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Originally posted as a Facebook update from FinCon in Dallas (video below)
In my opening keynote at FinCon last night I challenged the attendees to think about how their blog, podcast and video content could potentially be changing people’s lives.
You see, many of us see ourselves as being in the ‘content business’. But I think it’s better if we start seeing ourselves as being in the ‘transformation business’.
Great content leaves a mark on people. It moves them from one place to another.
The the creators of that content do it in various ways – teaching, giving information (such as news), entertaining, providing motivation, and giving their audience a sense that they’re not the only ones and providing hope for a better future.
We can all probably think of content that’s changed our lives in some way. For example, I can personally think of podcasts that inspired me to eat better and exercise, and probably added years to my life.
Some content creators see the change they’re bringing to their audience in flashing lights. It’s obvious, like the example I just gave. But some of us think the changes we bring are smaller, or even insignificant.
For example, at Digital Photography School we teach people how to move from being stuck in Auto Mode with their cameras, and help them get creative control and take better photos. It’s a transformation, but it’s not on the scale of adding years to someone’s life.
Or is it?
Here’s the thing. While giving someone creative control over their camera doesn’t feel that ‘big’, it can actually have a far bigger impact than you might imagine.
Since starting that blog I’ve had emails and conversations with readers who have told me that by bringing about that transformation in photography they’ve:
The point is, you never quite know what impact your content will have on people. But when you create content that brings about change, it can potentially have ripple effects beyond the changes you’re aiming to bring.
The other thing to consider is that sometimes you create changes in your readers on a scale you could never imagine.
ProBlogger, for example, is a blog all about helping bloggers start blogs and grow income from them. We attract a lot of bloggers at the beginning of their journey, and as a result hear a lot of great stories from them that reflect this stage of blogging.
It’s really satisfying to hear those stories from newer bloggers taking their early steps. What we don’t always hear are the stories of those who read ProBlogger in the early years of their journey and went on to do bigger things.
But just because we don’t hear the stories doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And the last few days here at FinCon and our Success Incubator event was testament to that fact as I bumped into some of these ProBlogger readers who went on to bigger things.
Without naming names, I met:
Each time I heard these stories I was taken aback, and even found myself getting emotional. Sometimes people take the content you create and the products and services you offer and run… or sprint with it. You may never know the end result, but you may have just played a part in changing someone’s life.
So stop seeing yourself as being in the ‘content business’, and start thinking about what you do as ‘transformation’.
When you do, you’ll find it has a number of impacts.
So don’t just create content. Create a transformation!
(Un-mute to listen!)
Image Credit: Dan Gold
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As bloggers, we create a significant amount of content. But most of us consume a significant amount of it as well.
In an industry that uses strategies such as SEO, social media marketing and email marketing as key tools, we need to stay up to date with changes and trends so we can keep growing and developing. We also need to keep abreast of what’s happening in our niche to stay relevant.
Trouble is, with so much content out there we could easily spend our entire blogging work day consuming it. Sure we’re learning a lot, but we need to be mindful of how much time we’re spending and do it productively so it helps us grow our blogs.
Here are five tips to help you consume content more productively.
If you’ve been reading the productivity posts here on Problogger, then you’ll hopefully have set a goal for the year. If you have, you can use it to help target the type of content you read, watch and listen to. General knowledge is wonderful, and certainly has its place. But in terms of helping you with your blogging it’s far more productive to focus on content topics that will help you reach your blogging goal(s) for the year.
For example, if your goal is to increase newsletter subscribers then subscribing to podcasts and blogs that share content on this topic would be beneficial, as would reading books or listening to audiobooks that share list-building strategies.
It can be tempting to learn about every blogging issue to try and stay up to date. But this splits your attention, which means you can only go shallow on topics. You’re better off going deep and consuming content on fewer topics that will help you reach your goal than spreading your attention too thin.
You’ll always need to look for specific information. But if there are blogs, podcasts and vloggers you like to read, listen to and watch regularly, make sure you subscribe to them. That way the information comes to you, which you can then consume whenever it’s convenient.
There are plenty of great tools available to help you. Here are a few that work well for me.
feedly
feedly is a content aggregator that works on web browsers, as well as on iOS and Android devices through a free app. It lets you curate a news feed from a variety of online sources. You can add blogs, Youtube channels, and even Google keyword alerts that will gather the latest articles on your chosen topics from more than 5,000 of the world’s best news sources.
As you can see from the screenshot, it’s super easy to add new content.
