6 figure blogging 6

Six Figure Blogging

Six Figure Blogging Class 6
Transcript
Andy: Welcome to our final call for Six Figure Blogging. This is the terrifying
conclusion or exciting conclusion, one of those! So Darren, we wanted to finish
up with week five right?

Writing Quality Content (cont’d)
Darren: That is right. I think from memory we were working through the
writing quality content page.

Andy: Right.

4. Make Your Blog Scannable

Darren: For your blog and we got up to point four or five. I think we got
through ‘make it scannable’. I’ll race through that a little bit but basically ‘make it
scannable’ is about trying to make it visually able to be read very quickly to
communicate your main points through lists, formatting, headings. Keep in mind
here is that the limited time that people will spend on your site and so you want
to communicate quickly.

5. Use Names

Darren: Number five there is using names. This is something that I’ve found to
be really important. I haven’t got the source of this statistic but it is one that
stuck in my mind. 28% of Google searches are for product name. So 28% of
people searching Google for a particular product, an additional 9% are searching
for brand names and another 5% are searching for company names.

So if you think about it, that is like 42% percent of people are searching the
internet for names of products, companies or brands which is a significant

© 2005 Andy Wibbels and Darren Rowse. All Rights Reserved. 180
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amount if you think about how many people are using the internet. Again, add to
that the amount of people that want to search for people’s names.

Andy: Right.

Darren: And for the names of movies, for the names of sports, and for the
names of events and you actually begin to see a trend there that names are
actually vitally important as you think about your niche.

Andy: Because that is often how people think is in what they already know. They
may not know how to phrase the question to get the search results but they know
what brand names or book titles or movie names or celebrities that are around
the topic.

Darren: That is vitally important. One that you put those names in your content
but even more so like we talked about last week in your title. I would actually
recommend that if you are going to write a post about a particular title then that
particular name of a product then actually just the name of that product is the
most effective way of getting picked up in search engines rather than the cryptic
titles that we were talking about last week.

If I am writing about a Canon E820D camera, then that is the first thing that I’ll
have in my title. It will be right up at the top of my content as well in bold
because I know that is what people are searching for.

They’ll be searching for reviews of that. So often if it is a review of that that I am
writing, then that title ‘Cannon E820D Review’, that is very effective. I find that
most people coming to my site are actually looking for those particular names. So
you want to be predicting what people are searching for in that way.

6. One Idea Per Post

Darren: Number six there is one idea per post. This is partly about search
engine optimization. The search engines get a little bit confused when you write
one post that has three or four different ideas in it.

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So what I tend to do is break up my longer posts into a series of posts so that
each post in that series is on a particular idea. If I am writing about how to find
readers for your blog, I might do a series on how to find readers for your blog
rather than just one with twenty different ways of finding readers for your blog.
So if people are searching the internet for particular information within that
series, they’ll find that post.

It is also important for AdSense as well. If you are running textual advertising on
your site and you have a page which has something with ten or so different ideas
in it, it will actually confuse AdSense a little bit. So I find one idea per post works
quite well.

Andy: Yes, it is that whole idea of granularity where it is not just one website but
posts which is one measure and then there are individual comments, and
individual categories. It is the whole idea of granularity of the information. It is
not just, “Go to my website but that you can go to this particular permalinked
post for this particular topic.”

7. Break Longer Posts Into a Series of Short Posts

Darren: That is right and the beauty, number seven there is break down your
longer posts into a series. The other part of that is that it creates anticipation
over time on your blog. So if you announce I am writing a series on ‘Finding
Readers for Your Blog,’ I’ll know that that is going to get people coming back to
my blog for as long as that series goes.

It will actually create some anticipation and momentum around that. I did the 31
Days to a Better Blog series in August and that created so much anticipation and
spin and buzz around the internet. I was quite amazed by it. So series of posts are
really important.

Topic: What is the Optimal Length for a Post?

Participant: What have you found is the optimal length for a typical post?

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Darren: I again, I think I mentioned it last week. Really I don’t have any set
rules around that. I would encourage people to go for two hundred words or
more just for search engine reasons. Probably the most important is about
establishing a pattern on your blog so people come to expect the same types of
posts whether that be the length or the voice that you are writing in. I would say
over two hundred. Once you get into really long like you have to scroll down two
or three pages to get to the end of the thing, the studies show that people will
drop off as you go down. So I try and keep it probably up to a thousand words.
Most of my posts would be probably around three or four hundred word mark, I
would say.

Participant: Ok and the second, I have three questions in a row here. The
second one is how many words do you put in your RSS feed?

Darren: I do an excerpt on mine because I found that a lot of people just scrape
through my content straight on to their websites.

Andy: Right.

Darren: I actually don’t know how much that excerpt is but if you looked on
Problogger RSS feed, you would be able to count it up. It is probably forty words
or so.

Andy: And depending on what tool you are using, you can also have the excerpt
field. So it is not just grabbing the first fifty words of the post body but it is
grabbing what you type in the excerpt. You can also do the ReMovable Type and
TypePad, I think.

Participant: Right, which brings up my third question which is, is it better to
have shorter on the index page but then have goes into the whole article or the
whole thing there on the index page? In other words, I use the Movable Type all
excerpt tool, that kind of question.

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Darren: Yes, I tend to use the extended post feature on Movable Type and
WordPress. So if I am writing a very long article, I’ll only put the first few
paragraphs on the front page.

Participant: Yes, ok. So as a rule, you have them go to two pages?

Darren: Yes, usually after two or three paragraphs depending on how long
those paragraphs are. Ideally I love people to be able to see when they come to
my site, the first two post headings.

Participant: Ok, part of the reason I ask this is as I’ve gone around and looked
at the other blog networks. What I’ve come to see is that everybody is writing real
short stuff. One paragraph and that is it.

Darren: I see the advantage of that and I see why they are doing that but I
personally think that if they are wanting search engines traffic, then they’ll need
something longer than that to get enough content. So the search engines, I think,
they like two or three hundred words ideally.

Participant: I don’t disagree with you at all. The point I have is what you get
when you pay bloggers by the post.

Darren: That is exactly right.

Participant: Ok thanks.

Andy: And then my point of view on that is that you want to get people off your
front page. If you want to think of the cold hard marketing bastard approach to
this, we either want them to click on an ad or to go further into the site and then
click on an ad.

So the front page is going to have maybe six posts on it that all have different
topics. So the contextual ads on that page aren’t going to be as focused around
one particular post. But if you split that post, get the person on to the

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permalinked page, the page for just that post, then the contextual ads, all that
stuff, is going to make more sense in the context of the post.

Darren: Exactly. Every time you get people to look at another page, you are one
step closer to making them a loyal reader.

Andy: Yes.

Darren: So if every page you get them deeper into your site there are benefits to
get. So you want to get people going into your categories exploring some of your
key posts so that is why I highlight my key posts on my menus. Actually show
people your best stuff and you’ll find that they’ll stay longer. They’ll look at more
pages and then you got more chances of them coming back.

