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By ProBlogger Expert Ali Luke.
Homework.
Even if your school days are long behind you, that’s probably not one of your favourite words. (Unless you were even more of a geeky kid than me.)
But blog readers want homework: actionable steps to put what they’ve learned into practice.
And here’s why.
Have you ever read an inspiring and practical self-help book – like David Allen’s Getting Things Done or Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – only to find that, months or years later, you still hadn’t actually put any of it into practice?
Reading about a topic seems like a positive step. And it is. But usually, simply reading won’t get you far.
As a blogger, you don’t want to simply produce content that people enjoy reading … and then forget about. You want content that changes their life in some way (maybe small, maybe big).
Because that’s what keeps them coming back for more – and, quite possibly, eventually buying something from you.
Sometimes, of course, your purpose might be to help someone feel encouraged or inspired. Your post won’t necessarily be something that leads to specific action steps.
But often, you’ll want to snap readers out of the habit of passively reading … so that they’ll actually do something.
Here’s how.
Lots of these tips can be applied to ecourses (free or paid) – keep in mind that with those, you can go much more in-depth than in a typical blog post, and you can suggest more time-consuming actions.
You don’t necessarily have to do all of these, but definitely consider whether they’d be a good fit for your post.
It’s often a good idea to use a subheader for this section of your post. You don’t have to call it “homework”, unless that’s likely to suit your readers and your brand.
Instead, you could try:
If a subheading doesn’t work for you (perhaps your homework is just a sentence or two and the subheading feels like overkill!) then you could use a different font for the homework: perhaps bold and/or italic, or coloured text.
If you want readers to actually do the homework you suggest, then don’t suggest something that’s going to take hours, or that’s going to be really complicated.
Keep it quick and simple: ideally, something they can accomplish in under ten minutes. In many cases, that might mean encouraging them to take the first step with something (e.g. “register a domain name”) – once they’ve got started, they may well follow the rest of the advice in your post.
If you do want to give more than a quick ten minute task, add other suggestions as “extra credit” so that they don’t seem overwhelming. (You could also use “bonus” or “next steps” or “take it further” or whatever wording suits you here.)
I’d suggest limiting your “extra credit” suggestions to two at most. Again, you don’t want readers to feel overwhelmed.
Depending on the main body of your post, it might be useful to include examples or links to other useful posts within the homework section. (Quite often, e.g. with a how to post, you’ll have put these in earlier on. You still may want to put a brief reminder.)
However clear your instructions are, it’s often easier for readers to follow them if they can see a finished example. For instance, if you’ve posted about “how to structure your About page”, it would be useful to give a worked example or a link to a good About page for readers to study.
You may need to be a little cautious with this one, especially if you have quite a large and/or responsive readership: you don’t necessarily want to end up inviting dozens of emails. Often, it’s easiest to prompt readers to leave a comment if they’re stuck or need any help: that way, other readers will be able to view and learn from your response.
(If you’re running an ecourse, you can use online forums or a private Facebook group to similar effect.)
If your homework involves producing something – like an image, a blog post, or a paragraph of text – then why not ask your readers to share it in the comments? You don’t have to do this, but if it’s a good fit, it can be a great way to build stronger relationships with your readers.
Alternatively, you could get readers to respond through a survey or online form, or through social media – whatever suits your topic, your readership and your own workflow or preferences.
Let’s run through some ways in which different bloggers give homework. For each of these examples, I’ve explained what’s working well, and (in some cases) what could potentially be tweaked.
From Ten Smart Things You Can Do To Build Trust Through Your About Page [With Examples], Ali Luke, Zen Optimise
This was a pretty long, detailed post and I wanted to give readers a simple step to take: think about using one of these lessons for their own About page. I also gave them a suggested timeframe (“this week”) to help them focus on doing something quickly – and offered them the opportunity to commit to it by leaving a comment.
One thing I wish I’d done differently here: I should’ve made this homework stand out, probably by using a bold and/or italic font (see Example #4, below), or by using a subheading.
– From 78 Marketing Tasks You Should Outsource Immediately, Neil Patel, Quick Sprout
Framing your homework as a “challenge” can make it sound a lot more exciting! Neil helps tackle the potential overwhelm caused by a long list by telling the reader to “outsource just one marketing task” and also gives a quick, clear recap on how to do that.
Example #3: Offering Further Reading
From ProBlogger Podcast Challenge: Write an Amazing List Post, Darren Rowse, ProBlogger
In this example, the post itself pretty much is the homework (“write a list post”). Note how, again, framing homework as a “challenge” can make it more exciting – and also help develop a sense of community around it.
There’s plenty of extra help and further reading listed here, in case readers feel they need some extra advice – both from ProBlogger itself (“10 Steps to the Perfect List Post”) and from related blogs.
