Day 5 - Making Your Blog Sticky and Creating a Community
Hello Visitors,
To make your website "sticky" means to use techniques to ensure your readers come back day after day! Sticky websites make more money so in this email I share with you how I make my website sticky and add value to my blog to drive the price up.
Adding Value To Your Blog
Creating a profitable blog isn't just about making more money while you sleep than from your day job but to also create an asset you can one day sell. Perhaps you want to retire one day and go on a trip around the world, buy a villa in the south of France or you just want to feel financially safe. When you sell a website you can sell it usually for 12 months revenue, so if you are making $200 a month, you can then sell it for $2400. On some occasions the site can sell for a lot more, I have seen blogs sell for more than $10 million with monthly earnings around $10,000.
When you signed up for my eCourse, I mentioned that you should "Have the end in mind and make sure every day you are working towards it" - you need to be thinking from day one who you want to sell your website to years down the road. For example if you are starting a tech review blog, then you may consider selling it to Microsoft one day.
The best type of competition is your own and so once you have mastered one successful blog, you may want to consider launching another blog related to your first. Someone who has done an amazing job with this is Collis Ta'eed, he first launched a freelance blog, less than a year later he found his readers also wanted to learn more about Photoshop so launched a new blog for that and within a couple years, he now has over a dozen blog's earning up woods of a million dollars a year. He was only able to do this so successful because they were all related and so every time he launched a new blog everyone jumped on board and started reading it.
One thing which I am a huge believer in, is reinvesting your money into your projects. So many bloggers earn thousands of dollars from their blogs and never put anything back into it. It comes to a point where your blog can't improve much further without you investing some of your money. I really wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't invest in myself and my business. One of our interviewees, 21 year old Jon Wheatley explains in his interview how he has built websites as assets to get to where he needs to be:
I see so many people work hard on a project for months, sell that project for a non trivial amount of money (let's say, $5,000). Then they'll go and spend that $5,000 on a new iPod and a holiday. If they reinvested all of that money, their next project would be worth a lot more than $5,000. If you keep doing this and "leveling up" it's hard not to be successful. (Not that I consider myself to be successful).
So in the future when you sell your blog, you may want to consider reinvesting your money into a even better blog. I often think when companies invest millions into websites because they want a piece of the pie, what if they invested it into their own website. With the Internet, business is totally different. It's hard not to be successful and so when you invest money, if you don't get a return, then it's not a bad investment, you just got scammed.
Adding a Forum to Your Blog
Adding a forum to your blog can be a great way to make your website sticky and to add value to your blog. Usually by adding a forum, you can double your revenue and by doing that, you double the value of your site. A few other benefits include:
- Readers Write The Content
- Readers Reply To Questions
- Possibility Of Charging for Membership
- Building a Community helps you Build a Larger Readership
Usually I only recommend what I use and recommend but from feedback I have found not everyone can invest much money so I will give you a FREE and a PAID option.
PAID OPTION: Every website I create I always add a forum and I do it the same way. The software I use is vBulletin and it does blow me away each time I use it. When I started blogging and creating communities I was silly enough to use another software which wasn't secure, not SEO friendly and customizing created a lot of issues. We all want our forum and blog to look alike and styling your vBulletin theme is a lot simpler than any other paid software. vBulletin costs $100 which although sounds a lot, it will make a huge difference to your blog. Once purchased, to install unzip the folders and rename the file "upload" to "forums" and upload the folder in your Public HTML folder. Then proceed to this page and follow the simple instructions http://yourdomainname.com/install/install.php. Replace yourdomainname.com with your actual domain name.
FREE OPTION: Wordpress has launched a blog plugin that allows you to add a forum to your blog. The benefits are, customizations aren't required because its built straight into your blog, its FREE and installing is easy. The software is called bbPress and can be downloaded here.
You can take a look at my vBulletin forum I recently added to IncomeDiary.com, click here to check it out!
Making Your Blog Sticky
The whole idea of making your blog sticky is to make them take action and participate in your blog and to keep returning, below are the techniques I use.
Get Readers To Subscribe
The best way to get your readers to keep coming back every day is by telling them to. RSS feeds are created to do this for you and although I have touched on it in previous emails, I haven't mentioned how to get the most sign ups possible. What I did was I ran a heat map on my blog to see where people looked at most on my blog and then placed the sign up there. The best place to include a RSS sign up is at the top of your sidebar, also offer an email sign up here using Feedburner email. You can see I have done this on IncomeDiary.com although I use Aweber for my email opt-in as it gives me more control over my email readers.
The next place I found a lot of people were looking was directly after a blog post, this is somewhere you may want to also include an advert or related blog posts. While we are on the subject of subscriptions, sign up for our RSS feed.
Reply To All Comments and Emails
This isn't something that I learned till recently, so many bloggers ignore their readers and their comments. I make it my personal mission to answer everyone because it shows I care and because of that I have 1000's more readers than my competitors. My readers know they will always get their answers here and if I can't tell them what the answer is then I will send them to someone who will.