8. Write for the Long Term: ‘Evergreen’ Posts

Darren: Number eight is write for the long term. I’ve given you a link to a post I
write evergreen posts; there is a time related post. This is a key concept that I
think a guy called Steven Spencer got me on to I’ve linked to in that post. I’ve
linked you to there.

It talks about how some posts that you write will have impact over a long period
of time whereas others will be very time related. So when we did the Olympic
games blog last year, we found that posts that we did on the events, particular
events like the 100 meters men’s free style final, that got a lot of hits when that
event was about to happen and just after it happened. I looked at my stats the
other day on that blog and really no one has ever looked at that page since.

But the page we wrote on Michael Felt, the swimmer, who may have been in that
race actually are still getting hits today because people are interested in him in an
ongoing way. So that is an evergreen post. It will slowly disappear and slowly
become less popular overtime as Michael Felt becomes less popular.

Every blog, every niche will have these time specific posts and it will have the
evergreen ones. I’ve actually believe that both can be incredibly profitable. It is

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about thinking through, how can I actually increase the longevity of my posts but
also to make the most of those short shop posts, as well, the time related ones?

That is really about writing for the long tail if you really want to use that
technical term.

9. Quantity and Quality

Darren: Number nine there is work on quantity as well as quality. Everyone is
always talking about quality is key. You got to write great quality content. This is
totally true. I totally buy into that but every post that you write is another
doorway to your blog via RSS, via search engines and via potential link ups from
other bloggers.

I am constantly getting asked by bloggers, “Why am I not getting any readers to
my blogs?” I go and look at their blog and they’ve got ten posts. So I really
advise, set yourself some posting goals. One post a day for a year is 365 pages on
your blog. Multiply that by two or three and you actually are starting to develop a
blog over a year which has actually a significant amount of content on it.

Andy: And something that I’ve noticed with your stuff Darren is, like on the
camera site, a post could be an excerpt of a camera review from somewhere else
versus a more extensive thing that is going to have more of an essay.

Darren: That is right. What I tend to do, and I haven’t really talked about this
publicly too much but what I do is the excerpt ones that I do from other people’s
sites and usually they are sent to me by those site and are asking me to do it.
What I do at the end of each one of those is link into my site to a page which is
much more extensive on that camera. I add that excerpt to that page as well.

So the excerpt from the page actually gets added to two pages on my site. One is
just featuring that site’s review and another one is on that particular camera
which will have overtime, ten or twenty different links to different sites on it with
excerpts.

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So those pages are constantly changing in the search engines. We know that
search engines like fresh content and so the actual camera page which has, it
grows over time becomes more and more popular in search engines.

Andy: Are you doing that with categories?

Darren: Yes, I am. So you got to think about the quantity, actually you can use
the same piece of information in a couple of different posts if you are clever
about it too.

10. Learn Your Blog’s Rhythm

Darren: Number ten is learn the rhythm of your blog. We talked about this last
week. Check your stats and find out when your blog comes alive and then
actually work with that and not against it. So my blogs come alive on a Monday
or a Tuesday. I’ll write my announcement posts; I might write my big news on
Mondays and Tuesdays and try and pre-empt to that traffic. We talked about that
last week so I won’t go on about it.

11. Write Original Content

Darren: Original content. While it is tempting to not leave a link to what others
are doing and I see that temptation and I fall into that temptation too. The fastest
way to grow your readership is to actually write original content or a least to
present what you are doing, what others are writing in a creative and informative
way that is actually useful to people.

So many people will only ever link to what other people are writing and don’t
actually add anything to it. That may go ok with search engines overtime but the
only way to build your search engine traffic is to get links from other people. The
only way people will link to you is if they find something original and useful there
on your blog.

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12. Link! Link! Link!

Darren: Number twelve is link, link, link. Many bloggers are scared of sending
their traffic to other blogs and they avoid it. I actually think that sending people
away from your blog actually has a lot of benefits as well. It gives your readers
quality content and the impression that you are well connected and that you are
well read. It also builds relationships with other blogs which we all know will
hopefully in time, bring back some links and bring back some traffic to you. I
think it is really important to send people away from your blog in your writing as
well. That is what blogging is about.

13. Stay On Topic

Darren: Another one is stay on topic. It is very easy to get off and start talking
about the movies you’ve seen and all those sorts of things. I actually really believe
in creating a niche for your blog which is what this whole course has been about
and staying with that niche. If you find yourself being tempted to write about
other things, start another blog. Don’t just write about them on a very general
niche.

14. Invite Participation

Darren: Invite participation, ask questions, be conversational. Don’t present all
the answers on a topic. I actually find that when you present half a case and
invite readers to participate in writing your article, it can actually create a real
buzz around a particular topic. Invite feedback, respond to the comments, all of
these things help to create an interactive blog.

An interactive blog is one that people will be attractive to. When someone surfs
in for the first time and they see you’ve got posts with ten or twenty comments in
them, they’ll want to participate. They’ll think that this is a happening place and
so interaction is really important. I often say that you want to balance your
expertise with invitation and humility.

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Andy: I like that.

Darren: And don’t be a know it all. Don’t expertise and humility together and
people will respond to that unless of course you’re writing a blog in a voice, “I am
the expert” and that is the voice that you want to go for. I actually find people like
the humility as well.

15. Predict Hot Topics

Darren: Predict the hot topics. I’ve talked about this before. Ask yourself, “What
is happening next week? What is happening next month? What is happening
next year? And how can I write posts now to position myself for that?”

So Apple Mac today upgraded their power books in their power Mac. Last week
they upgraded their video iPod. They announced it. The people who would have
gotten traffic around that would have been people who wrote about that a few
weeks ago predicting what was going to happen and being picked up by the
search engines for those keywords.

16. Write for the Search Engines

Darren: Write for the search engines. You can spend your whole life thinking
about SEO search engine optimization but it is really important to understand
the basics of it at least and I’ve given you I think a couple of links there to some
pages which you might find useful.

We haven’t got time. We could probably run a whole ecourse on search engine
optimization.

Andy: Oh Yes.

Darren: But really I would say, “Don’t get overwhelmed by it but learn some of
the basic principles.” I’ve given you some links there. Basically you want keyword
rich content, you want to interlink within your sites so you are building up your

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Google juice from within your site but also you want links coming in from
outside as much as possible.

I’ll leave those articles for you to read yourself. If you got any questions about
them, I’m happy to answer them later on.

I think that is all I really have to say on writing for content. I’m glad we didn’t try
and fit all that into last week.

Andy: Yes, it would have been crazy. So that gets us through last week’s content.
I want to break for questions and see if there are any lingering questions from
the week five stuff which again was thinking about traffic, metrics, and measures,
getting content and writing content.

Topic: Content Appearing on Multiple Pages

Participant: I’ve got a question. A few minutes ago Darren, you’ve made a
comment that you said that you can use the same content on several different
posts if you’re creative.

Darren: Yes.

