll give the last word to Paul Cunningham from Left Brain Blogging, who wrote a great reply to a blogger struggling to choose a platform in our ProBlogger Community group on Facebook last year (emphasis mine):

I know you’ve been struggling with these platform questions for a while so I’m going to give you straight advice. My main concern is that you’ll get so stuck on this decision that it’s going to delay the real progress you’re trying to make.

Go sign up for a free SquareSpace trial. Mess around with the interface and make a few dummy posts or pages. Do stuff you’d normally do, like add an image, or set up a sidebar. Spend an hour on it.

If you like it more than WordPress, then use it. Otherwise use WordPress. Your choice of platform has to be something you’re willing to use and that doesn’t hold you back with technical limitations.

But here’s the bottom line. WordPress is successful for a reason. Whether you like the interface or not, there’s no denying the benefits of going with the mature, large community, feature rich, and deeply customizable platform in WordPress.

What blogging platform do you use?

Photo credit: Christian Stahl

The post When DIY Blogging isn’t for You: 5 Alternatives to Self-Hosted WordPress appeared first on ProBlogger.

When DIY Blogging isn’t for You: 5 Alternatives to Self-Hosted WordPress

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richardrobertsimsuccessblog · 7 years ago

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The “Quit Your Job” Checklist: 8 Boxes You Must Tick Before Flipping Off Your Boss

It’s intoxicating, isn’t’ it?

Your dream of entrepreneurial freedom.

Every spare moment is consumed by your up-and-coming business as you toil, plot and plan.

It’s been a side-gig until now because you’re still tethered to your day job. But you can’t wait to march into your boss’s office and plonk your resignation letter on his desk.

You’re unsure now is the right time, though. What if you’re not ready? What if you take the leap and land in financial ruin? What if your business is a laughable failure and you wind up counting your pennies for your next meal and begging for work to keep the lights on?

Oh crap! Feels risky, right?

It doesn’t have to be. Because you can take precautions. You can minimize the risks. And you can make sure the time is right.

The 4 Big Risks of Quitting Your Job to Work for Yourself

Staying in a job you hate will condemn you to misery, right? But what if quitting winds up making you even more miserable? In truth, it’s a possibility many people ignore. Because leaving the security that comes from a steady job with a steady income means, in the early days, you’re as vulnerable as a tiny boat in an angry sea.

Here are the four biggest risks you face when quitting your job — especially if you quit too soon.

Risk #1: Your Business Fails and Now You’re Unemployed

Most new businesses fail within the first five years. And you’d be naïve to think it couldn’t happen to yours. So be smart and watch the horizon with vigilance in case your brilliant idea isn’t quite as brilliant as you think it is.

Financial momentum can be hard to maintain. Then bills mount up, your bank balance starts to redline, and you’re forced to look for a new job to make ends meet. Ouch.

Risk #2: You Face a Financial Crisis and Can’t Make Ends Meet

Even if your business is booming, that doesn’t mean you’re financially safe. You could lose a major client, wind up too sick to work or get sidelined by a horrid life event.

And let’s face it, if your income dries up you’ll sink pretty damn fast. You’ve got to be financially responsible to survive in the entrepreneurial world. It’s not sexy, yet it’s undeniably essential.

Risk #3: You Discover You Don’t Have What it Takes

Working for yourself ain’t easy. And the fact is that not everybody has the discipline and tenacity to see it through.

The freedom of being your own boss, working in your PJs and avoiding long torturous meetings is enticing. But it’s this very attraction that lures people who aren’t always cut out for it.

The truth is that many people suck at being their own boss. Many people underestimate how much hard work it is. And many people start to endlessly procrastinate when they no longer have a boss breathing down their neck.

Risk #4: You Hate Self-Employment as Much as (or More Than) Your Day Job

Just like a sparkly new love affair, it’s easy to fall head over heels with your new business idea.

In the early days, the little annoyances seem insignificant. Then, fast forward three months and you’re sitting in your home office, feeling isolated from the world, stressed out over disappearing clients, and you realize the honeymoon is over. Misery engulfs you as your new reality is a far cry from what you expected it to be. Maybe self-employment wasn’t the answer to the problem you had with your job after all.

8 Boxes You Must Tick Before Leaving Your Safe, Cozy Job

Now you know the risks that come with quitting your job to work for yourself. And let’s be real — you’ll never eliminate those risks completely.

But if you tick the following eight boxes, you’ll know you’ve taken proper precautions to minimize the risks. You’ll know the time is as right as it’ll ever be to send that resignation letter. And you can feel confident you’ll land on your feet when you do.

#1. You Know How Much Money You Need to Survive Each Month

First, if you want to stay financially safe, you must calculate how much money you need each month to keep your head above water.

So, for one or two months, track all your expenses, and when you’re done, divide them into two columns: essentials (food, rent, utilities, debt payments, etc.) and luxuries (Netflix subscriptions, nights out, etc.).

The sum of your essential expenses makes up your survival budget — the minimum amount you need to survive each month without running into serious trouble.

Then, from the luxuries column, pick three expenses (at most) that you feel you can’t live without. Give yourself some financial wiggle room to accommodate these from time to time, to keep yourself from growing resentful. (It’s difficult to remain motivated when you can’t indulge from time to time.)

Let’s call this your minimum income goal — the minimum amount you need to live in relative comfort every month. This will decide whether you can tick the next box.

#2. You’ve Earned Enough Side-Income to Cover Monthly Expenses for Five Months Straight

Now, once your side income meets your minimum income goal, you may be tempted to send your resignation letter straight away. But hold on…

If you want to be careful, you shouldn’t celebrate too soon. Meeting your goal one month doesn’t mean you’ll meet it again the month after, or the one after that. It may just mean you had a good month.

But if you’ve earned a consistent side income for five months straight, you can feel confident you can keep it up once you quit your job (especially since you’ll have more time on your hands).

#3. You Have a Financial Life Raft That Will Sustain You for at Least Six Months

Next, you’ll need a fully stocked hardship fund. Working for yourself means you carry all the risk on your shoulders — which is exciting and terrifying at the same time.

What if your website faces a huge drop in rankings due to a Google algorithm change? What if Facebook changes its ad policies which severely limits your reach? What if you throw your back out and can’t get any work done while you heal?

To avoid a crushing financial crisis, you’ll need to save up enough money to cover your essential expenses for six months minimum. It’s the smart entrepreneur’s contingency fund that’ll give you the time you’ll need to get back on your feet or, if necessary, find a new job.

#4. You’ve Had Your Side Gig for at Least Six Months, and It Still Excites You

You’re going to spend day and night with your business, so it’s got to be the thing that gets you out of bed, not the thing that sends you diving back under the covers. True entrepreneurs live and breathe their business — by choice. It never fully leaves their mind, even on days off.

If you haven’t spent time working on something every day, you won’t know if you’ll enjoy it.

But if you’ve already worked on it for six months alongside your day job, and you still feel that ping of excitement, you’ll know it’s what you truly want. On top of that, you’ll also prove to yourself you have the self-discipline to succeed.

#5. You’ve Written down Your Short- and Long-Term Goals

Ever worked hard all day and not achieved a thing? Bumbling about with no clear direction is a recipe for fast and definitive failure.