From 10 Practical Ways to Boost Your Energy Level, Michael Hyatt, MichaelHyatt.com
Michael always ends his post with a clearly labelled “Question” section like this, in bold italics so it stands out – which is a great way to make sure readers pay attention. (You can get his very handy post template here.)
Michael’s questions are geared around getting readers to think about the topic of the post and respond in the comments, which works very well for his more inspirational or mindset-related content.
For a post like this, though, focused on very practical things to improve the reader’s life, I would have liked to see a slightly more action-focused question, rather than ones that invite reflection and discussion. (E.g. “which one of these ideas will you try tomorrow?”)
Not every post you write will need homework – but if it’s a good fit, then adding just a couple of extra sentences can make all the difference in prompting readers to take action based on all your great ideas and advice.
As you come up with ideas for your blog, think about which posts are particularly actionable (e.g. how to posts, some list posts, “lessons learned”, advice for beginners). You might want to note down, alongside each idea, a few thoughts about how you’ll incorporate homework into that post.
Today: Take a look at the most recent post on your blog. Is there some way you can offer readers an action point, exercise, etc? Spend 5 – 10 minutes adding this in – do it right now, if you can.
Ali Luke blogs about the art, craft and business of writing at Aliventures. She has two free ebooks on blogging, Ten Powerful Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Stronger and Ten Easy Ways to Attract Readers to Your Blog … And Keep Them There: to get your copies of those, just sign up for her weekly e-newsletter (also free!) here.
The post Why Your Readers Want Homework (and How to Give it to Them) appeared first on ProBlogger.
You were browsing the internet recently looking for different ways to make money working from home.
You’ve heard of how some people are earning a full-time salary from the comfort of their home without having a mischievous boss commanding them like robots and now, you’ve also decided to follow that route.
Why not? Who doesn’t want to be a boss of his own?
You imagine how it will feel like to always spend all the time in the world with your family traveling the world like Ryan Biddulph without anyone questioning your movements or giving you the time you should return to the office or stand a chance of losing your job (That can be scary man).
After so much research, you decided to venture into blogging because majority of the people you see online posing on their Lamborghini are bloggers. Now, you don’t care to know if you can do it or not, what’s most important to you is that your friends are making money doing it, therefore, if they can do it, you can too.
Well, I will not argue with you, my friend, you may be right.
However, things don’t always happen that way. I understand that blogging is not a rocket science, but is it for everyone? NO.
The truth they say is always bitter yet, the best thing anyone that loves you can do for you is to tell you the truth, not minding how it hurts.
For the fact that blogging and internet marketing have created lots of billionaires across the world today is never a guarantee that you will also succeed at it.
You might have been told of how easy it is to make money while sitting on the beach but what you don’t understand is that it’s not as easy as people paints it. Anyone who tells you that it’s easy to make money on the internet is perhaps trying to take your money.
The worst disservice you can do to yourself is jump into blogging with the mindset that it’s easy, if you believe in that lie then, you’ve already failed. It might be easy ten years ago but today, most people that know what it’s all about will even prefer to hold on to their day job than sitting on their laptop every day.
The bad news is that there’s no push button to make money as a blogger.
It takes lots of time, efforts and sometimes, money. That is the mindset you should have even before considering launching your blog. This is because most people that started it with the belief that it’s simple often get disappointed along the line and then, they’ll give up.
They are the same people that will later start criticizing bloggers, accusing them of being fake and claiming that it’s not possible to make money on the internet. Take the story of Fake Steve Jobs for example.
Daniel Lyons who was once a blogger and was popularly known as Fake Steve Jobs for years until New York Times revealed his actual identity, this sent over a half million visitors to his site on a single day, and he ended up making $1,038.81 from that traffic.
Of cause, the money was quite beyond his expectation with such amount of traffic. Because of this, he concluded with the statement below:
Fake Steve Jobs worked so hard, he created epic contents, was able to make his site go viral and yet, was broke. But, this does not justify the statement above in any way. Daniel Lyons simply was unable to monetize his blog correctly, and that is not to say that the rest of us bloggers are done for.
The first thing is to find out if you’re lazy and hate working, if that is the case then you don’t even have to think about becoming a blogger because it’s one of the toughest profession I’ve ever seen.
Blogging is never for lazy people; instead, it’s for strong hearted people who truly understand that there is dignity in labor.
You’ve seen one of Pat Flynn’s income reports where he made over a hundred thousand dollars, and you think “wow,” that’s simple, and you start imagining what that amount of money can do for you.
Forget it, my friend; it’s not as simple as you’re visualizing. What you don’t know yet is that Pat started blogging since 2008, and if I’m correct, that’s about eight years ago.
Another important thing to note is that he was not making such amount within his first 2-3 years of blogging. That income you see on his site all came as a result of hard/smart work, consistency, and strong will power to succeed now, do you have these qualities? Or are you looking for a formula that will make you a millionaire overnight?
