I recently was chatting with a new blogger and they made the comment that after 3 weeks of blogging that they’d run out of things to write about. They had written 10 posts so far but felt that they’d nothing else to share of value on the topic.

What surprised me about their comments was that the blogger was actually a seasoned pro in their niche. They were new to blogging about their topic but they’d been working in their industry for 25 years and were seen as an expert in their field…. yet they didn’t feel like they had anything to say about the topic!

I dug a little deeper and it turned out that the reason for their issue was not that they didn’t have much to write about – but that they were taking for granted the level of knowledge that they actually had. Much of what they’d learned over the years was now so basic to them that they didn’t realise how valuable it was for someone at a lower level of expertise.

To use an old cliche – they were the type of person who has forgotten what most of us will ever know about their topic.

He said to me at one point – ‘I just want every post I write to be something that cuts new ground – something that says something great that no one has ever thought before.’

I’ve felt this way myself over the years (and still do). For me it often came about in those nervous moments before I’d go on stage to present about blogging. Doubts would creep in….”what do I know?”…. “my presentation is too basic”….. “what if people are too advanced for this?”….

The reality is though that 99% of people in the audiences I spoke to had a such basic understanding of my topic that what I often thought was basic was often a stretch for them.

Often in the Q&A times at the end of such presentations I’d realise to myself just how much I actually did know about my topic and how often in the search for my next profound post that unlocked the secrets to the universe that I was actually over looking a treasure trove of more basic but just as helpful topics.

I’m not suggesting that every post you write needs to rehash the basics of your topic – however I guess this is simple a challenge for those of us who sometimes struggle to feel we’ve got anything helpful and worthwhile to say to realize that we might be over thinking things and could probably serve our readers better by examining what we do know and sharing that.

Sidenote: I was having a discussion that touched on this today at Third Tribe when Valeria Maltoni commented – ‘I also take what I know for granted a lot.‘

I responded to her with:

“I think most of us have stuff in our head that we think is too basic to share with others however it’s real GOLD when we do share it because it’s often things that others are thinking about asking but are too scared – or its something that they need to know but don’t really know that they need it.“

How does one get to those Basic but Golden things?

A few ides for posts come to mind:

• Describe an experience that you’ve had
• Share a problem that you overcame and how you did it
• Give an example of where you learned an important lesson
• Tell the story of how you taught someone something
• Remember what it was like to be a beginner in your topic and outline the things you wish you’d known
• Share the answers to some questions that you or someone else once had

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Are You Taking For Granted That Might Be Useful to Others?

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Most people with smartphones keep their devices covered with some sort of protective case.  However, did you know that many of those cases still allow debris and dirt to get to your phone, which could ultimately cause scratches?

For this reason, Wrapsol created a unique film that protects mobile and other electronic devices. The film is clear for the front of the device and has a matte finish for the back.

Although Wrapsol protects from scratches and nicks, it is not bulky. In fact, users could even put a protective case over the film if they desired.

Wrapsol’s products are currently available on their site but will soon appear in stores such as Office Depot, Best Buy, and Staples.

Todays post in the Best of ProBlogger 2009 series looks at the topic of making money from blogs. By no means is it a comprehensive or complete guide to the topic but below are 12 of the more popular posts we’ve had on the topic this year.

1. The Importance of Having Your Own Product to Sell
2. How to Make $30,000 a Year Blogging
3. The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business
4. 5 Ways to Make Money Blogging Once You Have Traffic
5. $72,000 in E-books in a Week: 8 Lessons I Learned
6. How to Find Direct Advertisers for Your Blog
7. How I use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money
8. What is Affiliate Marketing?
9. How to Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote
10. 11 Lessons I Learned EArning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program
11. 10 More Amazon Associate Program Lessons I Learned on My Way to Six Figure Earnings
12. Should I Add a Donation Button to My Blog?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year : Best of ProBlogger

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Posted by great scott!