To stay focused and moving in the right direction, it’s essential to have two types of goals. A short-term goal you’re 100% confident you can achieve. And a long-term, slightly audacious big picture goal.

Both should be written using the SMART goal formula: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timed. Mark your measurable progress checkpoints clearly on your planner so you can tick them off on a weekly, quarterly and annual basis.

Doing this means you’ll stay on the right track to business success. If you ever find yourself struggling to meet your goals, you’ll discover it in time to change direction, and not too late to avert disaster.

#6. You’ve Mapped All Your Activities for the First 12 Weeks After Quitting

When you no longer have a boss chasing you with deadlines, it becomes tempting to slack off. You may convince yourself to enjoy your newfound freedom for a while, and that can send you down a path of poor productivity and dismal results.

That’s why you need to establish momentum early on, which you can only do through consistent and continuous action. So your best safeguard against productivity sabotage is to plan with military precision.

Type up a detailed twelve-week action plan, so you know exactly what you’ll be doing each day — starting from day one. Then, start doing. It’s your recipe for success.

#7. You’ve Identified Two Alternative Work Locations

Like it or not, going from a bustling corporate job to a lonely home office can be a shock to the system. Working for yourself may become a slippery slope to darkness as you begin to crave conversation and accountability. Self-employment may soon start to feel like a productivity-zapping isolation cell.

You can avoid this by finding ways to meet your need for human connection that doesn’t involve begging for your job back.

Prepare yourself with a list of at least two alternative work locations that enable you to be part of a crowd while working for yourself. Look for local co-working spaces and coffee shops that offer free wifi.

In many cases, sitting in a coffee shop for a few hours each week as you tap away on your laptop can be the perfect antidote for loneliness.

#8. You’ve Recruited at Least Three People for Support and Accountability

It’s impossible to survive, let alone thrive, in the entrepreneurial world alone. If you’re serious (and I know you are), you simply must surround yourself with people who support you and people who hold you accountable.

It can be the difference between sinking or swimming as you discover what it takes to work for yourself.

Here’s a quick hit list of things you can do:

Find two to five people with whom you feel close who will support and encourage you and your plans. Look to family or friends and share your goals and progress with them.

Join local business networking groups and online forums — and start contributing.

Surround yourself with guidance and advice by finding a professional mentor, or hire a business coach.

Commit to weekly accountability meetings with people from courses you’re enrolled in or groups you’re a member of. Ask someone to be your accountability buddy or join/start a mastermind group.

And those are the eight boxes you must tick to determine you’re ready to leave you job. Here’s an infographic that sums them all up (click on the image to see a larger view):

Embed This Infographic On Your Site

The “Quit Your Job” Checklist: 8 Boxes You Must Tick Before Flipping Off Your Boss from SmartBlogger.com

Ticked All the Boxes? You’re Ready to Quit Your Job

You know that taking the leap into the entrepreneurial world is not for the faint-hearted — and it excites you more than anything.

If you’ve ticked all eight boxes, you should feel confident you can safely quit your job.

You’re now prepared for the adventure with a clear roadmap, a solid safety net and a strong support network.

You’re ready to transition from employee to entrepreneur.

Now is the time to stop playing a small game.

Because freedom awaits.

About the Author: Miranda Hill is a writer and coach who helps life-hungry souls get unstuck from the chaos of life. If you want to stop spinning your wheels, hopping from one thing to the next in search of answers, discover the “10 Mindset Secrets That Set Truly Successful Writers Apart” and realise your full writing potential today.

The “Quit Your Job” Checklist: 8 Boxes You Must Tick Before Flipping Off Your Boss

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Creating a Simple Online Store Using the Stripe Payment Gateway for Free

You have decided it is time to start monetizing your website but don’t know where to start. There are many eCommerce solutions on the market although the majority of these come with high ongoing fees or alternatively an initial lump sum cost. Many people have heard of using PayPal to accept payments in exchange for goods or services but have you considered using Stripe? Your customers can pay using a credit card for your products and services. The transaction is processed by Stripe.

Stripe is one of the best payment gateways to accept credit card for an online business and is currently serving businesses in 25 countries around the world. If you decide Stripe is the perfect payment platform to use on your website, this article will help you set up a simple online store from start to finish for free. Alternatively, if you decide to use PayPal to accept payments from your customers, click here for tips on setting up an online store using PayPal.

Creating an Online Store for Free

You’ve decided that the Stripe payment gateway to accept credit card is the right choice for your online business. Whether you are currently running a blog or have just began setting up a WordPress website from scratch, the Stripe Payments plugin will allow you to accept payments from your customers in exchange for goods or services.

Video Tutorial

What is the Stripe Payments Plugin?

The Stripe Payments plugin is a free eCommerce solution for WordPress that gives anyone the ability to sell simple products or services from their sites. It is a light weight plugin that has all the features needed to operate a simple online store. This free plugin gives you the ability to create ‘Buy Now’ buttons for any products or services you wish to offer and then accept all payments using credit cards (the credit card payment is processed by the Stripe payment gateway).

Features of the Stripe Payments Plugin

Free and easy to install

A quick and easy checkout process where you can accept credit card payments from your customers

The ability to sell digital media products from your website

The option to collect billing and shipping information when selling physical products

The ability to accept donations (for example, if you are creating a charity website)

A shortcode inserter that allows you to input short codes easily in any post/page on your site

An orders menu where you can view everything that has been sold

The option to customize the payment button text

Automatically sends a receipt to your customers

Collect a simple question from your customers when they checkout

A shop page that you can add to your WordPress menu

The Stripe Payments plugin is perfect for business owners that intend on selling simple products to their customers. Each product has a separate payment button that lets the customers purchase the item quickly using a credit card.

Uses of the Stripe Payments Plugin

Selling Physical Products

Using this plugin you can create a shop page similar to the one below. Your customers can use the search bar to find a specific product. You can allow your customers to specify the quantity they would like to purchase, otherwise you can specify a set quantity.

Selling Digital Products

The Stripe plugin gives you the ability to also sell digital products from your website. After your customer purchases a digital product, they will be given a product download link.

Stripe Payments Popup Checkout Window

When a customer clicks on a ‘Buy Now’ button for any of your products/services, they will be shown the Stripe popup checkout window. This is where your customers will enter the credit card details and finalize the purchase.

Creating and Selling a Products

You have a WordPress website and you are ready to start selling products or services.

In this scenario, a woman has been writing a blog about multiple dog breeds for sometime. She has decided that she now has enough traffic to start monetizing her site. She would like to sell three different dog bowls. The following steps will outline how she could create one of her three products:

Step 1) Install and activate the Stripe Payments plugin.

Step 2) Ensure you have created a Stripe account and configured the basic general settings required.

Step 3) Under the ‘Stripe Payments’ menu, click the ‘Add New Product’ button.

Step 4) Give your product a title, description (if you choose) and a price.

Step 5) Choose a set quantity or allow your customers to specify a quantity.

Step 6) If you are selling a digital product select the appropriate file. In this scenario, she is selling a physical product so she would choose to collect billing and shipping information instead.

Step 7) Add a product thumbnail (if you choose).

Step 8) Customize the button text (if you choose). By default, the button text will read ‘Buy Now’.

Step 9) Publish the product you have created. This product will now appear on your shop page. You can use the shortcode inserter to display your product on any post or page on your site (see information below).

