This saying just doesn’t apply to a golfer’s life obviously (what? golfers have a life?). This applies to a blogger’s life, to an entrepreneur’s life, to yours and mine. I have highlighted the relevant text. I am convinced that it can not be said in a better way. So I will leave it at that.

So yeah, go, start with the relationship in mind. And end there as well. Go, relate.

—

Screenshot taken with TechSmith’s SnagIt, from the wonderfully designed website of Jim Sheard’s book Beyond The Score. I have not read the book though, but I do play golf sometimes. I suck at it.

You are also reading this to confirm that there is a problem with information. Yes, you already know the problem with information. It is information overload. So much of noise out there on any given topic that it is hard to get to any meaningful result out there. And it’s a trap I tell you, a freakin’ trap. Here’s how the trap works: you tell yourself, “I will learn and do whatever it takes to succeed at this,” and then you hit up Google and that’s when you go down this super-slippery slope of information overload. “But I am learning about blog SEO,” you say. But it was not about learning only, now was it?

A Classic Example

There is just too much shit out there for you to grasp. I was just going throught Neil Patel’s post on SEO.

The post is called The SEO’s Handbook – 53 Resources For First Time SEOs. Yes, 53. Are you kidding me? You expect me to go through the 53 resources to implement SEO on my blog or website?

Yes.

And herein lies the problem. Neil Patel did a favor to us all and stopped at 53. There are more resources out there, and you need to know them to be an expert at SEO. But you should not be an expert in SEO, hello? Are you trying to get a job as an SEO expert? Do you blog about SEO itself? No? Then  you don’t need 53 ‘starter’ resources to ‘get a grip’ on SEO.

How much information is good enough?

One of the myths about success in business – in any business – is that you need to know your business inside out. That’s just wrong, man. You need to FIND the core of your business, and outsource everything else. Stop frowning at the word ‘outsource’ for a second; by outsource I mean “don’t do it yourself”. You, as a business owner (and blog is as good a business as any other), need to focus on what’s important. This ‘finding of the core’ is given many names; it is sometimes called ‘do what you love’, or ‘only do what you are passionate about’ etc etc.

If you love SEO (I don’t know why you would!), then 53 resources is already a small number for you. But as a blogger who is either starting out, or is trying to expand on his market etc, you don’t need soooo much  information on SEO.

“But SEO IS important,” you are already saying. Yes, it is. But not important enough to work at for months on end (or even weeks). To get a fair idea what you, as a blogstarta, should know about blog SEO, read my post here on Blog SEO.

The End In Mind

“Why did you start gathering information in the first place?”

“So I can know what I am doing!” you quip.

Well, you are wrong, you half-assed quippin’ grasshopper. You started gathering information so you can put it to immediate use and take action. Get results. Make mistakes. Try one SEO tactic, watch it fail miserably, learn, and tweak, till you find the one that works for you. Learn as you go. As. You. GO. So yeah, go, do big things.

Here’s the link to Neil Patel’s post on SEO, if you want to spend the next 2 months learning about this. Good freakin’ luck, though.

Artists make art, not money. Only business makes money.

Make money with your blog, that’s what it is all about, isn’t it? Make money blogging, earn in your sleep, have an email list instead of an ATM; one email and BOOM! Money explodes into your bank account. The dream, I am happy to report, is alive and well, and more and more people are buying in: earn money and live the “Internet Lifestyle”. This represents an attitude almost, that it is just a matter of starting a blog, and you’d be done, with exploding bank accounts and everything.

That is not how it works though.

Yours truly is an entrepreneur, and have numerous enterprises that are, by God’s Grace, in the green. Most of them are offline. Distribution, agriculture and marketing. I hear the same attitude towards ‘starting your own business’ i.e. you just need to have your own business and money will come in like Niagara Falls (or Victoria Falls, depending on which side of the equator you studied geography). But that is not how it works, man!

A business is a lot more than a business card, an office space and an expensive suit. In fact, all my enterprises do not have an office space (there is an office address though!), I wear suits only for weddings, (ha!) and I work sometimes less than 4 hours a week.