Some time ago, I made a confession on my site about how I almost quit blogging and even wanted to sell my blog, do you know why? I guess you should be aware.
I wasn’t making a dime from my blog after my first three years, and that frustrated the hell out of me which forced me to abandon by blog for over a year. The reason why I’m still here today is because I’m determined to make it, and that is the real test of a blogger and anyone who want to achieve any meaningful thing in life.
You can’t just fold your hand doing nothing and then, expect money to be following you everywhere, if that what you want, I’ll advise you to play Lottery because blogging can never work for you.
Let me tell you, forget all those lies you’ve been fed with; blogging is not just all about getting a domain, hosting it and then, installing WordPress on your server, No. There are more to it that your fake coach probably forgot to tell you.
If it’s that easy then, everyone will be doing it and Fake Steve Jobs will still be doing it until today but unfortunately, it’s not.
Just like every other good thing in life, you must be willing to lay down so many things before you can become a celebrated blogger. Most of the successful people you see in the world today including bloggers and those in other professions started very tight.
Check them out and you will see that they didn’t achieve all the fame overnight. But the moment you become successful, people will never see all your struggles again. They will forget all the sacrifices you made.
Let’s use the image below as example:
Source: facebook.com
What does this tell you?
Zlatan Ibrahimovic is one of the most celebrated footballers in the world today but look at how he started. People will not even believe his story today.
Therefore, if you are not ready to work, please don’t start a blog because you will never finish it.
Like I already stated above, blogging requires lots of discipline and sacrifices, this screenshot of the post I made on Facebook recently says it all:
Now, the above screenshot has already explained to you the life of a blogger; I want you to ask yourself if you can leave such a life.
You’re always excited about the Internet lifestyle, but I guess you’re yet to understand its true meaning.
From the post I made on Facebook which I just posted the screenshot here, you will see that some of my friends who are also bloggers even missed this last Rio 2016, myself included.
That is the actual life of a blogger, and you need to ask yourself from start if you can leave such an unenjoyable life and if you answered yes then, congratulations…….. You’re going to make a good and successful blogger.
But if you in any way answered NO then, I’ll advise you look for something else to do with your time.
As a blogger, you will also need some money to invest in tools that will make it easier for you of cause; you’re not expected to start with a free blog if you’re serious. You must be willing to invest in your business too.
WordPress is the best blogging platform on the internet and to use it, you must invest in your domain and hosting. No real business comes free of charge, and if you want to be a blogger, you must understand that too.
You cannot skip all these sacrifices especially on your early days of blogging. I know it will come to a point when you’ve started making some money, and you can now afford to hire a virtual assistant and outsource some of the tedious tasks to freelancers, but that will be later.
Even if you have all the money to spend when starting, you will still need to familiarize yourself with these things before turning it to someone else to help you.
Conclusion
If you do not remember any other thing on this post; I want you to have in mind that blogging is not for lazy people, and it’s not a get rich quick scheme either.
However, I’m very optimistic that you can do it.
Be serious with it, get a coach to teach you everything you need to know to succeed as a blogger, work as if your life depends on it and eventually, you will become like Pat Flynn too.
The post Warning! Blogging Is Not For Everyone (And How to Find Out if It’s For You) appeared first on All Blogging Tips and is written by Theodore Nwangene
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By ProBlogger SEO Expert Jim Stewart of StewArt Media.
Driving your WordPress website toward a higher Google ranking involves constant tweaking, which can mean hours of detailed work. Enter Yoast SEO: the one WordPress plugin that can optimise your entire site.
This comprehensive tool is the most complete SEO plugin available for WordPress, with the ability to streamline your site to increase your click through rate and ranking. Rather than spending endless hours tracking down individual problems to fix, you’ll find all your SEO functions in one compact area. You’ll have the power to make real, effective changes to your site that gives positive results.
The more often you can tempt the Googlebot to crawl your site and see what it likes, the higher chance your site will rise in the rankings. Optimising your site with Yoast SEO will do just that.
It’s the one SEO tool that you absolutely can’t do without.
Once downloaded and installed, you’ll need to set up Yoast SEO so it works best for your website. Every site has different needs, but creating the right settings is a relatively straightforward task.
Begin with the SEO option on the dashboard menu, and then choose General. This will take you to a page that offers you general settings options for SEO. It includes a General Settings tab, which has a tour for the entire plugin if you want to see all its options. Next is Your Info, where you’ll input information about your site and your business.
Next, you’ll fill out the information on the Webmaster Tools (aka Google Search Console) tab. This allows you to verify your Google Search Console or other Webmaster tools you’re planning to use with your site. The final part of this section is the Security tab. If you’re operating a single-person site, don’t worry about it. If you’re working with multiple people on one site, you might consider disabling the advanced options for other, more casual, users.