Add the Products You Create to Any Post or Page

Once you create a product using the Stripe Payments plugin, you can then display this product on any post or page. This works well if you have a landing page and would like to promote your product at the top or bottom. This feature allows you to promote your products from pages that receive high volumes of traffic.

Use the shortcode inserter to select the product you wish to sell off that post/page.

The Ability to Easily View Customer Orders

Admin can view all orders and further customer details. If you choose to collect shipping/billing details all this information can be found by clicking on a specific customer order.

That finalises the documentation on how you can create an online store for free. To find out more and to download the Stripe Payments plugin (for free) click here.

Creating a Simple Online Store Using the Stripe Payment Gateway for Free

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10 Ways Your Tax Return Can Help Further Your Blogging Career

By Kimi Clark Tax season is the perfect time to invest in your blogging career. Why not use your tax return to help further your blogging career and get you started on the road to blogging success? For some people, tax season is the only time they have a little extra money coming in. Putting […]

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10 Ways Your Tax Return Can Help Further Your Blogging Career

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A HUGE List of Free Resources to Help Run Your Home-Based Business

By Holly Reisem Hanna Leaving the security of a steady paying job to launch a new business can be a scary endeavor. Even if you've planned and saved six months worth of living expenses, often it takes months to start generating income from your business. And guess what? Even if you don't have money coming […]

The post A HUGE List of Free Resources to Help Run Your Home-Based Business appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.

A HUGE List of Free Resources to Help Run Your Home-Based Business

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Craft Jobs for Stay-at-Home Moms

By Holly Reisem Hanna Are you creative? Do you love to sew, paint, draw, or scrapbook? Great news! There are lots of great work-at-home opportunities for artisans and crafters. The market for DIY products and homemade works has never been better for stay-at-home moms, particularly with the growing availability of online resources. From selling your […]

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237: How Collaborations Can Accelerate Your Blog’s Growth

How to Use Collaborations to Grow Your Blog

Have you ever felt that too many things need doing to build a successful blog?

A student I spoke to this week who recently completed our Start A Blog course said they were a little overwhelmed by how much needed to be done.

They said it felt like juggling with too many balls in the air.

So today I want to share a principle that has helped me keep a lot of balls in the air, and scale my business beyond what I ever thought I could manage–collaborations.

When you’re juggling alone you can only keep so many balls in the air. (The current record is 9 balls for 55 seconds.) But if you juggle with other people, you can keep more balls in the air for longer.

And this podcast is all about how you can make your blogging a more collaborative experience.

Links and Resources for How to Accelerate the Growth of Your Blog with Collaborations:

Further Listening

7 Productivity Tips for Bloggers

3 Tips to Increase Your Productivity

How to Create a Product for Your Blog

Examples of Collaborative Content

Creating Products Week: Before You Even Think About Creating Products, Think About This

Creating Products Week: Which Product Should I Create?

Courses

Starting a Blog

ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog

Join our Facebook group

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Hi there and welcome to episode 237 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses designed to help you to start and have an amazing blog that’s going to change the world in some way, that’s going to change the lives of your audience but also build a profit, and in doing so, change your life a little way as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

Of course, check out our two brand new courses. Firstly, our Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog which was released earlier this year, and our soon to be released, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. You can find the Start a Blog course at problogger.com/startablog and you can sign up to be notified when our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course goes live at problogger.com/31days.

In today’s episode, I want to talk about collaborations as a way to grow your blog, to accelerate the growth of your blog. I want to give you some practical ways that you can collaborate with other bloggers to grow you traffic, to create content, to build engagement on your blogs, and to monetize your blog. Collaborations have helped me incredibly to grow my blog, to scale it so much faster than I could’ve ever done alone, and I want to help you to do the same. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/237.

Have you ever felt that there’s just too many things that need to be done to build your blog to make it successful? This week, I was speaking to one of the students who’ve recently completed our a Start a Blog course and they said to me that they felt like they were completely overwhelmed by how much needed to be done. The words they used were they felt like it was a juggle and that they had too many balls in the air at once.

This is a feeling that I can relate too and I’m sure many of you can relate too as well because there’s so many things that need to be done to build a successful blog.

You need to write content, edit that content, polish that content, and schedule that content. You need to promote that content, drive some traffic to your blog, engage on social media, set up an email list. Then when the traffic comes, you’ve got to moderate the comments and engage with the audience, there’s email lists, there’s blog design, there’s servers, there’s plugins, and WordPress that needs to be updated, then there’s the monetization and finding the advertisers, all the affiliate products that you’re going to promote or creating the products that you’re going to sell, and then learning how to sell them, maintaining shopping carts, and the list goes on, and on. I hope I haven’t just made you feel stressed.

This is something that we all feel from time to time. It’s a common feeling. Most of us feel like we just can’t get it all done. There’s a number of solutions to this. One, we can get more effective with our time and certainly productivity is something that we teach about at ProBlogger. In fact, if you want to go back and listen to episodes 40 and 163, I’ll give you some practical tips on how to be more effective with your time. But today I want to share a principle that helps me to keep a lot of balls in the air and to scale my business beyond what I’ve ever thought I’d be able to manage in the early days by myself.

Today I want to talk about collaborations. Here’s the thing when you’re juggling balls for example. There’s only so many balls you can literally keep in the air at once. I actually just look up the world record for how many balls can you keep in the air at once and the world record is nine balls for a single person to juggle for 55 seconds and there’s a video as well of it, it’s pretty cool. You can only juggle so many balls at once, there’s a ceiling to that number but when you juggle with other people you can keep more balls in the air at once and for longer. It’s just logic really. Two people juggling nine balls each, that’s 18 balls and if you’re juggling together, potentially, you could even increase that number.

One of the things that I want to encourage you to do if you’re feeling like you just can’t get it all done, is to consider how you might want to make your blogging more of a collaborative experience. How can you involve others in the experience of blogging? There’s a number of ways to do this and the most obvious one is to hire people to help you. New team members, or to outsource tasks. That’s certainly one option but I know for many of you listening to this, it’s not realistic at this point in your blogging journey. Maybe you don’t have any money to invest into that, you might not have that sort of budget.

For the purposes of this podcast, I don’t want to talk about hiring or outsourcing, that’s probably a topic for another episode. In this podcast, I want to talk about collaborations with bloggers or other online entrepreneurs where you find a win-win opportunity to work with each other, where one person isn’t paying another person to work for them but you’re finding a win-win solution where you both can benefit from doing something together. It’s a true collaboration.

In my experience of blogging, there’s so many ways you can do this to grow your blog and the other person’s blog. The key is to write from the outset, to look for a win-win, to look for something where you are going to benefit. Your blog will grow in some way, the other person’s blog will grow in some way, and their business will grow in some way as well. You both make the same thing out of it, you both make a traffic out of it all, you both make a content out of it all, or you both make monetization out of it all. In some situations, it may be that one person gets traffic and the other person gets content or vice versa.

There’s a variety of different ways you can collaborate. In this episode what I want to do is run through four main areas that you might want to consider collaborating on and they’re all tied around the pillars of ProBlogging that we talk about quite regularly on ProBlogger. If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll know that I advise all the time that you really should be putting most of your efforts into four things.