Why am I telling you this?

You can do it!

Two things really: it is very much possible to live the “Internet Lifestyle”, it is very much possible to earn a 6 figure income just from blogging and a lot of people are making it big using only online means. The second thing is that it is not how most of us perceive it to be.

My direct experimentation with the online earning world in the past one and half years have taught me that it is the ‘same’ as the offline world. You have to work. You have to ‘get things done’ and before doing them, it is absolutely essential to know what ‘things’ need to be done (the 80/20 principle).

Sell Something with your blog

Blogging alone does not make you money. You have to treat it as a medium to sell something. The techniques to sell something are dime a dozen, but there MUST be a strategy, an overall vision behind your blog.

Start by answering the question, “Why would anyone read your blog?”

The answer to that question will tell you your blog’s target market.

Now you find products, or make them yourself, to sell to that target market. Till the time you are not selling anything, you are not in business, I am afraid.

Finish by answering the question, “What are you selling through your blog?”

Answer this question to slide down the rainbow and claim your pot of gold. Take your time though, because there is no other way.

From time-to-time, this list grows

1. All in One SEO
   Enough said.
2. Wp Captcha Free
   (Download for FREE)
   Use it to fight spam, and win! Definitely an underrated plugin, but one of the most effective ones I have used. I really do not know exactly HOW it does what it does, and I don’t want to know (I love abstraction sometimes). One of my blogs used to get 35 to 40 “Please moderate…” requests a day, and when I finally installed this plugin, the daily spam count dropped to… ZERO! Now I install it on every blog that I install. Highly recommended.
3. Easy Contact
   (Download for FREE)
   The simplest method to add a ‘contact’ page on to your blog. Some people recommend CForms, but they do that probably because they have not tried out Easy Contact. It is easy. Duh!
4. Subscribe to Comments Reloaded
   (Download for FREE)
   Whenever someone leaves a comment on your blog, you always focus on the comment. That’s missing the point. Blogging is not ABOUT COMMENTS people, it is about INTERACTION! Remember that. To encourage interaction, instead of just one-off comments, always use this wonderful plugin that lets your commentators ‘subscribe’ to just the comments section. This way, any new comment that gets added to the post, the commentator gets notified. This is great for interaction and I recommend it. Highly.

Like I said earlier, these are the fundamentals. And I am picky. So yeah, the list CAN grow much longer, but it ends here. Hope you find them useful.

Update: The following plugin makes ‘social sharing’ very easy, and after implementing it on one of my blogs, I highly recommend it:

1. ShareBar
   From your WP Admin, click on Add New Plugin, search for ShareBar. Install this plugin to have a floating share bar. It is quite effective, and also not intrusive.
   

I respect them for what they are doing and I pay attention to what they are saying. Goes without saying, I end up learning way faster.

In no particular order, here are the folks who are making it big out there, and telling you about it. I owe them dinner because they have given me a lot more than what I gave them. If you want to learn more about blogging, online marketing and business and general goodness, I highly recommend the following:

Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn

Blog name: Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn

What is the blog about? Pat talks about ways to earn passive income, strictly via online methods.

Why did this blog make the list?

I don’t even remember how I stumbled onto Pat’s blog, but I was glad I did.

The thing that got my attention was his straight-up honesty that no, he is not a “millionaire guru”, just a guy who has decided to earn his living from online ventures. And then he goes ahead and lays it all out, and his monthly income reports are a charm to read. Why? Because you can see the potential of earning online and that is truly inspiring.

His posts are always helpful and very much to the point. A very homely feel. A guy earning in the vicinity of 18,000 US big ones just from online sources, now that is inspiring in the very least.

And the best thing is, he is always up to something. That is the best thing about him that separates Pat from all other bloggers that I follow: he is a true entrepreneur. He is a STARTA and gets the STARTA badge of honor in his sleep.

Some people may think that if the blog is about earning Passive income, then why is Pat working so actively on his projects. These people do not get it. Passive income is not a marketing gimmick, but a solid hands-off system that once set, runs on its own. I can very easily relate to this and know that you, as an entrepreneur, make an ‘entrance’ while setting up the system, then if all goes well, it is just tweak here and there, and that’s that. Pure, unadulterated entrepreneurship.