Participant: Would you elaborate on that?

Darren: Sure. What I am saying there is don’t, is not to just post the same thing
twice under different titles because that will come up as duplicate content in
Google. What I was meaning there is what I do is write the same, it is hard to
illustrate it but so I’ll write a post saying, “Steve Digicam has reviewed this
camera” and I’ll put a quote from that and then at the end of that I’ll write
another little link saying “Read more about this camera at” and then I’ll link to
another page on my site which has all collections of all the different reviews that
I’ve collected. I’ll also include that excerpt on that so the excerpt, the quote that
I’ve taken from Steve’s Digicam comes up on a post which is just about that
review and it will also come up on another page for that particular camera which
has a collection of quotes from different reviews.

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The quotes are appearing twice on my blog but the pages are very different from
one another because one has just that quote and a link and the other page has
lots of content on it.

I don’t know if I explained that very clearly but that is my strategy at the moment
and it seems to work really well.

Andy: Yes, let me try and pile in on that. Part of it too is when you add a post to
a blog, it shows up on the front page and then it also shows up at its own
particular page, where it is the permalink, the one page for that particular post.
You can also have that post show up on a category listing. So on the main page
the, where those keywords fall is going to be different than where they fall on the
individual post page versus the category post page versus the monthly archive.

So it is the same unit, the same piece of the post from the database but it is being
built four times, well five if you count the RSS feed. Again, it is all happening in
different parts of the HTML. It could be that the post title appears in a headline,
two tag on the front page, and the headline one tag on the individual page, and
the headline three tag over here and it is the same keywords and the same
content but is appearing in different string in the HTML.

Darren: Does that make sense?

Andy: So what Darren could be doing is he could make a category for just one of
the Canon cameras so that way all of the posts about Canon cameras appear on
one particular page. So he not only has the front page and the individual page but
then a page just for Canon cameras which probably has the title of ‘Canon
Camera Product Reviews’. So when people type that into Google, it is a powerful
page because it is connected into all these different models of the Canon camera.

Any other questions out there? Alright well do you want to launch into week six?

Darren: Yes, let’s do that.

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Andy: Yes, week six is a lot of tying up all these different ends that we’ve been
talking about over the past several weeks. We really want to be starting first with
the idea of using newsletters and ezines and all of that jazz.

Building Traffic with Newsletters and Ezines
Darren: That is right. So we’ve got a post there on your side bar, under week six
about newsletters. You might want to open that up.

Why use newsletters?

1. Know Why You Are Writing a Newsletter

Darren: Really there is a variety of different reasons and my first point there is
if you are thinking about a newsletter on your blog, then you want to think about
what is the reason for that? Why are you writing it? What is the purpose of that?

I’ve listed there a variety of different purposes that you might want to have as
your primary and secondary goals for using a newsletter. They are great for
driving traffic to your blogs. My Problogger newsletter each week, I’ll do a
summary of my hot posts for the week, the most popular posts which gives
people a snapshot view of the five or so most popular posts on my blog that week
which does drive significant traffic back to my blog.

2. Newsletter Generate Leads (and Sales)

Darren: They have the ability to generate sales and consulting leads. If you’ve
got a product that you are writing an ebook, for instance, this particular course, I
announced it on my newsletter. I announced it actually as an exclusive
announcement before I generated some sales and some leads. Some of you have
probably signed up for that after seeing that on my newsletter. It can generate
revenue.

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Topic: Figuring Out Your Most Popular Posts

Participant: Can I break in for just one moment?

Darren: Sure.

Participant: I want to go back to a question to a point you said, “The most
popular posts.” Do you have automated tools to do that?

Darren: No, I simply just check my stats for the week.

Participant: Does anybody know of any automated tools to do that?

Andy: WordPress has, I think, a link tracker that can track which posts are being
click on most often. But I don’t know if it is going to output something automated
that you can pop into your newsletter or not.

Participant: Ok. What I’d really love to have is something along the side of the
most popular post of the week, most frequent commenter, highest rate of posts,
those kinds of tool.

Andy: Right. Those can happen on the actual blog but I’m suspicious that can
happen in a newsletter because you send it out and it is in the inbox and you
can’t update it in real time.

Participant: Yes, I am just wondering if for the blog if those tools.

Andy: Yes, I would look under, if you look in the plugins for different, like
WordPress plugins or TypePad plugins, I know there is for at least the for most
popular posts it is out there.

Participant: Ok, right. Thank you.

Andy: Sure.

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3. Newsletters for Direct Income Through Affiliate
Programs and Advertising

Darren: Newsletters are great for direct income maker through advertising and
through affiliate programs so it is the same way of generating sales. Some people
use newsletter to actually generate a subscription revenue. It is not something
that I have ever done myself but I know that some people are experimenting with
charging for a newsletter.

4. Creating Community

Darren: Creating community among your readers. This is something that I try
and do on my Problogger site is to actually occasionally I’ll promote some of the
other blogs, some of my reader’s blogs and create a discussion.

They are great for making announcements, for boosting up your personal profile,
upwelling readers to other products and other things that you might be wanting
to sell.

So newsletters can be used for a variety of different purposes and it is worth
defining that upfront.

Andy: Yes, I was also going to say that I think newsletters are often overlooked
by bloggers. That they, I think a lot of bloggers say, “If you are not going to get it
through our feed then screw you.” Where people still think in terms of the inbox.
Yes, RSS is out there. It is going to be in the new Windows and it is already in the
Mac. We are trying to get people in there and it is a training hurdle but I find that
a newsletter, a weekly newsletter or biweekly or monthly is such a great way to
really build a relationship because again, it is a little more intimate than just
viewing it on a web page. When you are viewing your own email, it has a different
mindset that you are receiving one on one communication.

I find my newsletter really connects and builds that relationship over time. Along
with the blog but the newsletter does that I think on an even warmer level.

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Darren: That is right. You want to take into consideration that it does take time
and it does take effort. I find that I get a lot of emails straight after I sent my
newsletters out from readers giving feedback. You don’t want to do it if you think
it is going to be an easy thing. It takes time and effort but it is definitely worth
while I my mind. Really what you are doing is your are getting permission from
people to market to them.

Andy: Right. That is I think the missing piece of a lot of blogging traffic is that
people go in and you never get to talk to them again. Whereas if you can make
your blog geared towards either getting people on an ad or converting them into
a newsletter so you can then market to them overtime instead of just losing that
traffic.

Darren: That is right.

Newsletter and Ezine Q & A

Participant: A quick question. Do you do this automatically in terms of taking
your post or is the whole process manual for you?

Darren: On my one, it is quite a manual thing.

Participant: That is what it sounded like, ok.

Andy: You can do a slightly automatically process where depending on what
blog tool you are using, you could set up TypePad or Movable Type or WordPress
to make a separate template called, ‘Newsletter Cut and Paste’ and it is going to
pop in maybe the HTML for your last five posts and then you can throw that into
what you are using to edit your newsletter and chop it up. That is going to save
you a little time but I mean, it is still cutting and pasting.