To add a blog you like to read, simply click on the Add Content button and paste in the URL. You can also add your favourite YouTube video channels by pasting the URL into the space provided and clicking Follow.
With feedly you can scan through your preferred data sources without going to the actual source sites. This means you avoid all the distractions and ‘rabbit holes’ you can lose yourself in, helping you consume content more productively. It also means you can turn off things like Youtube notifications, as you’ll get the updates automatically in feedly.
Content aggregators such as feedly can also help you position yourself as a subject matter expert in a particular area. It can search the internet for your chosen keyword and retrieve articles from reputable news sources all over the world, rather than you having to do all the searching yourself. You can then either share these articles on your social media channel straight away, or use feedly’s Read Later function and mark content you want to save to share on your social media networks later.
Podcast apps
The podcast revolution continues, with so many amazing podcasts being published every day. Subscribing to podcasts in your niche, goal areas or areas of interest is an excellent way to manage incoming audio content.
If you use an Apple device you can use the native Podcast app. But with the changes they made to the app in iOS 11 I’m now looking at two other highly recommended podcast apps:
While it’s great to listen to podcasts and read blog posts and books on topics that will help you, unless you take action it’s not an effective use of your time. To ensure you put your new knowledge to use, or at least explore your thoughts and ideas on the content you consumed, take action notes.
Action notes are exactly what their name implies. After you’ve had a reading or listening session, write down the actions you’d like to take. They aren’t just general notes on things you heard or read, or quotes from the book. They’re specific action items you can take for your blog, based on the broad information you heard.
For example, if you’re focusing on increasing newsletter subscribers you may have found the Problogger podcast in your app and listened to Darren’s podcast on how to get more subscribers, follows and connections from your blog readers. With so much great information in this podcast you could easily write reams of notes. But Instead, try writing three actions you can take from what you’ve learned, such as:
You can easily read and listen to huge amounts of information and not act on it. By keeping action notes in either your master planning document or a separate notebook, you can track and work through the action items you want to implement on your blog.
The best way to learn is to teach. Share your thoughts on what you’ve been reading, listening to or watching on your blog. Even if the information is different to your niche, you can build your own piece of content around it. You’ve been building a relationship with your audience, and they’ll be interested in your opinion and recommendations.
Gathering and sharing excellent content can be a great way to give value to your audience, and give purpose to the content you consume. Here are a few examples of bloggers sharing their thoughts on the content they’ve been consuming:
It can be hard to stop reading, watching or listening to content that’s stimulating, amusing or informative. But there’s a tipping point to how much content we can consume. Setting up personal boundaries can help ensure we take a productive approach to our consumption.
Look for pockets of time in your day where existing boundaries force you to stop. I schedule social media and blog reading in the last 30 minutes of my work day, when I pick the kids up from school. You may not have a school pick up to do, but you might have a meeting you can do some reading before, or a regular appointment that can act as a boundary and stop you spending too much time consuming and not enough time creating.
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash
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Here on ProBlogger, we have a lot of tips on influencer outreach – how to reach out to influencers and pitch to them. Here are just a few of the resources we have available:
But in this blog post I want to talk about why you should do it.
One big reason is the diminishing returns social media is providing. Many bloggers I know are struggling to get much traction on social media. It’s becoming a very noisy space, and the algorithms in place are squashing our organic reach.
If you don’t have the budget to pay for advertising (and many bloggers don’t), then social media can feel like shouting into an empty room.
Could influencer outreach be the solution for you?
Networking with influencers in your niche and building relationships with them can lead to any number of opportunities. Here are nine of them.
The right influencer linking to your blog (or podcast, video or social media account) at the right time can send you a decent amount of traffic.
One straightforward way to get this benefit is through a guest post. I know that Jon Morrow, who runs the very successful Smart Blogger blog, got a huge surge in traffic when we published his post How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World back in 2011.
Receiving a link from an influential blog in your niche can also send a lot of traffic over time – for example, being featured in a “Top 10” or “Top 100” list of blogs.
An influencer’s credibility and authority can rub off on you, helping you build your brand. For instance, if they retweet one of your posts it’s a signal to their followers that your blog is reputable and worth reading.
It’s worth keeping in mind that influencers are very aware of how their own brand is affected by what they share and link to. If your blog has hardly any content or your posts are full of typos, they may well avoid promoting you.
If an influencer says something nice about you – on their blog, in their email newsletter, or even in a Facebook post or tweet – you may be able to use their words on your own website.