Firstly, creating content for your blog. Secondly, building engagement with your readers, building community with your readers. Thirdly, driving traffic to your blog, promoting your blog. Fourthly, monetizing your blog. If you want to build a profitable blog, they’re the foundational of things you should be spending most of your time in. Content, engagement, traffic, and monetization.

There’s other things that you should be doing as well but that’s probably where 90% of your time should be going into. In my experience, you can collaborate in each of these four areas and some of you will have a real strength in two or three of them and you may have some weaknesses in another one. One way that you can supplement some of your weaknesses and boost one of those other areas is to find collaborations. What I want to do is to look at each one in turn and suggest one or two things that you could be doing in each of those areas to collaborate.

Firstly, let’s look at content. There’s a variety of way that bloggers could collaborate with one another when it comes to content. Firstly, and perhaps obviously, is we allow each other to create guest content for our blogs. This is very normal, it’s very common and it’s been going on for years. I’ll write you a blog post, you write me a blog post or I’ll just write you one and you post it. There’s a variety of ways that you can kind of structure those kind of agreements, it might be we exchange posts for each other’s blogs or maybe one person just writes for the other.

The idea here is that one person gets content and the other person get some traffic or some exposure to build their profile. This is very common and this is perhaps the easiest way that you might want to collaborate in this, but there’s so many other ways that you could collaborate when it comes to content.

As I look at YouTube, I think we can learn a lot from them. YouTubers collaborate all the time. In fact, if you go to YouTube you can actually find a whole page that YouTube has created themselves to try and foster collaborations because they see it in their best interest if they get their users collaborating together. It’s very common for one YouTuber to appear on another YouTubers channel and they create a piece of content together. Sometimes the piece of content will then go and appear on both of the channels. It’s just normal, they do it all the time and they do it very, very well.

It struck me that this kind of collaboration where we create content together could happen on blogs too. It may be slightly more tricky with written words. We might think, “Well, I can’t write an article with another blogger,” but you actually can. In writing books, co-authorship happens all the time. The ProBlogger book is a co-authored book, it’s Chris Garrett and myself writing different parts of the book. We’ve seen mainstream media. Articles get written all the time that are collaborations and the by line is two people’s names there. People work together as writers, why don’t we do it more as bloggers?

I’ve got 20,000 posts that I’ve published on my blogs over the last 14 years. I didn’t write them all but of those 20,000 posts, I would say 98% of them are one person writing the post. It’s probably more like 99%. There’s two main exceptions to that. Firstly, interviews would be the main exception to that and this is a relatively easy way to collaborate on a piece of content where one person interviews another and this is where I’d be starting out if you want to go beyond this post, I would be interviewing another blogger and then getting them to interview you and have those pieces of content go up on the blog. That’s a really easy way to collaborate on a piece of content.

You could actually write the post together. I can think of two occasions where I’ve done this and I’ve published a post on ProBlogger back in 2004 and I’ll link to the post in today’s show notes so you can see them. In both of these posts, it was part of a series that I was doing on ProBlogger and the posts were written with a guy called Shayne Tilley who many of you will be familiar with. He speaks at our events almost every year and he’s written a number of articles on ProBlogger.

In these two posts, I actually asked Shayne to tackle a topic but I also realized I had some things to say about that topic as well. If you go and have a look at the post, and I encourage you to do it, you’ll see that he’s written the post but from time to time there’s this little section that says, “Darren says,” and it’s got my head in it. It’s my little face and it’s in italic so it looks slightly different. We’ve got these call out boxes, almost looks like a block quote type thing around it. Shayne writes his and his head is there and it says something like, “Shayne says,” and then it says, “Darren says,” and it’s almost like a conversation. It’s not an actual interview. he had written his article and then I chimed in with my comments along the way. This post really went over well. Our readers really enjoyed that back and forth on this topic. It’s just one way that you might want to do a post with someone else, a collaboration in that written form.

There’s so many other ways that you can do it. You could run a series of blog posts across two blogs. I have the first post on my blog, you have the second post on your blog, and then we interlink them. Sending traffic back and forth and collaborating that way, we could do a blog take over. I’ve done this in the past on ProBlogger where I’ve taken a vacation and another blogger I think, Bryan Clark from Copyblogger came on in the early days of ProBlogger and he did a whole week of content on ProBlogger. You could do that type of collaboration as well. Think creatively about it. There’s so many different ways that you could collaborate with another blogger in your niche.

That’s the first pillar, creating content. The second pillar was growing engagement or building community. When it comes to doing that, I reckon there would be a lot of different ways that we could collaborate as bloggers together. For example, why does every blogger have to have their own Facebook group or their own Facebook page? What if a few small bloggers got together and they were from the same niche and decided to have a Facebook group together that they co-ran?

You’d want to choose carefully the type of person that you wanted to work with, you wanted to have some trust with that person, I’ll talk more about building that trust later but why not do that? You may not have a big enough audience to really keep a Facebook Group running but what if two or three other bloggers in your niche decided to do it with you? Together, you probably would have enough people and it’s a way of exposing each of you to each other’s audiences and to build some engagement that could go deeper and beyond what anyone of you could do individually.

Similarly, you could run a Twitter chat together. Some bloggers actually do this, they agree on a hashtag and they decide that each of them is going to promote this hashtag, and once a week they do a Twitter chat where they get all their readers together to have a chat. Live video will be another way of doing it. You could do some live videos and share them to all of your different Facebook pages, or all of your different Facebook groups, and introduce each other’s audiences to one another. Engagement, building that sort of back and forth is something that you could do together. In fact it may actually be easier to do, particularly if you’re just starting out, if you do it together.

Third pillar was driving traffic. The same thing is true when it comes to doing that. We all share our own content on social media and emails each week. Why not partner up with another blogger and agree to share some of theirs if they share some of yours? I’ve done this a number of times over the years with other bloggers.

For example, when I was just starting Digital Photography School, there was another photography blog that was on a slightly different topic to mine. It had a slightly different focus but we realized our audiences did overlap. We decided that five times a week, once a day, we would share a post that the other one had written that day on our social media accounts. It was very simple, we just had this little Skype conversation open all the time. Every time we publish a new post, we just left the link in the Skype conversation and then every day when we’re scheduling our social media, we went to the Skype conversation and grab the other persons link and added it into our social media channels.

Once a month, we decided that we were going to promote each other’s content, one piece of content in an email newsletter. We each got to choose one of our posts that we thought would work best for the other person to link to in their newsletter. As a result of just doing that, both of our blogs grew faster and we accelerated the growth of our blog. There’d be so many different ways to do that. That was just me working with one other blogger, I’ve seen bloggers do this in little groups and they set up a Facebook group and they do this sort of sharing type thing. There’s a lot of different ways that you could do this.

The last pillar that I want to talk about is monetization and for me this has been the biggest area of collaboration. I guess this started way, way back when I began to do affiliate promotions of other bloggers’ products. I remember the first time I actually did, I saw this other blogger in the photography space, had created an ebook. I’ve never really seen another blogger do an ebook before and then I noticed that it had this thing called an affiliate program to promote the ebook. They said that I could promote it and anyone could promote that ebook and earn 50% commission.