Darren: I find that it takes me about a ten or fifteen minutes to write them now
and read them over. It is not massive time but it does take a little while to learn
how to do it.

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Andy: And after a while I really, when I’ve written my best newsletter is when I
am focusing on entertaining my audience. I start writing it a week in advanced
because I usually email practically stuff but then at the bottom, I have weird,
quirky stuff as well and I really enjoy writing it. It becomes less of a chore when
you know the people are going to be looking forward to it.

5. Choosing a Newsletter or Ezine Delivery System

Darren: That is right. So you really want to pick a system for your newsletter
that is an opt-in, opt-out system. I think in some parts of US now, that is law.
You actually have to give your readers, you can only really pile a list of people to
get your newsletters if they opt-into it. There are a variety of different systems
out there. I use the WordPress plugin.

So I use WordPress plugins for that which I find quite good. It is a very simple
tool to use but there are a variety of others out there which costs anything from a
couple of dollars per time right up to or free even right up to quite expensive
products. I encourage you to shop around. Perhaps we can have some discussion
at the end of some of the tools that people use. But opt-in and opt-out is essential
in my mind. You don’t want people getting your email who don’t want to get it
basically.

The subscription page I find is really important. I’ve given you an example there
of my Problogger one which isn’t probably the best example in the world. I
looked at it this morning I thought I could find lots of ways of improving it.
Really the elements that I try and putting into my subscription page is how to
make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe. I don’t actually ask them for
anymore information than the email address.

I know a lot of newsletters collect a whole bit of information, name, age, gender,
location, star sign, income and whatever it be. I actually find that I have a higher
success rate if people just give me perhaps their first name and their email
address so I can personalize the emails a little bit with their name. Different

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people will have different standards on that. I don’t want to collect lots of data on
my readers at this point. I think there are other ways to do that.

So make it easy, make it clear upfront what the newsletters is about. There is
nothing worse than signing up for one thing and getting another. So you want to
tell your potential subscribers what they should expect and how they will benefit
from signing up for your email. I highlight that it is a free and useful thing that I
give tips and I’ll stick to that and I actually deliver on what I promised, I hope.

6. Where to Put Your Subscribe Form

Darren: Now position your invitations strategically. On my Problogger blog,
you’ll see at the top of my left hand menu there, there is a subscribe to
Problogger Newsletter and they can just simply put in their email address in
there or they can click on that and go to the subscription page. We talked about
last week and the week before about the heat map, Google’s heat map and the top
left hand corner is really important. So that is where I’ve put it.

I also put in an invitation to subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of my
posts. That is the place where people looking for something else to do. I find that
that is quite an effective spot.

Andy: And with your subscription page, also don’t forget your success page.
Where something I started experimenting this week, I don’t have stats for it yet
but I just added the ‘Thanks for subscribing’ page, I’ve added the link so that
people can then add the blog to the My Yahoo! and MSN, Blog Line or Newsgator
accounts. So don’t forget, when you get a success page as a thank you, you can
then send them into the archives, you can then send them to your greatest hits of
posts, you can send them to something else.

Darren: Yes, that is great and that is something I need to work on obviously on
my thank you page as well. Some people are now offering incentives for
subscribers. I am having mixed thoughts about that. One it is a great way to get

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people in but I am not really sure I want people to sign up for my newsletter who
just want a prize.

So you may want to play with that. I prefer people signing up who actually want
the information because I know later on, I am going to have less headaches with
those sorts of people. But incentives for subscriptions might be something that
you might actually want to play around as well.

7. Use a Free Giveaway to Tease to Your Newsletter

Andy: And instead of a prize, it could be an excerpt of something that you’ve
done before. Like in my blog, I used an excerpt in my ebook which is now the
book that is going to be published so it is not necessarily a kewpie doll but it is an
extension of the knowledge that is already out there on the web blog.

Darren: Yes, that is actually very smart. I’ll use that myself.

Other Newsletter and Ezine Tips

Darren: Writing your email newsletters really, I’ve listed there a variety of
different hints for writing a newsletter. Most of them are actually quite similar to
the list we went through last week and this week on writing for blogs. You
establish a voice and a personality and stick to it. It is something we talked about
already. Make it scannable, get to the point. And remind people that they
subscribed. I actually find that overtime, people forget that they’ve subscribed to
your blog and they may actually begin to think that you are spamming them.

I occasionally get an email from a newsletter subscriber who I know has opted in
saying, “You are spamming me; Stop spamming me.” So I find occasionally in my
first paragraph I’ll say, “Thank you for subscribing to this blog. If you would like
to unsubscribe, if you are not finding it helpful, you can do so by clicking the link
at the bottom of the page.” Just that little reminder actually is enough for some
people just to get over the fact that maybe you are spamming them.

I think that is a courtesy that I give my readers.
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Andy: You might also want to check and see if like does the WordPress plugin
check the IP address, Darren?

Darren: No it doesn’t.

Andy: Even alerts? Does it send you an email when people subscribe?

Darren: Yes.

Andy: Ok so you’ve got the IP address and the date and time, right?

Darren: Yes, that is true, yes.

Andy: So then you can save those emails. So if you ever need an audit trail for
those people, you can say, “You subscribed on this date from this IP address with
this email address.”

Darren: That is useful information.

Andy: Yes.

Darren: Use your title and subject line really wisely. A lot of people, if you are
like me, you’ll see a lot of your emails will just go straight to the trash bin. So that
subject line becomes very important in intriguing people and peeking their
interest.

Be consistent with the frequency of your newsletters. If you promise a weekly
one, then send a weekly one. If you promise a monthly one, do that also.

Give subscribers value. This is something I really believe in. People love to get
something for nothing. They love to feel like they are getting something
exclusive. So I’ll often hold back tip bits from my blog and actually give them
away as free tips or as previews of something that I am doing. I’ll give
announcements of things I am going to do before I actually make them public on
the blog. That type of thing actually creates some value to your readers.

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Otherwise you are just telling them to come to your blog. It is actually not really
any use to them at all.

You want to be transparent. If you are getting something out of a
recommendation in your email, then it is probably best to be honest about that.
Don’t hype things up. I am anti hype. Emails that just hype things up, I tend to
unsubscribe from pretty quickly.

You want to track your results if possible. A lot of the newsletter software tools
that are out there will actually tell you how many people click-through in your
email, or what things they click-through. The WordPress plugin does nothing like
that, which is quite frustrating but it is easy to use in other ways. So tracking
your results as we suggest with everything is important.

Consider whether you send HTML or plain text newsletters. HTML ones are the
ones where you can make things bold and you can put pictures in and actually
make it look pretty. The downside of HTML emails is that they have some
incompatibility issues with some email, clients and they also tend to get blocked
by span filters a little bit more than the plain text ones.

I use plain text on one of my newsletters and HTML in another. I find that the
plain text is quite challenging because you need to think about your design and
you have to use asterisks or space or whatever to actually get people to look at
different parts but I actually enjoy that more. It is a bit of a challenge for me.