Click here to check out Pat’s blog

Glen Allsop

Glen Allsop

Blog name: Viper Chill

What is the blog about: He talks about internet marketing and has very focused approach towards blogging.

Why did the blog make the list?

If anyone is focused, it is Glen. I read about Glen Allsop at Pat Flyn’s blog. Glen’s blog, oddly called ViperChill is packed with very ‘doable’ advice. But that was not the only reason; the appeal for Glen’s blog is that he almost comes off as cocky (which of course, means no bull, and that’s a good thing!)

He would write two to three post each month and although he has not monetized his blog yet, the subscriber count has steadily climbed. In fact, his blog Viper Chill has grown at an incredible rate.

You should read this blog if you want to know about search engine optimization and you should study this blog if you want to learn how to find focus, stay focused and achieve pre-set goals.

Check out Glen’s blog.

Johnny B Truant

Johnny B Truant

Blog name: Johnny B Truant

What is the blog about: He talks about whatever the heck he feels like talking about.

Why the blog made this list?

I do not read his blog, I study it.

The guy is funny, and no marks for figuring that bit out. But he is also working hard and smart. His blog is a testament that at the end of the day, a well marketed service is better than a well advertised one (let me know if you know exactly what I mean!).

I do not know how much he earns in a month, but I think I read somewhere that he is a six figure blogger. Even the most conservative estimate puts his monthly earnings very much above par. And he seems to enjoy this a lot, and he will at least make you smile, if not laugh out loud.

I wonder if someone with a voice like Johnny B Truant find the focus of someone like Glen Allsop. That would be a great marketing advantage for Mr. Truant. I say that because seriously, I can not ‘define’ Johnny’s blog in a sentence or two. Interesting dilemma this: I can very easily go to Johnny B Truant’s blog and find a few posts that I think define his blog. But I did not do that with the other bloggers on this small list. Why? Because other bloggers’ blog are easy to categorize. Johnny’s blog is not. Of course, Johnny would say that his underlying focus – his defining trait if you may – is his humor and that is good enough. But associating that with a service or a product can be a great marketing experiment (for example, what skill would I learn if I read Johnny B Truant’s blog? In all honesty, I can’t answer that straight off the bat)

I owe him dinner for bringing his very unique style to a sometimes boring playing-field, for playing the ultimate (and useful) guinea pig and also to exchange notes on hat designs.

Check out Johnny’s blog

Yaro Starak

Yaro Starak

Blog name: Entrepreneur’s Journey

What is the blog about: Yaro ‘used’ to talk strictly about blogging and getting traffic to your blog. Only recently has he started experimenting with other ideas on his blog, which makes sense; it is an entrepreneur’s journey after all!

Why the blog made this list?

I think he is the first of the firsts that I started to follow online. His blog Entrepreneur’s Journey was interesting because he was laying it all out. (Getting personal is one of the best ways of having a ‘unique voice’ that is so important in any type of writing, especially blogging).

Yaro is a great success story of what silent persistence can do for you; he was and is very modest about his approach, very open and hence, a very comfortable read. I don’t feel intimidated by his great achievements because he presents it in a such a way that it makes one feel that “this is doable”. This is a sure-shot sign of a gifted teacher, which I believe, Yaro is.

I’ve had a few chats with him via Twitter, I have taken his Membership Mastermind course (only to find out that I was not up for it at the time) and I have also advertised on his website. I can safely say that following Yaro through his continuing journey will benefit you in yours. God willing.

I owe him dinner for all of the above reasons, and to convince him to stop calling his Beemer (which really, should be called a Bimmer) a male! All great cars are females (uh oh)

Check out Yaro’s blog

Erica Douglass

Erica Douglass

Blog name: Erica.biz

What is the blog about: She talks about starting internet businesses from scratch. She has a few products already in the market and reading about her journey teaches you a few finer points along the way.

Why the blog made this list?