They scrape you, they copy you, you license your content, you need geo-targeted versions of your pages…whatever the reason, duplicate content happens. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday we’ll look at how to deal with duplicate content in ways that will help you make sure you’re the one who ranks for your material (as you should) and what traps to avoid .

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Dealing with Duplicate Content from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your copy of our new Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD series, I’ve got good news! We’ve extended our special launch pricing of 20% off plus free shipping for another week. This sale price will only be available until December 18th, and then it’s gone for good, so order your copy soon!

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Although Twitter’s homepage gets a tremendous amount of traffic, it hardly compares to daily amount of queries its API receives. According to Alexander Barbara, the founder of EasyTweets, www.Twitter.com got around 86.5 million pageviews last month, but the API gets hundreds of millions of queries each day. In addition, Twitter did an analysis and found that the majority of tweets posted come from the API instead of the website.

Many people do not realize that it is actually the API that allows them to do multiple tasks such as managing lists, following others, pulling profile data, and managing accounts and reputations. The good news is that Twitter is continuing to improve and perfect the API. For this reason, Barbara expects even more from Twitter’s API in the coming months.

Twitter is already adding functionalities that would make threading conversations easier. Also, they recently added geolocation features which display where a tweet originated and includes geotagging. What’s more, Twitter is starting location-based trends that show top trends on a localized basis.

Barbara said Twitter has embraced the development community by allowing it to build upon their platform. They have even incorporated some of the applications directly into their homepage. He said that by embracing third party developers, Twitter has not only enhanced the overall platform that the company is based upon, but it has also added value for everyone.

What do you think is next for Twitter’s API?

Back in August, WebProNews first told you about Google’s Caffeine update. As Matt Cutts told us then, the Caffeine project would provide improvements to Google’s indexing structure. Despite concerns from some users about the impact on search results, Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick told WPN that caffeine is in fact live at one data center.

He said the update was rolled out around 3 or 4 AM EST yesterday. Matt Cutts later confirmed the news in a blog post. Because it is only live at one data center, only a small number of Google users will experience Caffeine.

Although both Cutts and Google have indicated that there would not likely be a noticeable difference in search results, Schwartz says that any time the content in the index changes, the results will change as well.

In 2003, Google issued its Florida Update around this same time of year. Merchants and retailers were hit hard since millions of listings from the search results were reportedly dropped. Schwartz believes it is for this reason that Google is only releasing it to one data center. In his blog post, Cutts also assured users that the full launch would not take place until after the holidays.

While the location of the data center was not revealed, Schwartz expects webmasters to determine the specifics very soon.

What do you think about Google’s Caffeine update? Have you tested it? To what extent do you believe the search results will be impacted?

It is clear that Twitter is a valuable tool for business. WebProNews spoke with Jason Falls, the Principal of Social Media Explorer, who believes the reasoning behind this thinking is a result of the “conversational platform” Twitter provides for business usage. It is for this very same reason that he predicts Google will acquire the microblogging service.

Earlier in the year, Falls predicted that Google would buy Twitter by the end of the year. Although it may not happen within that time frame, he hopes and believes it will happen eventually.

Twitter rose in popularity because people were no longer happy with one-way communication models. They now want the two-way communication that Twitter provides. Falls believes Twitter is evolving back to its original purpose and becoming more of a utility for communications, instead of a platform for marketing. Although Twitter can be used for conversational marketing, Falls said it is more about the actual conversation than it is about marketing a product or service.

On the Twitter home front, it doesn’t appear that the Twitter founders are working to improve the tool and they have yet to find a monetization model. Falls believes they are trying to build a large critical mass in order to sell. He hopes Google will buy it since it is a company that desires to build utilities for people to communicate on.

Do you think Twitter will be acquired? Do you agree with Jason Falls and believe Google will acquire it?

I’m regularly asked about local domain names and whether they are worth using on a blog.

My answer usually revolves around the question of ‘what audience are you trying to reach?‘ Let me explain.