Andy: I added a link at the bottom to ezezine.com which is a service run by one
of my colleagues, Lisa Micklin. It is a spam free hosting of your newsletter and I
know that she has weathered the white listing process that you have to deal with
companies like AOL and all the other ips to get your particular newsletter white
listed.

So if you are interested and getting your ezines started on a small basis, I would
check out easyezine.com. I think it is free up to the first five hundred addresses.
She has also got a great ebook called, Start Your Ezine that takes what we’ve

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talked about in the past twenty minutes and really expands it and makes it a
comprehensive view of how you can use a newsletter. It is not just for blogs but
for businesses in general.

Darren: That is great. I’ll check that out myself.

Andy: And Darren uses the plugin, I myself use a shopping cart to manage all of
my newsletters so that way when people purchase, products and services, they
are in the same database as the newsletters. You can go from a plugin, all the way
up to having it integrated into your ecommerce system. So it just depends on
how advanced your needs are right now.

Darren: That is great and there are a lot of systems in between. I think I used
one for a while called Opt In Pro which I know a lot of people use which is
specific but it is probably like the EZEzine system by the looks of things.

Andy: Yes, so any questions about the newsletters stuff or the experiences that
people have had. I know a lot of people out in the call tonight have newsletters. If
you have any advice to people that are starting newsletters, please let it roll.

Tips for Formatting Plain-Text Ezines

Maryam: I have a question. I’ve just switched from HTML to text using
shopping cart and you are right, Darren, it is horrible. Any clues, formatting? I’ve
gotten dropouts just because they are not receiving the pretty HTML anymore
but my HTML is only getting through to about forty percent of my list. So the
spam catchers got, you know, the greater proportion of it so I am getting more
flow through using text but I am also getting complaints and lacking the time to
do both. Any suggestions?

Darren: I find it really hard. I have been trying using asterisks around heading
and spaces between sections. I mean, it really is just challenging. I tend to sent it
to myself first to see how it looks. Probably for me, I am lucky in that I started
with a plain text one and so no one has that expectation of anything else. But I

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just say over time you got to maybe even ask for some feedback from your
readers as to which ones work. So I don’t really have too much advice on that
one.

Andy: Don’t forget about periods and colons. I find that if you have a lot of
asterisks, it can overwhelm the visual scheme of the email. But if you have a
headline and just put a period, space, a period, a space before each headline, it is
going to bump it out a little bit but it is not as heavy as an asterisk. I know that is
a total detail but that is something I found useful.

Maryam: Thanks, that is great.

Audri: This is Audri. I have a couple of points. We have a lot of newsletters.
Some of them very large. A service that we use that we’ve been using now for
about three years is wonderful is AWeber.

Andy: Oh yes.

Audri: They do all of the managing of everything and it just really works well.
We’ve done a lot of testing on whether HTML, we did this about two or three
years ago and the text just outperformed in anyway you want to look at it. We did
get some complaints about not doing HTML but we get complaints about
anything we do. If you have no subscribers, we published Scam Busters and we
get complaints when we tell people about scam so we don’t get really upset when
we get complains about some things sometimes because people will complain
about everything. Our experience with just text is so the winner even though it is
challenging.

Andy: Great, thank you. Darren lets talk about hiring bloggers which is what you
are doing right now.

Maryam: Andy, I have a question.

Andy: Yes?

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Maryam: I am sorry, this is Maryam again.

Andy: Hi

Maryam: I have a short question. Now you send out occasionally you send out a
text email but occasionally you have a HTML header. It is a nice graphic inserted
in there and there is obvious formatting. What is your send ratio? What are you
getting?

Andy: You know what, I’ll look it up while we are talking. I think it is pretty
good. I haven’t check in like two weeks.

Maryam: You compared your HTML versus your plain text send outs on deliver
rate?

Andy: I haven’t notice much of a difference.

Maryam: Ah.

Andy: I don’t know if that is because of the host I am using or part of it is I am
doing part of my HTML as a Cascading Style Sheet so it is not really weighting
the email down as much. So I really, I am not, I don’t have any stats. I am going
to check my stats right now while we are talking.

Participant: Thanks.

Andy: I’ll tell you in a couple of minutes.

Hiring Bloggers
Darren: Ok, so we are going to be talking about hiring bloggers now. I’ve found
in the last six months that I’ve got to a feeling as to much I can actually write on
my blogs myself. I’ve had exponential growth up until about the last six months
when things are still growing in my blogging but the traffic that I’m getting, the
amount of posts that I’ve done, really are slowing down now as I hit that feeling.

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So hiring bloggers, hiring others to do the work for you is actually something that
I’ve begun to consider for myself and also in starting B5 Media. It is something
that we’ve been working on a little bit recently as well. That advantages of
including others in your work obviously are that you increase the quantity of
contents that are going out there, you increase the variety of the expertise in the
pool that you have and the skills as well.

So now B5, we’ve got fifteen blogs running and I think they run by that ten
people that have an incredible variety of expertise that I would never be able to
blog on their topics. They have a really interesting skill base as well. Some of
them are designers and coders which give other skills to our network as well.

Also brings more people promoting your blog as well. So we’ve got ten people
now linking to our system and bringing in across readers from their own blogs
which is great.

Downsides to Hiring Bloggers

Darren: On the downside, there are also some obvious risks and cost that is
associated with bringing others into your system. You loose control a little bit
over the quality. The more bloggers you bring one, the harder it is to track how
everyone going. You can run into issues of bloggers grandstanding and getting off
track from what their view are from your blogging system. I know the Insta Blog
Network last week had problems with one of their bloggers plagiarizing so there
was some legal issues around that. You run the risk of that and one of their blogs
was found pretty earlier on just copying stuff and not giving links back which is
obviously was really bad for their PR in their first week or so.

As you add more authors, you increase also the managerial role that you have to
play. You need to be willing to become a manager and be willing to discipline
your bloggers from time to time as well.

So there are some costs and benefits associated with new readers but my
personal experience is that the benefits generally outweigh the cost of it.

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When you are considering who to hire and how to hire, there are rights and
wrongs but I’ve listed there a variety of different factors, that you want to keep in
mind as you think about hiring bloggers.

Selecting Bloggers to Hire

Darren: Selection, so who should be chosen? I tend to go for people that I have
a relationship with of some sort. Last June, or this June we went overseas for a
month and I got a whole heap of guest bloggers added on to my blog.

Trust and Relationship

Darren: Out of that emerged some relationship with people. Now I’ve just hired
someone in the last few weeks and that person is someone I’ve had blogging for
me for a couple of months at first for free and we’ve developed some trust and a
relationship. I would always recommend that you know the people at least at
some level that you are hiring.