Again, I do not remember how I stumbled across her blog, but I know that I have been reading her for quite some time now.

She is an entrepreneur, selling her hosting company for a cool million sometimes back. She has a few products in the market now, and has promised to keep at coming up with other information products online.

I guess the number one reason that I read her blog is because of her honest writing; she doesn’t hold back.

Another credit that I must give to her is that I bought my first online training course because of her endorsement. And the course was very useful and helped me earn my first 500 dollars online. I think I owe her a dinner for that alone.

Check out Erica’s blog

Brian Clark

Brian Clark

Blog name: Copyblogger

What’s his blog about? Content marketing; using valuable content as your advertising and building your business around that.

Why the blog made this list?

He is the founder of this blog, you know, Copyblogger? Yeah, that one. Only one of the top ten blogs ever. But I don’t read his blog because Copyblogger is famous, I read because it is just so damn valuable (that’s why it is famous, helloo?!!). Mr Clark’s approach towards copywriting – and writing in general – have made me a better writer, no questions about it. And there is a mighty – mighty I said – lesson to be learned here; providing ‘free’ content that is valuable is the best type of advertising EVER. It builds the essential relationship and it keeps the ROI measurable.

I think ‘content marketing’ was pretty much invented by Brian Clark and he drives home the concept of Teaching Sells (he has a course by that name).

I have been reading Copyblogger since the time Brian was the only one writing there. No Sonia Simone, no Johnny B Truant, no no one. Now of cousre, Copyblogger has tons of guest writers and even more relevant content.

My question to him: How the hell do you still keep the content so damn relevant and each and every post seems to be written EXACTLY for me? How? What is the ‘system’ behind that?

You are probably already reading Copyblogger, and if you are not, then either you are very new here, or you are very, very new here.

I owe him dinner for all the help, and to let him know why he was the sixth blogger whereas the title says five.

Check out Copyblogger

Isn’t this a small list?

The list is small. I know. This is my attempt at the 80/20 principle.

There are a lot of bloggers that write great content, that did not make this list. For example, bloggers like Dooce or Penelope Trunk are great to read and are quite successful, but they are not in this list.

When I thought about it, I realized that the number one reason – and possibly the only reason that these six bloggers are on this list is because:

They give actionable advice in an inspiring kinda way.

The point is to find a relevant focus and then stick to it, at least for a while. Do not make the rookie mistake of subscribing to EVERYONE and do not at all make the mistake of subscribing to blogs without knowing EXACTLY WHY you are subscribing.

To gain from someone, you must first give.

“But I have nothing to give to these guys,” you say.

But you do have something to give to these teachers. Respect and attention.

You will not learn from anyone if you do not respect them and pay attention to what they are saying/doing.

Feelin' lucky, punk?

Because this is fundamental stuff, you do not need to be a geek to understand ‘em. Any blog owner and business owner should know these.

For your blog/website to be of any use, it needs traffic and a mechanism of converting that traffic into clients.

Go back and read the above line again.

Your website needs people coming to it. Search Engine Optimization deals with the field of bringing traffic to your blog/website. Because pretty much everyone uses search engines to find stuff online, your online presence should show up on search results for anyone to click through and come visit your website.

But people search for a gazillion things online. If I am searching for cars, why would your blog on baking cakes show up? It is the job of the search engines (like Google) to make sure that what a person is searching for, he gets related results. So only car-related stuff should show up if I am searching for Mitsubishi Evo.

You are a blogger, and your blog is about baking cakes. You write recipes and other fun stuff (fun stuff for people interested in cooking obviously). So when you write a blog post about your latest and greatest cake recipe, your post will be picked up by search engines (like Google). All search engines store this information so that they can display it to anyone searching online. But here’s the problem: there are just too many websites and blogs out there discussing whatever you are discussing. So the chances are quite low that your post would show up on the first page of the search results. That is where all the hoopla about search engine optimization comes along; to get your blog posts on the first search engine results page (SERP).

Keywords

Whatever someone searches for online, that is a keyword. It is not usually just one word, but a phrase. So, as a blogger/website-owner, if you want people who are searching for cake recipes to come to your website, you could optimize your blog for that keyword. Making sense?