A good example of a blogger using influencers’ words in this way is Jeff Goins. If you go to his website and scroll partway down his front page you’ll see this:
But before you put anyone’s words up on your site like this, make sure get their permission.
When you build a solid relationship with an influencer, they could potentially become a collaborator or partner. Many influencers reach a certain level in their business where they’re actively looking for other people to work with to grow their business even more.
You might end up joining them on a freelance basis (where you’re paid a set amount for your work) or on a profit-sharing basis (where you and the influencer split the profits from a particular project).
In the past, I’ve seen my own relationships grow and develop into creating products alongside other people – including ebooks and ecourses. If you take a look at the ProBlogger ebooks, you’ll see I’ve partnered with other authors on some of them. Mark Hayward authored ProBlogger’s Guide to Blogging for Your Business, and Shane Tilley developed The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing.
While landing a job isn’t the most likely outcome of influencer outreach, it does happen. Some influencers will be looking to hire part-time or full-time staff, and it’s only natural for them to favour people they already know and like.
I’ve hired numerous people who initially got to know me through social media. They didn’t reach out to get a job – they were just being friendly or helpful. But out of that initial contact grew a relationship that eventually led to them getting hired.
Influencers tend to know one another, and we talk to each other too. If you get to know one or two key people in your industry, they may be able to open doors for you to meet and connect with other influencers. This in turn can lead to even more opportunities and introductions.
Again, be aware that influencers won’t want to risk their reputation by introducing their friends and colleagues to someone they don’t really know. You’ll need to invest some time into building a relationship before asking for an introduction.
Getting a link from an influencer can help with your SEO. Some bloggers think of this benefit first and ignore the rest, which is why I’ve put it some way down the list. While SEO is important, it’s not the only thing to think about. And contacting lots of influencers just to ask for a link will likely backfire.
But if you’ve built a relationship with an influencer, there’s no harm in sending them a link to one of your best blog posts that you think will interest them and their audience. They may well be happy to send a link your way. And links from trusted authority sites can help boost your site’s position in Google’s rankings.
A relationship with an influencer can potentially lead to them recommending your products or services. They may simply link to what you do, or become one of your affiliates.
Again, keep in mind that influencers won’t risk their reputation by promoting a product they’ve barely seen, or something that doesn’t seem high quality. So create the best product/service you can, and make sure you give them full access.
Finally, being on good terms with an influencer could potentially lead to a mentoring relationship. This isn’t something you should necessarily expect – many influencers are simply too busy – but it is a possibility. Even if they don’t have much time to spare, they might still be willing to provide occasional advice on a particular question or struggle.
Of course, one great way to get mentored by an influencer is to read all their content. Listen to their podcast, buy their books (if applicable), and really try to put what they teach into practice. Chances are if you questions about something that’s not covered or isn’t clear, they’ll almost certainly be happy to cover them.
Some influencers even invite questions and use them as the basis for blog posts. Naomi Dunford is currently doing it on her IttyBiz blog, with posts such as Reader Question: How Do You Expand And Grow When You’re Too Busy?
As I said at the beginning, reaching out to influencers can lead to a lot of opportunities. I realise that reaching out out to the big names in your niche may be daunting. They may be people you’ve admired for months, or even years.
But hopefully I’ve convinced you that influencer outreach is worth the effort. And who knows? One day you may become an influencer yourself, and get to do the same for someone else.
Are you reaching out to influencers? How are you doing it? Tell us about it in the comments.
Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash
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This post is by ProBlogger expert Ellen Jackson of Potential Psychology
Have you ever uttered the phrase, ‘One day I’ll…’?
Of course you have. We all have.
One day I’ll schedule my social media
One day I’ll improve my web site
One day I’ll organise my images (a personal favourite)
One day I’ll start a podcast…
Next we say, ‘When…’
When I have more time
When I have more money
When inspiration hits
When I’ve developed my skills
When I feel more confident
When life is easier….
Here’s a thought: What if life is never easier? What if you never find more time, money or confidence?
What if tomorrow and the day after and the day after that are no different to today? How will you ever achieve your goals and get those ‘one day’ tasks done? What if ‘one day’ never comes?
Procrastination researchers have discovered that our tendency to put things off is a self-delusion designed to make us feel better about today.
‘We think that our future self will be better able to handle feelings of insecurity or frustration with the task,’ psychologist Dr Fuschia Sirois says. ‘That somehow we’ll develop these miraculous coping skills to deal with the emotions that we just can’t deal with right now.’
Oh dear.