When I first secured my own domain name I chose a .au (Australia) domain without really giving much thought to it. I figured as I was an Aussie I might as well include that in the domain and as the .com version of the domain was taken I though it was the next logical step. That was a naive decision and one that I regretted later (although it did have some benefits too).

There were a number of impacts of having a local domain:

• the blog ranked relatively well in Google.com.au’s results – being an easily identified Aussie site it seemed to get priority when Aussies were searching for terms related to it
• the blog didn’t rank as well on Google.com - .com domains (and other non localised ones) seemed to get ranked higher in other international versions of Google
• confusion with readers - time and time again I heard from readers that they kept forgetting to add the .au. As a result they ended up on other sites and some gave up on even coming to the site.

Ultimately it was a mistake for me because my goal was to connect with an international audience rather than just and Australian one. I ended up with some good Aussie search traffic which was nice but it could have ranked better internationally which probably cost me traffic.

Take Home Advice: As a result, I generally advise people to go for a local domain name IF they are trying to reach a local audience. If you’re looking to connect with an international audience go for the .com or another non localised domain like .net or .org (.com is my #1 preference though).

The other reason to get a localised version of a domain in addition to the .com is as a defensive move OR if you think you might produce a local version of your blog at some point in the future. Having the local domain means someone else can’t get it and it gives you the option of expanding into local markets (as Gawker blogs have done with some of their more popular blogs).

Do you use a local domain name? What are the advantages or disadvantages from your perspective?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Should You Use a Localized Domain Name?

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It is clear that mobile will be a very present player in many industries in the future and the ecommerce industry is no exception. Many retailers have already jumped on the bandwagon, but there are others who are still hesitant. As Ted Hong of Fandango explains, that hesitancy is not necessarily bad.

Fandango has had great success with its mobile efforts, but the company has also learned many valuable lessons. Because mobile is currently one of the hottest trends, many retailers are so anxious to have a hand in the game that they rush their mobile endeavors to market. According to app activity aggregator Apptimism, there are more than 78,000 mobile applications. With that many apps already available, retailers cannot afford to have “just another app” to get lost in mix.

Before launching a mobile campaign, Hong advises other retailers to, first of all, have a specific reason for their mobile efforts. Once their reasoning is determined, they need to take their time to build an effective product that will have staying power.

Mobile does open many doors of opportunity, but if retailers aren’t fully prepared for it they could, in the end, waste time and money and never see success.

Are you planning to launch a mobile campaign? Is your product prepared to challenge your competitors?

Two days back I explored the myth that all you need to do is write great content on a blog for it to get readers and introduced the idea of ’seeding’ content rather than ‘forcing’ it upon readers.

Today I want to take the ’seeding’ idea a step further and give a few examples of ways that you can do it – and in the process hopefully grow your readership beyond your immediate family (not that there’s anything wrong with Mom reading your blog).

I should say that while this post contains 9 ways to promote a blog post – that I rarely use all of them at once. Keep in mind that the idea of ’seeding’ is not about forcing things but rather it is about getting things going and then letting something organic happen. You might need to put a little more effort into things somewhere along the way to keep momentum going (like ‘watering the garden’ helps a seed to grow) but the idea isn’t for force things.

So without further ado – let me share a few of the techniques that I use to ’seed’ content:

1. Tweet it

I find that one of the most effective ways to get a link to a new blog post ‘out there’ is simply to tweet it. Tweeting a link is quick and easy to do – and if you do it well it can be quite effective at both driving direct traffic to a blog post but also in starting other little viral events on other sites.

The effectiveness of this does depend a little on the size of your follower group – but other factors you can have a little more control over include:

• timing your tweets to be during peak times when lots of people are on Twitter.
• doing a followup tweet to your original one (I only do this on important posts and usually try to change the wording so as not to annoy people too much)
• the wording of your tweet (give people a reason to click it)
• making your tweet ‘ReTweetable’ by not making it too long (I keep these seeding tweets to under 120 characters to leave room for people to retweet them).