Writing Ability

Darren: You want to check out their ability to write. B5 at the moment, we are
hiring bloggers. We actually look at the quality of their application as an
indication of whether they can write distinctly or not. I have just been amazed by
some of the terrible applications we’ve got that just show really poor writing
skills. You want to check out their ability to write, you want to check out their
longevity or their previous work, whether they’ve had blogs before or websites
before or whether they are stuck at them. A lot of people will reply to write for
you that have these huge ideas of making millions of dollars but they are not
willing to stick it out over the long term.

Time Commitment and Availability

Darren: Do they have time to write? Have a look at some of the examples of
their writing and their work. We ask the question, “Are these people
entrepreneurial type of people? Are they creative type of people?” We don’t want

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just people who are going to do links to other posts. We want people who have
the ability to write original content and what voice will they write in? They are
some of the questions we asked around selection. I’m sure there are a variety of
other ones that we could ask as well.

Content Ownership and Copyright

Darren: One of the factors you want to consider is ownership. Who owns the
content? This is something that all the networks are thinking through at the
moment. There are a variety of different answers on this depending on which
network you are talking to. Basically you want to establish with the bloggers that
you hire upfront who owns that content and what happens when the relationship
ends. Does the blogger own the content? Do you own their content outright?
Does the blogger own it and at the end of the relationship, they take that content
with them? Do you have some joint ownership system where perhaps you own
the online content but they can produce it in a book form or they can produce it
as an ebook?

You want to establish the parameters of ownership of content right upfront. It is
very important or else you might get yourself into all kinds of trouble later on.

Compensation and Payment

Darren: When it comes to payment options, again, there are so many different
ways that networks are approaching this. Weblogs, Inc. I think pay on a per post
basis. They have this fee but it is generally about four or five dollars per post is
what they are paying people at the moment. Different people have different
opinions on whether that is a lot or not much at all. If you look at a lot of their
posts they are very short posts so maybe it is ok.

If you are wanting people to write longer, original content, you might want to up
that a bit. Some people go with a flat free with goals attached. So we’ll pay you a
hundred dollars a month or a hundred dollars a week but you have to write x
amounts of posts which is similar to that first one.

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Some people are using incentives and bonuses. I think the Gawker Network do
this where if the blogger, the blog editor gets the blog to a certain traffic level,
then they get a bonus on top of whatever flat fee they’ve got.

Some blogs networks are going for a revenue share option. So at B5 we do that.
We give bloggers about forty percent of the income from the blog plus the first
one hundred dollars that the blog earns. So we’ve got a bit of a combination deal
there going.

Others contract people will write a certain amount of articles. Some people, I
know the Fine Fools Network gives one hundred percent of any AdSense ads on
the post that the person writes. So they got group blogs and a variety of different
bloggers earning money off their own posts.

Some people give a certain percent of the overall income of the blog depending
upon how many posts their blog has done. So there are a variety of different
options there. You really need to knock that out right upfront.

I would suggest that flat fees are good in that the bloggers like to have a regular
income but for your point of view, I would want to give them an incentive as well
to do better and to write quality posts. So my personal preference is some steady
income but also incentives or some combination of that.

Another thing you’d want to establish right upfront is what are the duty that you
are expecting of them? Blog networks just get the bloggers to post and that is all.
They are just posting articles. Others will include comment moderation in that.
Others will include publicity and some marketing. Others will even get their
bloggers to manage their own advertising.

You want to define right upfront what are you going to do and what is your
blogger going to do? That may vary from blogger to blogger depending upon
their skills.

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Exit Strategies

Darren: Lastly, you’ll want to think about your exit strategies. Know right
upfront who can end the relationship and how much notice they need to give and
what happens to revenue after the blogger stops blogging for you. There would be
nothing worse then actually a blogger leaving your blog on bad terms which
actually in turn reflects purely upon your blog.

I’ve seen a couple of examples of that. I think Peter Rojas from Engadget left
what is it, Gizmodo. He took a lot of readers with him over into Engadget because
things didn’t end very nicely there.

So you want to think about some of those factors. I’m sure there are other factors
as well. Do you have any others Andy to add to that list?

Andy: No, I was just going to, it was about the ending the relationship with
bloggers. I’ve just thought of a really good point and I just lost it. So keep talking,
I’ll remember it.

Non-Compete Agreements

Darren: That is alright. One of the other things that a lot of blog networks will
impose upon their bloggers is that they cannot write on the same topic
elsewhere.

Andy: That is what it was, a non-competing agreement. Thank you, that is what
I was going to ask about.

Darren: Yes, and that is something we are talking at the moment on B5 because
some of our bloggers do write on a similar topic but is slightly different so you’ll
want to think about that. There are some actual advantages of having them blog
on similar topics because they actually bring in traffic across with them. But
really it is a bit touch and go. I would say keep it as relational as possible. Make it
a win-win situation.

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Other Types of Compensation

Darren:One of the other things I will say is that a lot of bloggers will write for
you for free as well or for just for you giving them links or rating their profile on
your blog or giving them some free consulting or training in a particular area, or
whatever it might be. Some bloggers will just blog for you because they want
comradery and they actually want to connect with another blogger.

So it maybe that you can work on a variety of different factors of payment, to use
that term loosely.

You are going to talk about in building a team, Andy?

Andy: Yes, and we included examples of agreements at the end of that post as
well (here and here). I added in the Weblogs, Inc. agreement that got leaked. I
think it was a guy or gal that got all mad and posted the contract online and it
was on there for like four hours and people went crazy.

Other Team Members

Andy: We are speeding towards the end of the course but I wanted to make sure
we talked briefly about like Darren hiring bloggers is your are going to want to
think about yes, hiring bloggers but also if you need to be assembling a team. If
you are not a designer, you need to get a designer, system administrators, coders
if you want some custom coding or if you need help with plugins and templates
and all that jazz.

I feel like an adult. I finally hired an accountant this week. So as you get more
volume you are going to have to get staff to help you out. You may hire a
professional PR person that can help you with the traditional PR stuff while you
handle the online bloggy stuff.

Sources for that are of course, Elance, Guru and those are, along with
rentacoder.com are sources where you can post a project and then people bid on
it. I posted on Elance as well as Rent a Coder and you get people from all over the

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world bidding on a certain project. Usually the people, it is very, very inexpensive
to get a project done as well as some of the people out there have been doing
these projects on these sites for two or three years. If you need something done
in php or if you need something done in a special language, there are people out
there who can do it for you. As well as Craig’s List is the catch all for anybody
needing anything will start a Craig’s List first. Don’t forget that you might need
help as you assemble your blog network and you’re emerging media empire.

Darren: Right. That is something I don’t really know any from those list so that
is really useful.

Ethics, Legal Matters and Free Speech
Andy: Yes and we also talked about some lose ends, we want to make sure we
talk about of course the grey area with liable in blogs and free speech. It is still
being hammered out in many different jurisdictions in many different countries
and Delaware, at court just ruled out that a anonymous commenter is protected
speech and a place to keep up with that stuff is the Electronic Frontier
Foundation at http://www.eff.org. They cover not just free speech issues but
privacy online. They just released a crazy report about how in the United States
printers, your color printer, prints out a code that people can track back to your
particular computer.