You as a blogger need to figure out which keywords you need to work on. These keywords will serve as the focal point for your SEO efforts. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is setting up your website in such a way that the content on your website shows up on the first of the SERPs. That is why deciding your topic early on and then sticking to it is usually considered a good blogging practice (although this is usually presented as a rule, this sticking to one topic, but it is not a rule, it is a suggested practice. A lot of successful, rich bloggers do not follow this per se).

Backlinks

When you write good enough content, other people link to that content. All external links pointing to your website are backlinks. A search engine will consider your website to be authoritative if it has more and more backlinks. Which makes sense; a backlink is kind of a vote the other website is giving you, and search engines use that to determine the relevancy of your website to the keyword in question. Making sense? (if not, ask me in the comments section)

Getting as many backlinks as possible is one of the most practiced task for any SEO effort. It is also the most misused. A lot of spammers use this concept to try to dodge the search engines. You, thankfully, are not a spammer.

Content remains King

It all boils down to this; your content. What you put on your blog should be valuable enough to be linked to. No SEO gimmickry would do if the content is not actually useful. The concept, I assure you is divinely simple; create something valuable, unique and interesting, and people will link back to it.

Write for the people, and they will come.

But it is hard to create valuable content if ALL you are tying to do is earn a quick buck. A solid STARTA mentality is required; your first priority should be to ‘help people out’, you know, for-profit philanthropy.

That is it. I kid you not folks, that is it. Don’t let anyone else tell you differently. You as a business owner are now well informed about what exactly is SEO and how it applies to your overall success online.

That’s it?

Yes. The rest are tactics. There are tons of ‘em. From keyword phrase research to identification of LSI keywords to article marketing to directory submissions. And more. Lots more. If you approach SEO from the tactics end, confusion is guaranteed. Now you know. Go, start something.

To really optimize you search engine rankings, you need to do a few basic things with your blog. Setting up a 301 redirect is one of them.

301 what?

A redirect, as the name suggests, takes you from one place to another. For example, you can set up a redirect at http://abc.com/ so that whenever anyone comes to abc.com they are AUTOMATICALLY taken to http://xyz.com.

In our case, setting up a 301 redirect is important to help your blog with its SEO rankings. You see, as far as search engines like Google are concerned, http://blogstarta.com and http://www.blogstarta.com are two completely different sites. But in normal practice, they are the same. So what happens? Someone links back to your blog with http://www.blogstarta.com/ and some without the ‘www’. This divides your linkback count, which really should not be the case. There ought to be consistency primarily because consistency helps with the SEO of your blog/website. You need to enforce consistency on your end (you really can’t enforce this on the linker’s end; you should be thanking the linker, not enforcing stuff on him!). Also, it does not matter what you decide (to go with WWW or without), but what matter is that you do decide, and stick with it. (I am sure there is a deep philosophical tangent to this, but that’s for later )

I recently set up a redirect to one of my blogs, and I just edited the header.php file, and on the top, I added the following lines:

<?phpif (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) == ‘www’) {header(‘HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);header(‘Location: http://’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);}?>

But this is not the only way to do this. A great resource on different ways of doing basically the same thing i.e. a 301 redirect can be found here.

We all agree that ‘long term thinking’ is far better than short term. Strategic thinking is better than tactical thinking. In fact, some people would venture far enough to suggest that there should be no thinking at the ‘tactical’ end at all (think automated assembly lines!).

If you want to build an online empire that rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, you need to have strategy. That strategy will dictate the tactics. I made more than 250 dollars TWICE with an ‘investment’ of less than 50 dollars. Now what I did and how I did it had NOTHING to do with Strategy. It was ALL tactics. That is why I am not making those 250 bucks per month right now. It was an experiment (a successful one at that, by God’ Grace). I did not have a strategy in place for myself, I was just copying someone elses’ strategy. My lack of strategy was somewhat deliberate as, like I said, it was an experiment in earning online. But a general lack of strategy is where most entrepreneurs fail; thinking that a set of tactics is good enough.(For the naysayers: the above two experiments are very much scalable; I spent 50 dollars because that is what I had to ‘test’. If I had 5,000 dollars to ‘spare’, the returns would have been proportional, limited only by the traffic that I was pulling in).