I think it was like a $15 ebook and I was like, “Wow, $7.50 per sale,” I wonder what I could do in terms of sales. I signed up for their program. I didn’t contact the blogger at all. I just signed up for their program and I grabbed the affiliate link, and that night I sent out an email to my little photography list. By sending out that email, I made a few hundred dollars over night and I was like, “Cool! That’s pretty cool,” that was just one email and for me that was a pretty big deal at that time. I decided a few weeks later to contact that blogger directly because I noticed they had a number of different ebooks.

I approached him, I didn’t really know what I was doing, I didn’t know whether it was a dumb thing to approach people directly but I approach the blogger and I said, “Would you be interested in giving my readers a discount on one of your ebooks?” He didn’t really know whether that was a dumb thing either, this was all new to both of us but we decided to give it a go. He’d seen the sales come through from my previous promotion and he said, “Yeah, I’ll give you 30% off for your readers for a week.” We did this week long promotion on another one of his ebooks and a few months later my email list was slowly growing, and growing, and growing and it was the first time I’ve done anything like this.

I sent out an email and it went crazy because there was a discount this time. Over the coming weeks, I think we made about $5000 in sales as this promotion ran and that promotion did a few things. Firstly, it cemented a relationship with this blogger and we continued to work together for a few years after that. We’re semi-regularly promoting each other’s ebooks. Once I created some ebooks he became an affiliate for me as well. It became a really mutual relationship where we promoted each other’s stuff, where we made quite a bit of money together. The other thing that I learned by doing that little collaboration was that ebooks worked with my audience and so I decided to create my first ebook.

I began the painstaking process of writing my first photography ebook. For me, it took me three or four months to get that ebook written, it was a lot of work. I got there in the end though. I think I tell the story of the creation of that ebook in episode 67 and back in that episode you might remember that ebook actually did really well with our audience. We made about $72000 over the 10 days after that launch. It was a really good payoff for all that work. But I got to the end of that launch and I knew I needed to do more products of my own but I just didn’t have the time. This bring me back to collaboration again.

Creating ebooks was another ball that I had to put in the air but I was already at capacity, I was already juggling my nine balls, I didn’t know how to add a tenth into that scenario. I decided the only way I could do it to create a second ebook was to find a collaborator. I reached out to one of the people who’d been writing some articles on my blog and we started talking about maybe instead of writing some articles for me, they could write an ebook for us and we decided to create this ebook together. He’s had a collaboration work, he wrote it, he did all the work, and I’m writing it which was a lot of work but I worked on the design, the marketing, I had the traffic, I had the email list, and he didn’t have any audience. I worked on promoting it and marketing it. Getting a shopping cart up, doing the customer service, and drove a lot of traffic to it, and we decided that we were going to split the profits on that.

That ebook did a lot better than the first one and it began a snowball effect in many ways. That collaborator went on to write three more ebooks. We ended up with four ebooks with him and then he also created a series of courses with us as well. It became an ongoing relationship that we had and as a result we made a fair bit of money for him and he made a fair bit of money for us as well.

Today we’ve published I think it’s around 30 ebooks. All of them, except for the very first one, are collaborations. I’ve not written a single ebook on Digital Photography School since the very first one. In fact that first one no longer is available for sale, it’s been superseded. We’ve created six courses, all of them are collaborations. We’ve created some softwares, some Lightroom presets, all of them are collaborations.

As I look at my income streams, 90% of them are collaborations. The only real exception in all of my income streams that’s not a collaboration is the job board on ProBlogger and perhaps the event that we run for ProBlogger as well although even that you could probably argue as a collaboration of sorts because we work with a variety of speakers who speak at out events as well.

Ninety-percent of my income streams, even the ad networks, that’s a collaboration. I’m partnering with AdSense, we sell ads directly to sponsors. I guess you could say that’s a collaboration because the sponsor is working with us but we actually outsource the process of selling those ads as well to a third party who takes a cut of those ads as well so that’s a collaboration too. Everything I do is collaborations when it comes to income and as I’ve been preparing this podcast, I guess really come home to me just how important collaborations have been for me.

How do you develop these collaborations I guess is the big question. The thing I want to say is that, yes, today 90% of my income comes from collaborations but it started really small. It started because that guy who wrote that first ebook with us, he started as a writer on our site and that was the small collaboration. He started writing some guest posts for us and we sent him a little bit of traffic, and helped build his profile, and he created some content for us, and that’s where it began.

The first thing I would really encourage you to do is to think about how you can start small. You may not want to leap into writing a book together as your starting point. Start with them writing a piece of content for you or you writing a piece of content for them, or start with, “Let’s promote each other’s content once a week,” and let that relationship grow, let that trust grow, see if you work well together. Do small things and let the great relationship grow naturally over time.

When I first had that guy write on my blog for the very first time, I didn’t know it was going to turn into an ebook deal, then courses, and an ongoing thing. I didn’t realize the nature of that relationship, I just started with something small. When you’re looking for collaborators, look for people who have complementary skills sets to you. You don’t want to just duplicate it, you don’t want to just choose someone who’s exactly like you because then you’ll end up just doing the same things. As you look at your own skill set, maybe there’s a deficiency, maybe you’re not as good on design, or maybe you’re not as good at promotion and marketing. Find other people who can complement those things and fill in those gaps that you have.

Look for collaborators who share your audience or at least complement your audience. You don’t have to have a blog on exactly the same topic but there needs to be enough overlap, particularly if you’re going to drive traffic in the collaboration, there’s overlap there. You don’t want to be a fashion blogger, and if they’re a travel blogger, and you’ve got completely different audiences. You might work well together if they’re a fashion blogger, and you’re a travel blogger, and you share the same demographic of audience but if you’re talking to retirees who are 70 and they’re talking to millennials, it’s probably not going to work at least in terms of sharing traffic and building engagement in that way.

Look for collaborators who share your values. I can’t stress this enough. The few times that I’ve run into issues over the years with collaborations, it usually came down to us having different expectations of the relationship, different motivations, and ultimately some different values as well. You want to choose good people, people of character, people who share your values, your goals, and expectations as well. As part of this, you want to make sure you set the boundaries of the relationship early. Get the expectations right. If it’s going beyond, “Hey, I’m going to write a piece of content for you, and you write a piece of content for me,” if you’re getting into, “We’re going to create a product together,” you want to get that in writing and know right up front how that is going to operate.

There’s a variety of models there in terms of sharing revenue. You may do a collaboration where one person takes a higher percentage of profit or revenue based upon them bringing more to that relationship. It doesn’t always have to be 50-50 but you want to be really clear up front about how the benefits, the wins from that collaborations are going to be split up.

Lastly, communicate. It’s just so important to keep the avenues of communication open in these collaborations at all times. I’ll just stress again, start small, you don’t have to leap into a massive collaboration with someone that you barely know. You want to build trust. Let that relationship grow naturally and who knows where it might end up.

I hope that’s helpful. I would love to hear your stories of collaboration. I know many of you have collaborated in ways that I haven’t mentioned in this particular podcast and so I’d love to hear how you collaborate. Maybe we could do a follow up podcast at some stage with some of the things that you advice. You can let us know how you collaborate, any ideas that you’ve got on this topic in two ways. Firstly, on our show notes where there’s an opportunity to comment at problogger.com/podcast/237 or in our Facebook group. You can let us know there any tips that you’ve got. If you are sharing a tip, just make sure you use the appropriate hashtag there. We like everyone to hashtag every post that they’ve got. If you’ve got some advice, hashtag it with that and if you’ve got a question to ask as well, make sure you do that. There’s information in our pinned post about how to hashtag your posts.

