How to Make Blogging Make Money For You

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A while back Trevor Hampel left a comment on my 5 Reasons Why I Blog post that has stuck with me.

Trevor shared with us 5 reasons he blogs. But he added a footnote to his last reason. Here’s what he said:

I need the money. (What money? Show me the money)

I’ve been thinking about that for a while and I’ve come to the conclusion that earning money blogging is both much simpler and much harder than most of us think.

Let me explain. Read more

SOBCon is Blogging!

The gang over at SOBCon ‘07 has started blogging over at their site.

Expect to see posts from the various different speakers. We’ve got plan’s to give the folks who are attending a voice over there as well.

Oh, and you are going to see my name a bit since I’ve agreed to help organize the posting end of things over there!

So go check it out. Subscribe to the feed.

And then make your travel plans to join us in Chicago this May!

Web 2.0 Explained to Music in 4 Minutes and 31 Seconds

Are you still trying to figure out what all this Web 2.0 stuff is all about?

Do you feel like an outsider, like you’ll never master social media?

Caught this video last week over at ConverStations (thanks for sharing it Mike!)

It gives a good visual explanation of what Web 2.0 is all about. When Gorgeous watched it she called it a “Techno-geek dance video”. (Minus the dancing, of course.)

Check it out.

Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us

(Link to video for Feed Subscribers)

Wild Hogs is Worth the Price of Admission

Last night was movie night for Gorgeous and I. We sprung for the whole nine yards. We went at night, not to a matinée. Got the truck-o-popcorn and the quarter-barrel of soda.

The movie we picked was Wild Hogs. I didn’t realize it was only out in pre-release still. We were a bit confused when we walked into the theater because there were no signs for the movie on the marquee.

Fortunately we were in the right place.

And it was a good thing we got there early too. Because as we were standing in line waiting to arrange financing for our snacks they announced that the showing had sold out. More than 30 minutes before the movie started.

We broke from our place in line and got some seats.

The crowd was surprising. I bet it is one of the oldest aggregate crowds for a sell-out (pre-)opening night in a long time. I’m cresting 40 and I was on the younger end of the spectrum for this one. Not many teenie-boppers present.

I stayed to guard the seats while Gorgeous went off to negotiate the acquisition of our munchables.

There were several conversations going on around me and it was obvious that most of the folks present owned motorcycles.

Anyway, I’ll keep this short.

The movie was hysterical. I haven’t laughed that hard at a film since I don’t remember when. A fair amount of quasi-bathroom humor and embarrassing situations. It’s probably not for the younger kids. It is PG-13.

Gorgeous described it as City Slickers on motorcycles. I bet it does just as well too.

William Macey is absolutely brilliant in his performance in this one. The four principle actors work very well together. We’ll be seeing a sequel for this one. I’m sure of it.

Go check it out when it comes to town. You’ll be glad you did.

Make People Like You More with 1 Simple 4 Step Formula Guaranteed to See Success

Business is about people. Business Blogging is also about people.

Some of you reading this are thinking, “No it isn’t. Business is about money (then a few might even add) you idiot!”

If you are one of the folks thinking that, I say you are wrong. Here’s why.

If you get the people, the money will follow. Money doesn’t spend itself. People make the transaction happen.

And it is a fact that people are much more likely to do business with other people that they know, like and trust. If they never hear of your business, chances are remote that they will send their money in your direction. If they have a strong reason not to trust you, you will have a much more difficult time making a sale than if there is credibility built in before you meet.

But how can you become more likable? Is it truly possible to make people like you?

Yes. It is possible.

And it is easy too. Just apply this simple 4 step formula and you will find people like you a whole lot more than they do now. Read more

SuccessCREEations Now Rewarding Quality Commenters

Encouraging Blog Comments

One of the best things about blogging is the dialog and conversation that develops within the comment portions of the blog posts. I have made new friends because they have taken the time to comment here or because I commented over at their place.

Blog comments are one of the features that make blogs more powerful than traditional web sites. That dynamic back and forth is completely missing from most business web sites (and scares the jeebies out of many business owners).

Comments also add tremendous value as far as the search engines are concerned because they add new content to the pages of your blog that is chock full of words that make your blog show up better in the search engine rankings.

As a business blogger I want to be doing everything I can to encourage comments here. So far my efforts have included making it easy for people to see their comments show up right away (no comment moderation so far), being kind to those who disagree with what I post and treating them respectfully, and intentionally responding to each comment quickly and personally as best I can.

But could I be doing more to encourage comments?

I’ve considered adding a “Recent Comments” section to my sidebar, but that one just didn’t resonate with me for some reason. I’m not sure why.

But this week I discovered something that I think really fits here. Read more

CREEating Value - 22 February 2007

CREEating Value - About once a week I go through my feed reader and pull out a few gems that bring value to you as a business blogger. Here are this week’s juicy finds.

Enjoy!