Recently I challenged my audience to see if together we could make some progress on our ‘one day’ goals. Science tells us that public accountability can help motivate you to achieve your goals, so we teamed up and made a commitment to work together.
We each picked a ‘one day’ goal – something that had been on the to-do list for months or longer. Tasks we’d been avoiding – important but not urgent. Goals that languished in the backs of minds, niggling, without ever launching forth to a point of urgency.
Our aim?
To follow five simple, science-based steps over five days to make major progress on our ‘one day’ goals.
The goals were diverse:
‘Make a plan to buy my first home’
‘Digitise my client files’
‘Tidy my spare room’
‘Write my ebook’
‘Build my potential client base’
We were all filled with enthusiasm, posting images to Instagram each day to share our progress.
The results were gratifying.
“I am well on the way to finishing my ebook. I produced 65 pages of a 100-page book, created the template, designed the cover AND worked out a distribution plan. All in five days! Prior to this I had done… not much for two years.”
“I have officially ticked off everything I set out to do this week. Feeling chuffed.”
And the steps to get there?
Let me share the five science-based steps to making your ‘one day’ today.
‘Fix my web site’ is a goal too overwhelming to contemplate. What does ‘fixed’ look like? How will you know when it’s fixed? Will ‘fixing’ one piece break another one?
No wonder you never start.
When you pull a goal apart and specify exactly what you want to achieve, you do two things:
A clear, specific goal is necessary but not sufficient if you want to achieve your ‘one day’ project. You need to know where you’re going, but it’s action that will get you there.
Step two involves two tasks.
Task One: Write it down. Did you know you are 42% more likely to achieve your goal if you write it down? It’s not clear how or why this works, but the evidence confirms that it does.
Task Two: Work on your ‘Why?’ For many of us, motivation comes not just from what we’re trying to achieve, but why. Studies have shown that if we connect our goal to something larger and more important (‘I want to make money blogging so I can spend more time at home with my children’) we are less impulsive, less likely to give in to distractions, and more likely to plan and execute the required actions to reach our goals. When you’ve articulated your goal, spend some time thinking about why you want to achieve it. Who’s involved? How will they benefit? How will achieving this goal improve your life?
Motivation: We’re all looking for it. Somewhere along the line someone convinced us that when we find our motivation, goal success will be effortless. We just have to find it, and then making client calls will be easy. We’ll sit at the laptop and schedule our social media. We won’t procrastinate or be distracted. We’ll just get stuff done. Simple.
But motivation isn’t ‘thing.’ It can’t be found. Motivation, in simple psychological terms, is the desire to do something. You won’t find the desire to do something hiding anywhere. You have to create it.
Here’s a tip from the world’s leading researchers in goal-setting: Make your goal difficult.
Challenging but realistic goals – goals that stretch us but not quite to breaking point – activate motivation. They push us, encourage us and reward us when we achieve them. If a goal is too easy we don’t get the get up and go to… well, get up and go. If they’re too difficult we’re too overwhelmed to start. A stretching, challenging but achievable goal is like Baby Bear’s porridge – just right.
It’s called ‘The 15-minute rule’ and it rocks. I know because I use it all the time.
Here’s how it works:
If there’s a task on your list that you’re avoiding, commit 15 minutes to it today.
It could be:
Why does it work? Because getting started is the hardest part of any task. The good news is that once you’ve started, you’re likely to push on beyond the 15 minutes you committed to. It’s called the Ovsiankina effect. Your brain doesn’t like starting a task and then stopping partway through. It will linger on your unfinished business, niggling at you until you get the job done. Get started and you’ll find the motivation to do more.
What do you do when you finish a project or task? Do you tick it off the list and move straight on to the next one? Do you get on a roll, morphing into a task-completion machine? How long can you maintain momentum before you collapse on the lounge with the remote and Netflix?
A critical step in making progress towards difficult goals is celebrating the steps along the way. Yes, a big win feels great. But it’s the small wins – the incremental tasks you nail each day – that sustain your motivation and keep you happy and engaged for the long run.
Day five is all about reviewing your progress and celebrating your successes. Make a list of every little thing you’ve achieved on your ‘one day’ goal so far. Every little tiny thing. Give yourself a mental high five and put your feet up for a while. You’ve made a big start on a long-time goal. That deserves a reward. What’s more, you’re set up to rock on into next week.
Ellen Jackson from Potential Psychology is a workplace psychologist, consultant, writer and speaker. Her mission is to help others to live, learn and flourish. You can join her next free Quick Win Challenge to nail your ‘one day’ goal here.
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