Strategy takes you (to the right) places

Remember to ‘know’ where is it that you want to go. By ‘knowing’ I do not mean exact specifics (as that are limiting) but a general idea as to where you ought to be. It is like you are at the airport, and you are heading for New York. That much information is enough to take you where you are going, and you won’t end up in the plane heading to California. But if you say ‘I want to go to the US of A’ then California or Miami would be the ‘right’ destination. Think about it for a minute.

Tactics is (the all-too-friggin-important) action

The problem is that I come across way too much literature that insists that action is the cornerstone of success. They are right, but that is only half the information. There is a difference between smart work and hard work, and strategy is what differentiates between the two. You may climb the tallest tree in the forest only to find out that you were not supposed to climb the tallest tree. Action is very, very important. Without it, way too many of us have achieved old age with a heavy heart that pleads “what if…”.

The Price You May (robs you completely sometimes)

I know a friend who started a magazine (offline, with paper and everything). His plan was to do everything himself. No surprises there; he was cash strapped and he was the CEO, the Marketing Director, Editor and Accounting Clerk all wrapped in one. That is how most big companies started. But he had no strategy to separate these ‘systems’ at a later date. In fact, like many entrepreneurs, he considered his overworked day as being a clear sign that he is ‘working hard’. He was working hard for sure, but he was not working smart. It took only one cash crunch (that any business WILL FACE more than once) to make him go look for and then find a job. Soon his magazine missed an issue (it was monthly) and before you know it, his dreams of having a publishing empire were boxed away.

Separating tasks for your business should be part of your strategy. You may not need to write it all down and be way-too-strict about it, but nonetheless, a separation of job roles is ESSENTIAL for any business to have a CHANCE of being long-lasting.

Isn’t Action Supreme?

In most cases, no. I can imagine people frowning:

wait a minute, everyone tellin’ me to GET UP and do it! And you want me to continue my analysis paralysis?

If whosoever is telling you to get up and do what he is telling you to do, if that person is good enough, he is probably telling you to do what he is laying out in front of you. He is giving you the strategy to put into action. He is giving you the plan. For example, my post on “How to Start a Blog” is a blueprint (strategy) for you to act upon (tactics).

Consider, you won’t dream of digging up a plot without making sure that is how the architect has envisioned it. Then why are YOU jumping into whatever you are jumping into WITHOUT having a blueprint?

So what is you strategy, your plan for your work? Your home? Your life? And here is the gazillion dollar question (wth? gazillion is actually a word? no red underlining, huh?)…anyways, the gazillion dollar question is that if highly-respected people and organizations are putting SO MUCH importance on a strategy for their business, should YOU have one for your life itself?

Here’s an ‘actionable’ item for you: go write (and/or reconsider) your ‘life strategy’ for yourself right this minute. Just get up and do it. It will take no more than 15 minutes to write down things you’d want to do. It is ALL uphill from there onwards, but uphill is good if you enjoy hiking. (if you don’t enjoy hiking, you will learn, as you always do)

The Design of a Website Should be AWESOME!

Here’s the justification: if it looks beautiful then it must represent a well thought-out blog/business.

I agree! Design of a blog should be awesome. But design is overrated and not prioritized properly. It is like saying, ‘it is better to live in a mansion than an apartment’. A mansion costs more, hello? And it is overkill. It does not justify its presence if all you need to do is house one person. Same is with design. If you are on a budget, design should NOT come before functionality. Design should come after more important elements of your blog such as, your customer contact center, or email marketing systems. These systems are way more BENEFICIAL to your blog than a GOOD LOOKING design.

Design is also very subjective. I may find one design to be out-of-this-world and you may find it to be average. Put another way, you typically find it hard to measure how good or how bad a design is.