Healthy Web Design (feed) - Some folks believe it is dumb to link to someone who might be seen as competition for your business. Personally I don’t subscribe to that thinking. There is so much to go around, why wouldn’t I want to share good thinkers with y’all?

And Dawud Miracle is one of those guys. He’s into helping businesses improve their web presence. And he truly gets blogging. He understand the power and versatility it brings to businesses. Not bad for a guy coming at our business from the traditional web site design side of things. I think the reason Dawud get it is because he has embraced blogging whole heartedly in his own business. Web consultants who are actually blogging have a huge leg up when it comes to helping businesses get on board the blog wagon. Dawud is constantly adding to the conversation. Check him out.

Business Blog Summit (feed) - Here’s a blog that was started to support a business that helps businesses learn about business blogging. (Did ya follow all that?) You get the best of both worlds from these guys. They run a conference called the Business Blog Summit. And their blog is one of their primary marketing arms. Subscribe to them and you’ll see how a blog can help your business while reading on the topic at the same time.

Business Blog Consulting (feed) - You know, I might as well keep rolling with links to the “competition”. This is one of the early adapters to the business blog consulting world. That’s how they got such a great domain name! But the reason they are popular is because they produce good stuff. If you looking to learn more about blogging for your business, add these guys to your reader too.

Linkable Web Sites Are Good For Business

I was poking around a shopping web site this morning for a project I’m working on. What I was looking for was a few quick links for some store items to include in a post.

Unfortunately after I searched for each item, the URL in the address bar ended in a nondescript “search.html”.

The site was using some kind of behind the scenes scripting to produce their results rather than just taking you to the page with the goods.

I found a work around, though. I put the items into a wish list, then emailed it to myself. There in the email were some pretty links with URL’s direct to the items.

Why Make Linking So Hard?

I’m not a super genius or anything. But I’m thinking that one of the things any of us want with our business web sites, whether they are blogs or traditional static sites, is for people to give us inbound links.

We’ll get more links if we make it easy. One way to do that is to make sure that the part of the web site we want to link to has a visible URL in the address bar.

It is always frustrating when I see something I want to tell someone about by shooting them a quick email with a link and can’t.

Too often what I want to link to is in a flash web site or some other scripted deal like the shopping site this morning and I’ll have to pass a long a whole set of instructions for the person on the other end of the email to get them to the interesting stuff.

Click on this button. Then when the next page loads scroll down and look here. Click on the part that says blah, blah, blah.

Depending on how hard it is to explain, I may not bother.

I don’t even like web sites that have a “Permalink” button rather than just displaying the URL straight into the address bar. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve copied the wrong link from the address bar for something rather than getting it from the permalink link.

If we want to encourage traffic to our business web sites (and blogs) we should make it as easy as possible for folks to link.

Use scripts and flash code responsibly!

Is FeedBurner Bad For Your Email?

I’ve been having some trouble lately with my emails not getting through to folks. And it is getting a bit aggravating.

It used to be every now and then I’d not get a response from someone so I’d give them a call.

What do you think about my email?

I didn’t see an email from you.

Hmmm… Let me resend it…

It didn’t happen all that often. Just enough to make me wonder what folks were doing on their end. But these days it seems to be getting more frequent. Frequent enough that I suspect the problem is on my end.

Since I started SuccessCREEations I’ve been using FeedBurner’s Headline Animator in my default email signature. It looks like this:

It seems to me to be a great, catchy way to get the word out about my blog.

I’ve got multiple email addresses I use. I’ve got way too many addresses. Drives me a little nuts. But that’s the reality of the blogging world sometimes.

It doesn’t seem to matter which addresses I send from. When I find one that hasn’t gotten through, I’ll resend it deleting the signature and then they get it.

Just last night I sent a couple emails to my wife. (Yes I know that’s a sorry commentary on the state of marital communications that I’m emailing to the other room. We do talk, audibly, with our voices. Honest.) And both of them ended up captured by her spam filter. And in that case it was bellsouth to bellsouth addresses!

A catchy way to promote your blog is ineffective if it is causing your emails to end up trapped in people’s spam filters. I think I’m going to have to say goodbye to Feedburner’s Headline Animator.

I hate it. But I hate my communication not getting through more.

Top 10 Reasons I’ll Be at SOBCon ‘07

By now you’ve probably heard about SOBCon ‘07, that tremendously cool conference that several of us have put together in Chicago for this May. If somehow you missed it yesterday, as of this writing Technorati is already showing 130 links to the site (here’s the Technorati SOBEvent.com search). You get right down to it that’s pretty good for a web site that hasn’t even been live for 18 hours yet! Especially when you figure that’s about a quarter of the number of links SuccessCREEations has and we’ve been around for nearly 6 months.

Ah, the power of blogging. You gotta love it.

Why SOBCon?

If we set aside all the buzz for now, why would you want to attend this conference?

I mean there are tons of conferences and even a few blogging conferences you can go to this year. Why SOBCon? What makes this one stand apart? Read more

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