Thank you so much for listening today. I’m actually going to be on the road next week, there may not be a podcast coming out on next Monday because I will be in San Diego at Social Media Marketing World where I’ll be doing a talk. Part of my talk is actually about this very topic. If you’re in San Diego, I’d love to catch up with you at Social Media Marketing World. Otherwise, I’ll be back on the podcast in a couple of weeks’ time with episode 238. Thanks for listening, chat with you next time.

If you are looking for something else to listen to, I did mention a few episodes during this particular episode. Episode 40 was 7 Productivity tips for Bloggers, episode 163 was another 3 Different Tips for Increasing your Productivity, and episode 67 was How To Create A Product For Your Blog where I tell the story of my first product and give you some suggestions on creating products for your own.

Dig around in the archives, there’s 236 other episodes to find there. You might want to go back through iTunes. They’re all sitting there, at least they will be for the next little while. I think 300 is the limit. Some of those early episodes will begin to disappear once we get up to the 300 episode mark. Thanks for listening.

If you’ve got a moment as well in iTunes or whatever podcast app you are listening to, I would love it if you’d leave us a review and rating. I do read them all, I get a notification every week every time a new one comes in. Let us know what your name is in that as well and if you want to pop in your blog link, it doesn’t come up as a hyperlink but I do check out the links of all blogs that are mentioned there as well. Thanks for listening, chat with you next time.

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics or subscribe to the series, find us at problogger.com/podcast. Tweet us at @problogger. Find us at facebook.com/problogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

This episode of the ProBlogger podcast was edited by the team at PodcastMotor, who offer a great range of services including helping you to set up and launch your podcast as well as ongoing editing and production of the podcast that you produce. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com

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richardrobertsimsuccessblog · 7 years ago

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Behind the Scenes of ProBlogger’s First Course Ever

Last month we launched our very first ProBlogger course. After a whirlwind few weeks (months, actually ), I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a bit of what happened behind the scenes while creating the Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog course.

Why have we only started offering courses this year?

To say it’s been a long time coming is a bit of an understatement. We’re constantly asked why we don’t offer courses, as it seems like the most obvious thing we should be doing. Our focus has always been on offering great value that’s easily accessible, whether it’s our free blog posts, podcasts or world class (yet very reasonably priced) events.

All of which takes up a huge chunk of time and dedication from our small team.

We’ve been thinking about courses for a while now, and our goal is to create a blogging course unlike any other. Something that goes beyond the that goes beyond the prescriptive “this is how I did it” approach that doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.

And so we created the Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog course, and made it available for free.

But this is just the beginning. We have many more courses in the pipeline, and together they’ll help you piece together the best approach to blogging for you.

What is the first course about?

Our first course starts at the beginning – how to start a blog. Actually, it starts even earlier in the process, as one of the first things the course asks is whether you should even start a blog.

That’s one of the reasons our first course is totally free. We don’t want you buying a course on how to blog if you find out blogging just isn’t for you. We also don’t advocate investing too much in getting your blog set up.

But we strongly suggest having a solid base (your own domain and a self-hosted site) so it’s easier to progress if you decide to stick with it.

So, the first course provides a lot of guidance about:

why you should or shouldn’t blog

what to blog about and call your blog

the basic steps to getting your first blog up and running and posting your first post.

All up there are seven steps. And while it’s basic it’s also quite comprehensive – at least for a free course.

This was our beta launch, which we ran in the lead up to our self-proclaimed International Start a Blog Day on February 7th – a day to celebrate starting a new blog in a new year.

How did we create the course?

We get a lot of people asking us how we created the course site. So here’s the breakdown in case you’re looking for a possible way to launch your own.

Content

The content for the course is a mix of repurposed content from our blog, podcast and events, along with new content created specifically for the course. So we spent a lot of time editing existing audio, creating accompanying slides and converting them to videos, as well as creating new worksheets and other downloadable resources.

At first we were a bit worried about repurposing existing content. But when we realised how much work it is to a) find it in the first place, and b) organise it into a comprehensive easy-to-follow course, we were glad to have these resources to draw on and add the extra value of convenience and structure for our readers.

Infrastructure

We have a separate WordPress installation for our courses site, which sits on a different server to our main blog and podcast site installations. Here’s what our ‘stack’ looks like.

LMS (Learning Management Software)

Learndash – we like how this solution is both comprehensive and easy to use.

Theme

Social Learner – incorporating Buddypress elements for community features (we don’t use all of them), this theme provides a good looking layout for the modules and lessons. We also used Thrive Architect (which works nicely with Social Learner) to build some of the extra content elements into our pages.

Membership Plugin

WPFusion – this is an elegant plugin that lets us easily control access to content based on tags specified in Drip for our course members.

Email Communication

We use Campaigns in Drip to automatically onboard course members after they’ve either filled out one of our Thrive Leads opt-ins or registered directly through the site.

Payments

Whilst the first course has been free, we’ll use our existing e-Commerce solution Easy Digital Downloads to process payments and pass information to Drip and the courses site via WPFusion.

Forum/Group

While our setup has the option for a forum, groups and comments (we turned comments on for some of the modules), we elected to run a Private Facebook Group for the first intake of students. Partly to test one against the other, but mainly so we could get students’ feedback on the course as they progressed through. It also served as a customer service channel.

We won’t be maintaining an ongoing group for the course throughout the year (course members can join our main Facebook group at problogger.com/group). But we will run one in conjunction with International Start a Blog Day each year.

Promotion

Building awareness, and the call to action to sign up for our Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course, was done primarily through the ProBlogger podcast, along with a sales page and a couple of articles on the blog.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, we changed how we did the ProBlogger podcast to generate interest in starting a blog and the course we were launching. Instead of a weekly podcast, we released a series of 12 shorter podcasts (one each weekday). And is each episode we shared a different blogger’s story about how they started their blog and how far they’ve come. These stories were told by ProBlogger podcast listeners who submitted their stories as audio files. This series of podcasts has one of the highest levels of engagement of any I’ve released. In each podcast there are calls to action to sign up for the course via the sales page on the blog.

The sales page for the Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course had an easy-to-communicate URL (problogger.com/startablog/), and a snappy design created using Thrive Architect. We linked to it in our “Start a Blog” section of the blog, as well as in a couple of articles we wrote about a starting a blog in the New Year.

Knowing that most of our audience had already started a blog, we asked people to share the information about our new course. We asked our existing readers to share it with those they knew who may be interested in starting a blog. We also asked the people who signed up for the course to share it with their friends.

Launch

Trying to launch anything early in the year can be tricky, especially when everyone in the southern hemisphere is typically on summer holidays. Like many course creators, we were still creating content and making the site look and work the way we wanted right up to the deadline.

We had team members holidaying in different time zones with bad wi-fi issues and sick kids. Some last minute re-recording of tutorials had Laney chasing away noisy dogs and throwing sticks into trees to scare away squawking birds. (We have some pretty obnoxious birds in Australia.)

It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. But we kind of made our launch date (I’m sure we made it in a timezone somewhere in the world). And the actual launch happened without too many hiccups other than some people having activation issues because they clicked the link more than once.

