Blog Tech Guy

Yaro Starak will very soon re-open his doors to Blog Mastermind, in my opinion the best blog coaching and mentoring program out there. I’ve personally been through the course so have first hand experience of how good it is. His Blog Profits Blueprint FREE eBook is a must read for bloggers. Below he discusses how to move from being a reporter to an expert.

“There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.”

As I mentioned at the start, this article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind blog mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

Get more information about Blog Mastermind.

Another of the great questions I got in response to my newsletter is regarding how to add an email subscription box to your website or blog. So I’m going to look at two methods, Feedburner and AWeber.

Feedburner

Feedburner is a service where it makes it easy for people to subscribe to your feed, and tracks all your subscribers in one location. They also provide an email subscription service, where subscribers will receive a daily email containing all your blog posts for that day (no posts = no email, 10 posts = 1 email).

1. Log in/sign-up to Feedburner (to sign-up you’ll need your blog’s RSS feed which will be something like this http://www.your domain name.com/feed/).

2. Once logged in or set-up, click on your Feed name to go to your Feed Stats Dashboard.

3. Then click the Publicize tab - See the image below.

4. In the left hand column you will see an option called Email Subscriptions, click this.

5. Choose how you want your email to be delivered. For now we’ll choose Feedburner.

6. Click Activate to begin the service.

7. You will now be presented with the form code to put on your site. Scroll down past the AWeber instructions to read how to put this on your blog.

AWeber

AWeber is a professional email newsletter and autoresponder sequence service. I’ve been a member of over a month now and have been thoroughly impressed with their service. From the quick technical support, to the flexibility of their autoresponder and newsletter broadcasts, if you don’t mind paying for a great solution then I would definitely recommend giving their 30 day risk free membership a go (note this isn’t free, just risk-free meaning you can get a refund within 30 days).

To create a sign up form, simply sign into your account:

1. Go to List Settings > Web Form. If you have not set up you list you will be asked to enter certain details before being able to proceed.

2. Press the Create Web Form button.

3. On the form details tab enter:
Form Name: Your unique name for the form
Type: In this example we’re just doing the in-line form, we can experiment with others later (like the Pop-over/Hover that appears on my Contact page for new visitors).
Thank You Page: We can customise this later, for now we can leave it as AWeber’s default page.
Ad tracking: You can give you form a name here so if you have multiple forms you can see which one a subscriber used to sign up.
Press Next.

4. The Design Form window will appear. I like to keep the form short and simple, maybe adding the Name box like I have. Just hover over it with your mouse and press the green + button when it appears. You can also add a headline to your form, and change the name of the submit button. You can always change the form options later.

5. Once you press Save you will be taken back to a list of all your forms. You will see a Get HTML column, and link. When you click on that you will be presented with two options: Javascript or raw HTML. I recommend using the javascript form, the difference is with the javascript form you can track the number of times it is displayed (and compare it to number of sign-ups to find out your sign-up rate), and while the HTML form doesn’t allow this, it does allow you to customise the form outside of AWeber. For now we’ll stick with the javascript.

Adding the code to your blog

If you have signed up for Feedburner, or AWeber, then the act of putting the code onto your blog is essentially the same. Here I will show you how to simply add the code to the sidebar of your Wordpress blog (version 2.5+) and am assuming your theme is widget enabled.

1. In another window or tab, open your blog. You will need your email code window still open, so don’t close that just yet.

2. Go to your Wordpress blog’s management dashboard.

3. Select Design, then Widgets.

4. If you see no widgets here then your theme may not be widget enabled and you will have to add the code directly to your theme files. Please contact me if this is so and I can talk you through the options.

5. On the left hand side, find Text Widget and press Add to add it to your sidebar on the right hand side.

6. Once added on the right hand side, press Edit to open the widget. At the top of the widget you can give the widget a title, such as “Subscribe to Email Updates”.

7. As shown in the image above, copy the code that you’ve been given by your email service (javascript of HTML) into the main body of the text widget. Don’t worry about changing it for now.

8. Once you have the widget title and code in place, remember to press Change to close the Text widget box, and then press Save Changes.

Your subscription box should now appear on your website. In a later tutorial I’ll show you how to change the styling of this. You can re-order your sidebar widgets by dropping and dragging them up and down your sidebar. Just remember to press Save Changes in order to see the results on your website.

You can also put this code in the body of a blog post too, like my newsletter sign up box below! Any questions, or problems please let me know.

I had an excellent response from my newsletter request for questions (to sign up just use the form on the right or below), some of which I’ve responded to personally and some that I thought more could benefit. Two very smart people asked me the same question, essentially what are quick and easy ways to keep people on my blog longer?

“Quick and Easy” is the holy grail of course, and plugins always come to mind, so there are a few things a blogger can do.

Check your stats

If you have a stats/analytics program installed (like the excellent free Google Analytics) you will be able to see some very useful information. Relevant for this question are:

• Bounce rate. This is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. We can use this to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
• Time spent on site. This is simply the amount of time spent on your site divided by the number of visitors. A low tie on site may mean people aren’t finding relevant content, or it’s not interesting enough.
• Where visitors are coming from. A high proportion of visitors from search engine traffic usually means a higher bounce rate and less time on site.
• Search keywords. What words are users searching for that are finding your site. Are they relevant to your site’s content?

These all link into our next point.

Write Relevant Content

You’re probably sick of people telling you to write good unique content. Well it’s still good advice, but it’s also good advice to write articles on the same topic. If a user comes to your site from a search for foreign coins, but finds the rest of your site is about handbags, they’ll not likely to hang around long.

Landing Pages Plugin

This plugin will recognise when a visitor has arrived from a search engine, and suggest other articles on your site based on the term they searched for. This can be downloaded from the Landing Sites plugin page →.

Related Posts Plugin

Similar to the above, but puts related posts at the end of each post, this gives a reader somewhere to go once they have finished reading your post. Related Posts plugin →.

What Would Seth Godin Do? Plugin

Seth Godin is an internet SEO guru who advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site. This plugin displays a small box above each post to new visitors containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin →.

If you have any more questions please let me know. For more tips, sign up for my free weekly newsletter, by filling in the form below.

Quick Wordpress SEO notes:

Basics
- One topic per post, be specific. “What is…”, Top ten posts, best of posts, “How to…” and so on.
- Text in posts should contain keywords, but not keyword stuffing. Bold and italics help a little. Must be natural for the reader!
- Write unique content that’s useful!

Wordpress specific
- Custom permalinks (your URL): as these are automatically generated (though you can change them using the Post Slug function) it makes you post title even more important, see later.
- Category names: broad categories.
- Tag keywords: specific words.
- Post and page titles: usually 5 -7 words containing your keywords. These will appear in either H1 or H2 tags, which show search engines they’re important.
- Image ALT tags (the description section of image upload): make these descriptive and relevant to the picture and article.
- Also sign up for Google Webmaster tools and opt-in to Google Advanced Images Search.
- All-in-one-SEO plugin
- XML Sitemap plugin

That was a very quick overview of what can be a complex topic, so please contact me for any further questions.

Just a quick note, if you use Firefox, there is a new release of a content suggestion plugin for the Write screen in Wordpress (and Typepad and Blogger). Note that this is a plugin for Firefox and NOT a Wordpress plugin, but does add functionality to Wordpress. More info can be found at Zemanta.

It’s an Alpha release which means it is early testing code, but if you want to give it a try, then here’s a demo video below. If you do try it, please let me know what you think!

[Via: Weblog Tools Collection]