So it is a really great site to keep track of those particular around all the privacy,
free speech, and liable because as blogging becomes more a mesh in the
mainstream media, this is going to become more of an issue.

All bloggers, journalist is a protected speech, you know thank God Judy Miller
wasn’t a blogger or that would have been a whole ball of wax here in the States.

Further Diversification: Niches and Sub-Niches and
Other Media Formats
Andy: Along with, Darren, you were talking about the niche, sub-niche thing
and diversification too.
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Darren: Yes, I was just thinking last night one of the things I am seeing that
some blog networks do now is rather than just developing a wide variety of
niches, that is one way to grow your blog network is to just start a blogs on a
variety of unconnected niches.

A lot of the networks now seem to be moving towards developing many networks
within a niche. So one way if you got a blog on scuba diving for instance, I’m not
sure why we keep using this scuba diving one, you may actually think about a
blog on scuba diving destinations or one on scuba diving equipment and actually
develop your expertise across the niche with a variety of different blogs within
that niche.

That is effectively what I have done with my digital camera one and printer one
and my camera phone one. They are all focusing on digital imaging rather than
growing a blog network that has all disconnected topics. I am trying to focusing
in on a larger one. So that may be another way to diversify.

Andy: And you also talked about diversification by media too.

Darren: Right.

Andy: That it wasn’t just niche and sub-niche but you could take your niche and
instead of diversifying the actual topic is diversify the media where the blog then
becomes a course or a seminar or a book or you know a movie or something like
that. It is a way of taking the content instead of broadening it past around niche
is having it vertically stretched with media.

Darren: That is right and I am seeing a lot of bloggers moving in that direction
at the moment. I suspect you’ll see a lot of books and a lot of ebook in the next
few months and years coming out of these particular niches that people are
blogging on.

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The Future of Problogging
Andy: And then finally we were talking about what we think is going to happen
with this problogger and stuff.

Darren: Yes in a year or two, I hesitate to predict what is going to happen. I
think one thing that we will see is mini networks within networks happening. I
know for a fact that that is coming on a few blog networks. The new advertising
systems that are out there, the Chitika. The guys behind the Qumana blogging
system came out with one last week call AdGenta. There are a variety of new
advertising providers coming out there which are going to change the landscape
quite a bit. Some of them have got some innovative things in the pipeline.

Of course there will be new blogging tools and platform and everything but yes it
is going to be a changing environment and I am really looking forward to see
what people come up with in the blogging.

Andy: Wow, I think we almost reached the end of the content Darren.

Darren: Who would have thought?

Remember: Keep it Fun
Andy: I just want to reiterate that please remember that this is suppose to be
fun stuff. I always tell people when they start blogging that if it is not fun, you are
not going to do it. If you are going to resent your job, you know, just stay in a
cubical. If you are going to do this and still resent your job, it is not going to be
any fun. Any other final words Darren?

Darren: Yes, I was commenting on Problogger this morning is one of the things
I am seeing is that people over-expand too quickly. One little lesson I’ll say on
blog is that they’ll start like fifty blogs and half of them haven’t been updated for
two weeks. So one of the temptations with this is just to go crazy and start blog
after blog after blog.

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My advice would be start one and as you have time and as the opportunity open
up, start another and continue to add new contents and new blogs to your
network but don’t go too quickly. Do the blogs that you are doing well and then
add to them in that way.

Topic: Seth Godin’s Squidoo
Andy: Great. So go ahead with your question Maryam?

Maryam: Yes a comment on Squidoo and what is going to happen out of this
lensing effect?

Andy: Yes, I am on the beta test for Squidoo right now.

Maryam: How do I know about that?

Andy: It is pretty darn slick. I am still trying to figure out, if you don’t know
what we are talking about, you can go to sethgoden.com and go to his blog and
he has released a new service called Squidoo and the whole idea. It is a blend of
about.com, a blog, and a social network. I am so curious to see how it all shapes
out. It is called Squidoo. It is in beta testing right now and it is the idea that
everybody is an expert in something and that people can become lens makers
and have lenses which are different views for blogs.

I was excited to hear about that because I wrote in my ebook two years ago but it
is really, I am curious to see how it all shapes out. It is really a pretty slick
interface and visually, I was really blown away by it. Darren, did you have any
input on Squidoo?

Darren: Not really. They haven’t except me into their beta program and so you
know, I don’t think it is much.

Andy: Right it is the whole idea is that people are going to be able to become,
register or show themselves as experts in a field and then somehow make money

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off that. That is where it falls apart for me. I don’t know how the heck an income
stream is going to be involved in this so I am curious to see how it all works out.

This is the guy that built the whole Yahoo marketing thing so I am sure it is going
to work somehow or another.

Darren: Yes, it would be very interesting to watch.

Maryam: Thanks Andy.

Andy: Sure, any other questions out there?

Topic: Choosing a Blog Platform
Participant: As you, as one builds a blog network, I am curious about what
tools you would recommend in terms of the blogging CMS platform?

Darren: You are the tools man, Andy.

Andy: Oh you mean which one to use?

Participant: Yes.

Andy: Oh yes, I suggest, I really am partial to WordPress simply because it is a
very easy; it is easy to install; it is a free tool. If you use a host like TextDrive or
Dreamhost, you can do a one click install. I’m actually working on a WordPress
course right now where you could have a domain up and then the next day have a
blog up in that domain.

Granted, WordPress does have some idiosyncrasies with how it lays out all the
templates. So it depends on how much, if you have access to a geek or are
married to one or dating one, I always say, date a geek and get them to install
that software for you and then dump them or if you are yourself a technically
inclined person. If you are not, you might want to stick with TypePad until you
develop things enough to hire some technicians to get in there but I am really
partial to WordPress. I believe in the whole free software thing. Darren?

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Participant: How much tie-in between your different blogs do you do?

Andy: Myself, I don’t do any because mine are all separate topics right now. I
got my personal blog which is all over the board. I’ve got the andywibbels.com
which is use to be the Easy Bake blog and that is really just the public face to my
business. I am working on two niche blogs right now but there are not going to
be related.

Participant: If you were doing related topics, what would you do?

Andy: I would, well, that is a toughie. Movable Type allows you to, well actually
WordPress does have what is called a multi user addition where you can manage
more than one blog through the same installation. So you might check that out
because then you can manage all of your five blogs from your network from one
WordPress installation. That becomes a headache. I use a WordPress installation
for every course that I do. I have some private blogs for part of what I am
working on and I’ve got public ones. So I’ve probably got about twelve different
WordPress installation across my server right now. They are all at different level
of being upgraded so that is going to be a headache. It is that an intimating thing.

As well as Movable Type, you can have multiple blogs quite easily. I work with
two coaching companies right now and they are having, I think Susan Austin has
probably about nine blogs across her entire network and it is managed with the
same Movable Type interface. Then Andrea J. Lee and Tina Forsyth have I think
six on their system. They are able to manage their empires through one tool.