The main takeaway? Don’t expect everything to go smoothly, keep your cool, and prepare to work hard when it counts.

Outcome

We were blown away by the response. We knew there would be some, but given our readers have mostly started blogs already, it was hard to know just how many students we might get.

Sometimes you just have to trust your gut and go for it.

By the time it went live, almost 5,000 people had signed up for the course. Of these, roughly half went on to enrol in the course once it was launched, and half of those started the course (a little more than 1,000 students).

In the time between launching the course (January 10) and International Start a Blog Day (February 7), more than 1,000 new subscribers had signed up for the course. By the time February 7 came around, more than 2,000 students had started the Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course. More than 100 new blogs were launched in time for International Start a Blog Day, with many more launched since. You can check them out here.

And there were other positive outcomes too.

We ended up with more than 1,000 members in the beta Facebook Group, which gave us very useful environment for getting direct feedback from students as they were trying out the course. We learned a lot about:

the people who were signing up for the course

what their issues and pain points were

what they did and didn’t like about the course

how we could help them going forward by improving the course (and in other ways).

International Start a Blog Day was also a very rewarding experience for me and the ProBlogger team. We got to really see and celebrate the course outcomes for the many students who launched new blogs as a result. We loved compiling the honor roll of new blogs – exploring their sites, reading people’s stories, and seeing how they put their learning into practice.

And we now have a very comprehensive opt-in that helps us identify people we can help on their blogging journey. Best of all, they’ve shown they have the drive to take action, which makes it even easier for us to help them succeed.

What’s next?

In March we’ll be launching our first paid course – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog – the successor to the ever popular book of the same name. The course version includes:

more detailed course materials with video tutorial presentations

printable worksheets, resources, and further reading

recommendations and tools to help set the right foundations for accelerated growth.

For more information, and to sign up as one the first students to sign up for the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course, visit courses.problogger.com/courses/31-days-to-build-a-better-blog/.

We’re also reviewing the feedback we’ve received from the beta Start a Blog course group to help tweak and improve that course for future students.

Have you launched a course recently? How did it go for you?

The post Behind the Scenes of ProBlogger’s First Course Ever appeared first on ProBlogger.

Behind the Scenes of ProBlogger’s First Course Ever

#Richard Roberts IM Success Mix #Behind the Scenes of ProBlogger’s First Course Ever

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richardrobertsimsuccessblog · 7 years ago

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5 Things Nobody Tells You About Making Money in Your Underwear

That’s the dream, right?

No dragging your butt out of bed at an ungodly hour, sitting in traffic, being stuck inside an office all day, and slaving away your life for a measly paycheck.

Instead, wake up whenever you feel like it, saunter over to the laptop in your skivvies, and sip a cup of java while you “work.” Take a vacation whenever you want, spend time with your loved ones, and travel the freakin’ world.

Hell, yeah…

Too bad it’s just a fairytale, though. We’ve all seen the scammy ads about making $80 an hour filling out surveys, starting your own online store in a “virtual mall,” making megabucks from reselling old crap on eBay or Amazon. There are a gazillion different variations, all of them promising you easy money, all of them stoking your hope of a better life, all of them a little too ridiculous for you to believe in, even though you really, REALLY want to believe.

But you’re not a fool. You know they’re not telling you the truth. It can’t be as easy as they make it sound.

And you’re right. I’ve made my living on the Internet for eight years now, and while it’s certainly nice, there’s also a lot nobody is telling you. Not because it’s a secret, but because most people don’t actually want the truth. They want to believe it’s easy, fun, straightforward.

If anything though, it’s the opposite, and that brings us to the first lesson:

Lesson #1: You can’t do this in your “spare time.”

Regardless of whether you’re starting a blog, building an online course, or creating your own virtual storefront, you probably don’t think of it as a “business.” It’s a project, a hobby, a “side hustle.” No offices, no employees, no budgets or business plans – it’s just you tinkering around in your spare time.

Right?

Well… not if you want to succeed.

In my experience, people who make a nice living online view it as a business from day one. That doesn’t necessarily mean they get an office or hire employees, but they approach it with the same mindset any sane person would have when starting any other type of business.

For instance, let’s say you’re starting a dry-cleaning business. You’d probably go to work for another dry cleaner first, learn the craft, figure out how you would do things differently, save your money, and then launch your own competing dry-cleaning business with a solid understanding of the market and what it takes to succeed.

In other words, you would put serious thought and effort into it, start preparing months or even years in advance and work your ass off for several years to make the business take off. That’s a normal mindset for anyone starting a new venture.

For some reason though, people’s mindset is entirely different when thinking about making money on the Internet. They are looking for quick and easy, not hard and long. They want a way to game the system, not a way to win the game. They try to minimize their investment of time and money, not maximize their ROI.

And I’ll be straight with you:

That’s dumb.

Making money on the Internet is just as difficult as making money in any other type of business. The capital requirements aren’t as high as opening a brick-and-mortar store like a dry-cleaning business or a restaurant, meaning it’s easier to get started, but you’re also facing global competition. You’ll need to be better, smarter, and faster than entrepreneurs only competing in their local markets.

The only appropriate mindset is to accept that you are investing years of your life and every penny of your savings into a venture that might ultimately fail. If it does succeed, it’s also not going to be because of your creative genius or some magical technology that makes money pop out of your computer. It’s going to be because of hard work, sound thinking, and skill.

Especially skill. Let’s talk about that next…

Lesson #2: Being smart isn’t enough.

We’ve all heard the story of the stereotypical Internet entrepreneur. Some smart kid sees an opportunity nobody else does, works night and day to create a groundbreaking product, and then goes on to become filthy stinking rich. In other words, the equation is something like this:

Smart + opportunity + hard work = success.

And that’s a beautiful story. Like many stories, it’s also mostly true, but it’s missing some important details.

To make money online, you do need to be smart, you need to find an opportunity, and you need to work hard. All those variables are totally accurate. What no one tells you is that there’s one additional variable that’s just as important as all the others combined:

Skill. If we were to modify our equation, it would look like this:

(Smart + opportunity + hard work) X Skill = Success.

And here’s the part that’s really hard to wrap your mind around:

The specific skill you need changes depending on the opportunity. If you want to start a freelance graphic design business, you’d better be a pretty freaking good graphic designer. If you want to start the next Facebook, on the other hand, you’d better be a pretty freaking amazing programmer. To be more precise, you need whatever skills are necessary to capitalize on the opportunity better than all the other smart, hard-working people pursuing the same opportunity.

In other words, you need to be elite. I’m not sure what the precise measurement of “eliteness” is, but if I had to put a number on it, I would say you need to be in the top one percent of all people worldwide with your skill. That might sound scary, but it’s actually not a very high bar because the vast majority of people doing anything suck. If you have at least a little natural talent for the skill, you can probably become a member of the top one percent with a few years of diligent work and study. Here’s how…

Lesson #3: Education is everything (and nothing).

The whole mythos around Internet entrepreneurs is they spurn education. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates dropped out of school. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel pays entrepreneurs $100,000 NOT to go to college. That’s as “anti-education” as it gets.

Or is it?

If you look a little deeper, you’ll find that most entrepreneurs are devout believers in education, but they also believe that certain systems of education, such as universities, are fundamentally flawed. They espouse a more experimental model of learning where the student states their assumptions, poses a hypothesis, and then proceeds to test that hypothesis, not only to learn but also to hone their skills in the real world.