Post Frequent Blog Posts
Why would someone come to your blog day after day if there isn't anything new to read. This was something recently brought up by Stuart Wooster who is one of the eCourse members, he posted on our forum the effects of his traffic when he stopped posting daily. Check that out here! Pretty self explanatory, post daily and you will be much more likely to be successful. What I do is prepare several weeks of posts in advance and pre publish them so that every day a new one is published on the blog. This means I can be doing anything I want, anywhere I want and still know my readers are getting fresh new exciting content!
Social Proof
Social proof is really important, everyone wants to know if the website they are reading is dead or not. One thing you can do to show it's an active website is by showing your RSS readers, you can do this by going to your feedburner account and click publicize and then you can add a stat counter to show how many RSS readers you have. Another thing I do is to try and build up my comments, you can do this in a few ways, you can ask friends to comment, you can also ask readers questions in your posts and so they reply to you. If you took my advice and decided to reply to everyone's comments, then that will also boost your comments greatly and make your blog look hugely more popular.
Also if you did decide to add a forum to your blog, I use a plugin for vBulletin which shows the members who have visited today. This will show the readers if the forum is active and if they should expect a reply.
Auto Responder Series
I have touched on building your mailing list several times over the eCourse but I can't stress to you enough how important it really is! Take for example my FREE eCourse, you get an email every day for 7 days where I teach you for FREE but I have the opportunity to keep referring back to my website. So when you visited my website and signed up for the eCourse, there was a huge chance you would have never come back but now you have probably come back every day for a week now.
Check out this interview with James Schramko he doesn't just share how he gets a huge amount of sign ups but also how he makes $100,000's a year from them! For your auto responder series, I recommend Aweber and iContact, they both offer a great service!
Blog Competitions
This is a great technique you will see a lot of readers using, if you offer a blog competition, your readers will return more often to see what's up for grabs and how the contest is going. When seeking prizes for your contest, there is no reason for you to be out of pocket, contact your competition or someone high up in your niche for FREE give aways, 9 times out of 10 I get what I want. ;-)
Building Relationships with the Competition
One other really important thing to getting decent repetitive traffic is to build relationships with your competition. My competition often include me in their weekly roundups and put my link in their blogroll. You really need to reach out to your competition and make sure you do something for them, then they will feel they have to do something for you. This works with so many things, if you comment on someone else's blog, they will comment back 9 times out of 10. If you mention them in a post then they will remember you next time they want to do a weekly round up post. Another way to build great relationships and have a chance to network with competition well above you is by asking them for a Interview. For example Rachna Kingston is much more successful then I am and she sure is making a lot more money but when I asked her for a interview, we started being friends and now I know if I ever needed something, should would be able to help me. Actually another benefit was, Rachna included a mention of the interview on her blog and this is really common. If you took a look at my about page you would see that I link to all of my interviewees and let me tell you, they would get plenty of traffic from that!
Another great example is Adriaan Pienaar, I reached out to him for a interview for this blog and now 3 weeks later I sent him a email asking for 5 FREE Wordpress themes worth $400 and without hardly anytime passing, he emailed me back saying, Defiantly Michael, just name it and it's yours! I am sure if I didn't ask him for an interview and start talking to him, then he wouldn't be so eager to help me out. You don't just get to be their friends but the huge other benefit is you get the content and this type of content, is KING! ... Ooo and don't let me forget, they do all the hard work for you by answering your questions!
Actually just for that reason, I want to give you guys a challenge today, go off and find one of your biggest competitors and ask them for an interview, once you have done this, leave your interview link on our forums and I will make sure to check it over and give you any feedback possible. Just to help you guys out even more, below is the email I use to send to my interviewees, it never fails!
Hello Craig,
My name is Michael Dunlop and I work for Midascode LTD representing the young entrepreneurs network of websites.
We have recently begun doing interviews with successful entrepreneurs and we would love to invite you to be one of our main interviewees.
Our two main sites are: www.retireat21.com and www.retiredat21.com they offer business, webmaster and life advice to young entrepreneurs.
You have been on my wish list for a while now, and I was particularly impressed with the success you have had with Craigslist.
I appreciate you are very busy, but please get back to me if you would like to go ahead with this.
Also, we will include links and promo material for your site, and we have a combined readership of over 100,000 readers per month on our webmaster/business sites.
Kind Regards,
Michael Dunlop
I hope today's email has opened up your eyes to some new ideas and hopefully made you think about what your end in mind actually is!
To our success in 2010,
Michael Dunlop
PS. If you need any help with anything mentioned in the eCourse then check out our NEW support forums!
PPS. Let me know how you get on with today's email! I hope it helps...
PPPS. There are dozens of techniques people have told you to use on your blog, the reason I only suggest a few is because I have actually gone out and tested all of the advice out there and these are the techniques that worked for me!
Midascode Ltd, 5 and 6 Azure Suites, Churchill Court, 112 The Street, Rustington, W Sussex BN16 3DA, UNITED KINGDOM
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