Darren: Is that through one domain name?

Andy: The Movable Type installation is on one domain but it is building to
different domain names. So all the domains are all pointing to the same physical
machine but they are all being built in separate subfolders which then are
mapped to the domains.

Darren: Ok

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Andy: This may not make any sense at all. I am totally all over the place.

Participant: It makes sense to me because I’m good at technical discussion
here for just a minute more.

Andy: Yes.

Participant: How much, in week two we talked a little bit about whether you
should publicized your blog network or just quietly go develop it. And the point
was made well publicizing the fact that you are doing one creates all kinds of
incoming links which brings value yet I can see advantages to doing it quietly
also.

Andy: Right, you might consider keeping it under the hood for maybe the first
month while you build that couple weeks worth of content. It is like Darren was
saying, one network just blew up and it’s got fifty blogs but nobody is posting.

You may want to say, “We are going to take this first month, cultivate the
content, figure out what our keywords are.” Make sure everybody knows, you
know, you need to be in these categories this many times a week or this many
posts and build a content that way so that when people come to it, it is not like
walking into an empty house.

Participant: What about hosting on separate servers?

Andy: Yes, that is something I might explore in the long run. I know Darren, you
know that lady that has the finance, women’s finance site that it’s the same
blogger but it is on different servers?

Darren: Yes, that is right. The advantage of it is that it is search engine
optimization related. I personally have most of mine on two different servers
now. It is very hard to know what the difference is but most people would seem
to argue that if you’ve got them on different servers, it is going to look like
unconnected sites. So when you link between one to the other, it will be like any
other sites linking to you which has its benefits.

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Ideally, you want to move them on to different servers but practically that has a
higher logistical problems associated with it in keeping your head around
different servers.

Andy: Yes, I think it is more people who get hit to I can run twenty blogs from
one, from my dream host account. Google will make that a stronger element. The
whole, is it a diversification if IP addresses across the network of sites? Are these
really separate sites? Are they on the same machine which might mean, they are
from the same web host account.? So that I think it is going to become stronger.
That along with what you were talking about Darren with the people using
geographic location and the IP address too.

Darren: That is right.

Andy: So I don’t know if that answers the question but that is just a lot of talking
around it. I hope the helps.

Participant: Thank you.

Andy: Sure. Any other questions?

Darren: The time may have come Andy to say good-bye.

Feedback From Participants
Andy: Yes, well can we do some feedback real quick Darren?

Darren: Sure.

Andy: I want to take a maybe three or four minutes and just get some quick
feedback on the course from people. This is the first round of the course and we
are both stunned by the outcome and the response and it has been very, it has
been a ball to do this course.

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So I would like to get some feedback from the participants on what worked, what
didn’t, what would you suggest for the next round of the course, and that kind of
thing?

Participant: I would like to see in future seminars more interaction between
users so we can see what other people are doing. I just felt a little isolated, is
what I am saying.

Andy: Ok great.

Darren: So you think a discussion forum would be a better thing than a blog in
that regard? With the blog, it could be a bit harder to follow the conversations of
what was happening?

Participant: I don’t like the comment system on those blogs actually.

Andy: Great. Thank you.

Tara: This is Tara. I like having the notes available ahead of time. That really
helped a lot so I can put them in the word processor document and then add
other notes so it is very helpful. I do agree if you can have a discussion forum
where we could more easily write back and forth to folks. I think that would get
people more involved in putting information out there and then responding.
Also, there was a lot of information in this course and six weeks is definitely not
enough but I know you are trying to balance cost with time but it was really
comprehensive and outstanding and I really enjoyed it.

Andy: Great. Thank you.

Maryam: Hi, this is Maryam, piggy backing on to what Tara said, I think six
weeks isn’t enough and think there should probably be a beginning and an
advance and an maybe an intermediate course. So leveraging more level right
along the way.

Andy: That is right.

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Maryam: And also, I would really appreciate one of those, you know where they
have the Webmeeting and everyone can see your desktop and you know like for
instance, Darren could be showing us Chitika. I got a little lost in that discussion
and I was following links and going, “Where the hell am I and oh, that looks like
an interesting ad, Gee, do I need one of those?” And then I am off following
things and I lose the mainstream. It would really be cool if we all have that
capability. I don’t know if that is possible but for as many people as there are
here.

Andy: Yes, the probably would have been good to have a visual element that
would help anchor the discussion because I know that if you are at home
listening to a teleclass, your eyes can wonder all over the place. So if not having
desktop sharing maybe having screen shots and or slides as well would have been
helpful.

Maryam: It is a Camtasia away.

Andy: That is right. Thank you. Other feedback?

Tom: I have some positive feedback.

Andy: Fantastic, go for it.

Tom: This is Tom from Scared Monkeys. We implemented a couple of the things
you talked about in the early days and we paid for the course while the course
was going along was with the changes we made.

Andy: That is fantastic to hear.

Darren: Can you write that down for us?

Andy: Yes, we’ll start tomorrow on putting this together in a downloadable
course so we are going to need testimonial from people so we’ll be soliciting
those in the coming weeks. That is great.

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Participant: I want to second the point of having a beginner and an advanced
class because I think that is where there is a bit of a separation that happened
with some of the questions. I think, you know, with people who have been doing
this for a bit, there are some topics that we could have flushed out a little more
but than would have left a lot of people behind.

Andy: Yes, I am thinking maybe like the beginner course would be people that
haven’t made their blogs yet and the advanced would be you have active blog.
That was something that Darren and I talked about was well do you tailor the
course for people that are, some people take the course might not be building
blogs during the course. So maybe have a beginner flavor that is before you start
building it out and then the advanced flavor that is going to be people that are
actively doing it.

Participant: I agree with that.

Farewell
Andy: Great. And let’s take time for one more. We are about sixty minutes over
so thank you for staying with us. But let’s get one more feedback or a comment or
question? Great, let me open up the calls so we can all say good-bye. Hold on two
seconds. Alright, so we can all be heard now. Darren, can you hear me?

Darren: I can hear you.

Andy: Ok, great. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us these past six
weeks and again, we are going to get all this stuff out there. We’ve got learning
guides being made and all that fancy stuff so that will be showing up in the next
couple of weeks. Like I said, you are going to have access to this hopefully for the
rest of your lives. It has been such a great journey. Darren?

Darren: That is right. I would say anyone who is listening who is not live on the
call to feel free to shoot us an email with your feedback as well. I’ve love to hear

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that. Let’s keep the discussion going on the site if you’ve got more questions and
advice for each other then we’ll continue that discussion. So thanks very much.

Participant: Thank you very much.

Andy: Thank you. Everybody have a great night.

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Six Figure Blogging Class 6
Worksheets
(there were no worksheets for this session)

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Change Log
A list of versions, changes and revisions to this document:

October 2005 Version 0.9 Released (Draft)

November 2005 Version 1.0 Released

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6 figure blogging 6

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