In other words, entrepreneurs learn how to teach themselves. Not just by reading books, not just by listening to teachers, but by observing the world around them, thinking about what they see, and then coming up with their own interpretations. They don’t depend on anyone to “break it down” for them. They figure it out for themselves.

And it’s not just a learning style. In many cases, there’s no alternative.

With making money on the Internet, for example, there isn’t a degree program or book that’ll teach you everything. It doesn’t exist, and it never will, because the Internet is evolving too quickly. By the time someone created the book or degree program, most of it would be out of date.

There’s one exception: skills. Many of the skills necessary to build an online business either don’t change much, or they are easily transferable. For example, if you learn one programming language, it’s relatively easy to pick up another. Negotiation, business writing, and marketing are skill sets that haven’t changed much in decades or even centuries.

And it’s useful to have a teacher. If you’re learning how to write an advertisement, for example, you can learn a lot faster if you have a master copywriter critique your ads.

In my experience, this is where books, online courses, and other forms of traditional education shine: the acquisition of evergreen skills. You can then apply those skills in the real world to continue learning. For instance, the following skills are always in demand and have long-term value:

Copywriting

Graphic design

Programming

Content creation

Content promotion

Marketing automation

Public speaking

Ad management

Social media management

Project management

Freelancers with elite skills in one or more of those areas often make six figures per year, working completely online. They get to choose their hours, travel when they feel like it, and, and live a pretty awesome lifestyle.

Granted, it’s not total freedom, because they do have to work, but they also have a lot of control over how they work, and in my experience, that’s what really matters. Here’s what I mean…

Lesson #4 You don’t actually want freedom.

Let me guess…

You love the idea of building a passive income that flows into your bank account like clockwork every month?

Maybe it’s the idea of working in your underwear, choosing your own hours, traveling the world, or whatever. The idea is passive income = freedom.

And here’s the good news:

It’s true. Over the last eight years, I’ve built a passive income “machine” that’s allowed me to travel and live a life most people only dream about.

But it took a long time. Contrary to popular belief, passive income isn’t just something you can create out of thin air. It takes time to build, and it’s a five-stage process:

Learn a valuable skill. We discussed this one in the last couple of lessons. I recommend picking one of the ten skills and taking online classes.

Practice until you are elite. Again, you are competing against everyone in the world, so it’s essential you’re in the top 1%. The bad news is, you’ll probably start in the bottom 10% and work your way up, usually by working as either an employee or freelancer.

Start your own business. Once you’ve built a collection of elite skills, you’ll probably run across an irresistible opportunity, and you’ll jump in with both feet. It’ll take you several years or maybe even decades to become a successful entrepreneur.

Replace yourself. Passive income is the result of turning what you do into a system that runs without you. Sometimes an employee replaces you, sometimes you can automate everything with software, and sometimes you simply teach what you’ve learned through an online course.

Fine tune the machine. The bad news about passive income is it’s almost never entirely passive. Yes, you can reduce your number of hours, but you’ll still want to spend a few hours each week fine-tuning the machine. This is where the idea of the “Four Hour Workweek” came from.

And let’s be clear:

You don’t receive any passive income until the final step. From start to finish, I don’t know anyone who has done it in less than five years, and it takes most people 10+.

I realize that’s way more work than you probably anticipated, but here’s the good news:

Chances are, you don’t really want total freedom. What you actually desire is flexibility, and that’s much easier to achieve.

What’s the difference?

Well, freedom means you can get up every morning and do whatever the hell you want. Play golf, go surfing, travel to Paris, or just stay in bed all day. You’re in total control of every aspect of your life.

Flexibility, on the other hand, only gives you partial control. You still have to work, but you decide when and where. For instance, maybe you take your family to Italy in the summer for six weeks, work every morning and evening on your laptop, and then gallivant around the rest of the day.

Still sounds pretty good, right? And the good news is, it takes far less time and effort to get there. Maybe 6-12 months.

Here’s how: take a few online courses on any of the skills I recommended, do a bit of free work for friends and family as a way of building your portfolio, and then apply for virtual jobs requiring that skill. You may not make a lot of money to start, but as your skill grows, so will your income, and you’ll eventually find it easy to replace your day job.

You can also accelerate the process by moving to a cheaper country, which brings us to:

Lesson #5: It sucks to be an American.

Probably going to get flamed for saying that, but it’s true, and not just for Americans. Living in Canada, England, Australia, or many European countries is just as tough, and the reason is simple:

It’s expensive.

Between our houses, cars, meals, gas, and all the other little expenses, it’s hard to survive in most cities for under $3000 per month. In some big cities like San Francisco, New York, or London, you can barely get by on $8-10k a month.

But take a look at this…

I rented a luxury condo on the beach in Mazatlan, Mexico for $1600 a month. A meal at a restaurant was about four dollars. I could get a reputable doctor who spoke English to do a house call for $20. Altogether, I spent about $3,000 a month, and I lived like a king.

And here’s the crazy part:

I was able to make that much working only 20 hours a week as a writer and editor. As my skills improved, eventually my income crossed $10,000 per month – more than three times my living expenses.

There were also tax advantages. I won’t go into the details here, but Google “earned income tax credit.” It’s complicated, but you can actually save a lot of money on your taxes by leaving the US.

Altogether, it’s far easier to make a living online when you’re living in another country, and the lifestyle is better too. The biggest reason I came back to the US is that I eventually started my own company, and banks get a little nervous when you’re processing more than $1 million per year in credit card transactions from your laptop on a beach in Mexico. No idea why… haha. It was also nice coming home after living abroad for years.

The bottom line?

Not only does the Internet give you opportunities for increasing your income, but it also gives you ways to reduce your expenses substantially. It’s by no means a requirement to move to another country, but it certainly makes making a living easier, and when you’re getting started, you can use all the advantages you can get.

Here’s How to Get Started Making Money Online

So, we’ve covered a lot of ground here.

Mindsets, skills, passive income, having the flexibility you want to live the way you want. Hopefully, it’s all starting to make more sense.

But chances are, you’re wondering what to do first.

Should you create an online course? Start a blog? Find a freelance gig where you can learn and grow?

There are a lot of options, and the truth is, all of them are viable. Nobody follows exactly the same path.

But here’s what I recommend:

Figure out what skills come naturally to you. Chances are one or two of the ten skills I listed are easier for you than for most other people.

Buy a few online courses on those topics. In the future, I’ll publish some recommended courses, but until then, just use Google.

Start applying for freelance gigs. You might get rejected a lot at first, but eventually, somebody will say yes, and you’ll make your first dollar off the Internet.

From there, you can scale up. Maybe you’ll start your own business with employees and offices, or maybe you’ll just become a highly paid freelancer. Neither path is right or wrong. It’s just two different lifestyles.

The bottom line?

Making money online isn’t a fairytale. You can do it. You just have to be smart about it and have realistic expectations.

Good luck!

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the CEO of Smart Blogger. Check out his new blog Unstoppable and read the launch post that went viral: 7 Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything but His Face.

5 Things Nobody Tells You About Making Money in Your Underwear

#Richard Roberts IM Success Mix #5 Things Nobody Tells You About Making Money in Your Underwear

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