And MOST importantly, there are tons and tons of design templates out there that you can choose from that seem to fit all design inclinations. And what are the costs? It certainly is NOT in thousands of dollars, heck, it is not even in hundreds. Many are actually FREE, or costs not more than 50 US dollars, paid once.

If you need quality, you need to pay for it

Quality comes at a price, we have always been told. But whose quality? Quality again is always treated subjectively. A website or blog is considered ‘high quality’ that ‘looks awesome’ or ‘looks very professional’. But that again is quality based on ‘eye candy’, a mostly-subjective exercise. A blog’s function is disregarded. We need to treat your blog as a medium, and the design as a function of the requirements. There is a reason Google is just one search bar with a search button next to it.

But most importantly, given today’s technology, what was once defined as ‘high quality’ is now a ‘standard’, and is readily available at almost throwaway prices. Examples of this are abundant; computer memory was once very expensive, now Gigabytes cost less than a dollar. A camera phone was once a novelty and was high priced, now it is ‘not something new’. A bigger change than this has already happened in web development but most web development agencies don’t want you to know that. Most of the software used to run your website is free. Yes, it is not cheap, it is completely free. In fact, it is a crime to pay for it!!! That is why many agencies charge high ‘set up fees’ and try to present that charge under the head of ‘software charges’.

A very good metric for your blog’s success is the traffic it generates. And a good benchmark for traffic that is of any use are your blog’s subscribers (either RSS subscribers or subscribers to your email list).

Email Marketing is cumbersome

A person would make numerous calls in a day to keep that all-too-important client relationship, but he would not use the free email. Why? Because managing an email list was considered cumbersome and you would need to ‘hire some specialist’ to handle your campaigns. What rubbish!

Email marketing for blogs is essential because it is so cost effective. Think about it for a minute now; you NEED to keep a solid relationship with your customer base, and most of them have email. Why not contact them using the best thing since sliced bread i.e. email?

And about ‘hiring some specialist’…

Services like Aweber make it a snap to manage and communicate with your email list. (Aweber does cost your 19 US dollars per month, which is way, way cheaper than ‘hiring a specialist’! I use Aweber and have no complains whatsoever). With Aweber, you can send emails, see how many of your clients opened them, if they clicked on any links within the email etc, to better tweak your email campaigns. There are tons of other things you can do that help you better manage your email campaigns like setting up great looking forms. All within your Aweber account. And all very ‘doable’. You don’t need a specialist to do it, because the interface is intuitive and easy to learn. Even if you do get stuck somewhere, you don’t need to pay someone to help you, just Google it. It is that easy. And it is that simple (if your business can afford to hire someone, you can use anyone who is comfortable with computers to actually manage your whole email marketing system – no need to hire someone ‘technical’).

There are many more myths that need busting, and Blogstartas around the world bust them everyday.
You can bust the busted myths themselves. This can get confusing here, so the bottom line is that you ‘take action and see what happens’. Go start some. Good luck in your conquests and queries…

But I won’t fool you. You already know that ordinary people take ordinary steps and become extraordinary. Action is the number one tool in their arsenal that adds that ‘extra’ to the ‘ordinary’.

You are here because you want to start a blog, to earn a healthy, clean income that can support you fully (or partially, depending on your lifestyle plan). This will explain the steps you’d need to take to make it happen online. These things are tried and tested, and the possibilities of earning anywhere between 500 to 50,000 dollars per month lie within these steps. Pay attention now, it gets interesting.

Here’s how ‘online success’ with blogs work:

Now there are a lot of ways of doing each of these steps. That is where ‘analysis paralysis’ kicks in, and you are left jumping from one method to the next. This might as well be the NUMBER ONE REASON most online entrepreneurs fail; too many options and no clarity. No strategy. And without strategy, your action is usually wasted.

Now you have the strategy to start.

With the above number of steps, you can have a clearer focus and will be able to do each step before the next one. This will cut off all the noise and let you build a blog that gives value to the reader and provides you with the lifestyle that you want.