Once you’ve finished the Your Info option, move down to the next one, Titles & Metas. For me this is probably the most important area of Yoast as it determines what Google can crawl & index on your site. Most bloggers sites I see have this set up incorrectly. The settings will differ slightly depending on how your site is built and what sort of blog it is but the goal is the same. Eliminate duplication. Duplication of your content can hurt your ranking efforts as Google may have difficulty understanding which page it should rank. Under Post Types, normally we would “noindex” things like media or gallery pages and some custom post types if it makes no sense for Google to index them. Similarly, forms, lightboxes, or other plugins may be generating content you don’t really want or need Google to index. You can simply select noindex on those post types. The other major area to look at is the Taxonomies tab. On most sites, we would noindex categories & tags. That may be different for your site depending on how you use them, but for most they are simply duplicating what can be found elsewhere.
The other section you should spend some time in and familiarise yourself with, is the sitemaps section. I’m surprised the amount of bloggers I speak to that have not submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console. I explain it all here
Unless you have a multi-Author blog, noindex your Author Archives. Once again, for most sites we don’t want Google crawling the archives as they are simply a duplication of content found elsewhere on the site.
This, and every section after this, is very simple to fill out, while being crucial for getting the SEO correct on your site. Take the time to read each section carefully and fill out each answer thoroughly.
Now that Yoast SEO is set up on your site, go to the left side menu on your dashboard and choose All Posts or All Pages, depending on which ones you want to check. You’ll see a column marked “SEO” on the right side of the screen.
This column gives each page or post a score, rating its SEO “friendliness,” the likelihood that Google will like it:
This process won’t tell you exactly what each page needs for improvement, but it’s great for triage. It organises your work to tell you where you’re needed most.
After a while, you will get a feel for how to write a post that is optimised well simply by following these scores.
Click on an individual page to open it to the page editor, and you’ll find the Yoast SEO toolbox underneath the page’s content. Here you can customise your description tag, page title and add a “focus keyword” which will tell you how well you have optimised for it. Think of this as the SEO training area. You need to strike a balance between using your keywords whilst maintaining readability.
Tweaking your site with Yoast SEO can give you incredible results, but don’t worry about turning every dot green on the entire site. Use some logic when changing your page details. Remember though, it is just a tool and your results will depend on how well you use it. Like every plugin, Yoast SEO isn’t perfect, but it’s the closest you’ll come to having an SEO professional on your staff, 24 hours a day.
Jim Stewart, CEO of StewArt Media, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.
The post Yoast: Your Complete WordPress SEO Toolkit appeared first on ProBlogger.
There’s a buzz of excitement here as PBEvent 2016 gets ever closer! I am obsessively going over my slides, information is being emailed, awesome competitions to win cool blogging stuff are being run, and there’s tons of chatter and getting-to-know-yous in the Facebook group for attendees – bring on the 9th and 10th of September! (and that’s not just because I’m dying to get out of the Melbourne chill and into some beachy sunshine).
Not everyone can be at the top of the game, but you can still be successful as a mid-range influencer, blogger or online creative. The numbers pressure is still there, but you can make it work for you.
That title will make much more sense when you read the article! But the truth is, design plays a huge part in how your audience will receive your stuff. Are you happy with how your site looks right now?
Colin Gray talks to Chris Ducker about how he’s developed his podcast into a long-standing business based around his personal brand (and how you can too!). Colin has written some great posts here on ProBlogger recently, if you missed them:
This is so important – in the rush to retweet or share something pertinent with your audience, you might be getting it so, so wrong. It’s so easy to publish fake news and images these days. Make sure you don’t get fooled! There can also be huge ramifications for sharing incorrect information.
And this too! The consequences for sharing content that doesn’t belong to you – even if everyone else is doing it – can throw a spanner in the works (and if you’re really unfortunate, cost you a lot of money).
It’s one of the fastest-growing niches, and one that can be quite lucrative. This is a pretty hefty post! There’s plenty of “start a blog” posts about (we have a super-thorough one here, which is packed with resources), but if you’re looking for one with a particular foodie bent, then you’ll find some extras on Ramsay’s post.
Jon takes us back through the early days of his blog, the mistakes he’s made, and the tips he used to grow into the Facebook expert hub it is today. We all have wobbly early years! Don’t let that keep you from trying.
I’m excited about this! As are (I assume) the perennially trolled.
Once again Donna nails it with her epic visual social content knowledge! She really knows her stuff.
You may as well hear it from him if you’re resistant to the message that you have to show up and do the work. Consistently. There is no easy money, not even online.
What’s caught your eye this week?
The post Reading Roundup: What’s New in Blogging Lately? appeared first on ProBlogger.