Project Management 101

In any given project, a lot of tasks can be started concurently, whereas some tasks are dependent on another task. For example, you can get a domain, get hosting and a basic design for your blog before you refine your idea or work exhausitvely on your market research. At the same time, you can write valuable, helpful content only after you have established your niche (this is done after you have refined your idea with some solid market research). No need to worry though, a lot of these tasks are not as difficult as they sound. In fact, as you will see (in Blogstarta’s email course), I will tell you EXACTLY how all of this is done. But you must treat your blog as a project if you want to make it profitable.

Starting a blog – the tasks at hand

If you’d notice, the ‘cheat sheet’ above is all ‘action’. It says ‘have’ an idea, ‘get’ hosting etc. These are tasks. Things that you’d have to do (or get others to do it for you).

Have an Idea

What interests you? Chances are, a lot of people share the same interest. You can reach out to them via your blog and hence have an audience to write to and to write for. For example, this very blog here, blogstarta, is a classic example; I have a deep interest in blogging, and from being interviewed at Wired to setting up DOZENS of blogs for myself and clients, I had first hand knowledge of blogging. So my idea was to share what I know about blogging. I have another blog, about stress management, but I am not a qualified anything , so I get qualified teachers and professionals to write on the topic. The idea is to be motivated about ‘something’. Maybe you feel that you can provide a good resource for dairy farming, or maybe woodworking. The choices are pretty much unlimited.

Do Market Research

What do I mean by Market Research? I want to start a blog on golf. Fair enough, that’s the idea stage. Now I need to QUALIFY my idea and see if there is a large enough audience interested in golf. Market Research will help you decide if your idea is viable (hence, sell-able).

Of course, golf being a world famous sport, you would be right to assume that there already is a lot of people interested in many different facets of golf. But you see, you need to find out EXACTLY what they are interested in. In fact, you would have to find out the ‘keywords’ people are using to search for golf related information online. Are people searching for ‘golf instruction’ or ‘golf tutor’ online, for example? If you ‘thin down’ the bigger market, you will then be able to ‘write for that audience’. The trick, of course, is to find a niche that is interesting to you and has a decent amount of people searching for it online.

When you get to the writing helpful content stage, you would want to address problems people are already facing, right? I mean, at the core of any successful business – online or offline – lies the solution to a problem. People want to learn ‘how to improve their golf swing’, well that is a problem, and if you decide to select that as a topic for a few posts on your blog, then you are better off in learning EXACTLY what kind of keywords are being used to carry out the search. This is where Market Research gets technical. But we don’t need to delve into such intricacies as we have a better way of doing Market Research; in fact, as you will see in the 7 Day Free Email Course, Market Research is easy and can actually be fun. And besides, if you do this one step right, this Market Research, you will give your blog/website the most solid of foundations. You will not only enjoy building your readership, but will also be able to earn a healthy income while doing so! How cool is that?

Buy Domain

Domains are booked on a yearly basis, so a minimum of one year is going to cost you anywhere between 9 to 15 US dollars. To buy a domain, you need to come up with a name of your blog. In most cases, the name of the blog is the domain name (but this is not always true as it is getting harder and harder to get even ‘pronounceable’ domain names). A lot of famous bloggers have domains named after themselves (such as John Chow and David Risely) but many have established brands by using different domain names (such as Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur’s Journey, Michael Dunlop’s IncomeDiary etc).  I have a very simple rule for domain name selection, and that rule is that “a domain name is only important till you don’t have it” because people will come to your blog NOT because you have a good, memorable domain name, they will come because your content rocks! Names are overrated.

Host Your Blog

Finding a good, reliable host for your blog is – oddly enough – one of the most ‘painful’ experiences for bloggers. I know it was for me, and I run a small hosting company! But the reason for such pain is that a lot of folks TRY OUT a “cheap” web hosting provider only to be severely disappointed. Please, do not do that. Blogstarta initially was that small hosting company I was talking about , but our hosting has a limited number of ‘seats’, so I have compiled a list (it is a small list though) of tested, reliable web hosts. I highly, highly recommend that you do not try to save four to eight dollars PER YEAR to get tangled in the hosting mess.

Check out Blogstarta’s 7 Day Free Email Course on How to Make Money with Blogging for more details.