I find that when something does well on Twitter (and not every post will) that it can often trigger a secondary event on a site like Delicious. This in turn can trigger blogs to link to my posts or other social bookmarking sites to pick up links.

2. Facebook Status Updates (and other social media)

This is of course similar to Tweeting a link. I’ve not had as much success with Facebook as a promotional tool for my blogs but know of a few bloggers in different niches who find it to be more effective. Whether it sends loads of traffic or not it can be helpful in an overall strategy.

Similarly I sometimes also use other social media sites like LinkedIn’s status update if I feel that the content I’m promoting is better suited to other audiences. Again – it depends partly upon the size of your network on these sites but even a small but relevant network on these sites can trigger other bloggers to link up or secondary organic submissions on other social sites by those in your network. You never know what impact sharing a link in these sites can have until you do it.

3. Pitch it to another Blogger

Is the post you’re promoting relevant to the audience of another blog?

This is a question I’m always asking myself as I’m writing blog posts. As I write I jot down the names of other bloggers that have an audience that might find what I’m writing helpful. This means that when it comes time to promote the blog post I have a ready made list of people to shoot out an email to to let them know about my post.

I don’t send these emails out often, nor do I send them out to the same group of bloggers repeatedly – but if I genuinely think my post is of high quality and that the blogger will find it relevant I will.

Check out these suggestions on how to pitch other bloggers for some more tips on how to do this effectively.

4. Pitch it to another Twitter User

This is similar to pitching another blogger but can have a great impact as well. In fact I recently had a link from a blogger who both posted on his blog and tweeted the link and the Tweet converted much better for me in terms of traffic.

The key once again is to make sure that the link is relevant to the Tweeter and the type of thing that you’ve seen them sharing on twitter with others.

5. Share a Link in a ‘Signature’

Many bloggers have links to the front page of their blogs in both email signatures and forum signatures – but what about directing people to an individual post? There are a variety of tools out there that highlight latest posts (feedburner has one) and they make a lot of sense to me because you’re sending people to standalone articles that you’ve written rather than a sometimes confusing front page of a blog.

6. Bookmark it

This is one that I don’t tend to do myself these days but I know many bloggers who do so I’ll include it. It entails submitting your post to a site like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious etc.

I don’t tend to do this any more as I find many of these sites have algorithms that penalize a site if it’s submitted by the same person over and over. What I do instead is occasionally shoot a link to another user of these sites in the hope that they’ll submit it for me. Having said this – I also find that as your traffic grows the submissions become more and more organic from regular readers so there’s less need for me personally to be involved in these types of ’seedings’ in social bookmarkting sites.

7. Guest Posts

Another method that I’ve seen a number of bloggers using with real effect lately is to link to your important blog post in a guest post on someone else’s blog.

Most people who guest post on another blog tend to link back to the front page of their blog in the byline. This is a good general link to get but if you have an important post that you’ve written that relates to the guest post you’re writing you should find a way to incorporate a link to that post – either as the byline link or if the blogger allows it – within the blog post itself.

8. Give readers an easy way to share it

Hopefully with some of the above techniques you’ve got a few readers over to your blog – now you want them to share it with others.

There are many ways to make your blog post ’sharable’. I tend to use a combination of templated techniques as well as a few custom ones that I add to posts once on posts that I think will do well on social media sites.

• Templated techniques – there are many ways to build social media buttons into your blog. There are heaps of tools and plugins that will do this for you. The key in my experience is not to have too many buttons/options but to choose just a few that relate well to your audience.
• Custom techniques – if I notice that one of my posts is starting to do well on Twitter or Digg or some other social media site I generally will either add an extra button to a post or add a text link pointing people to where they can tweet or digg the post. I find that these more obvious little additions to a post can often tip it over the edge to a viral traffic event.

9. Newsletters

This is a way that I often ‘tip’ posts that are doing OK over the edge into a viral traffic event. It usually works like this:

A – I write a post that I think MIGHT do well as a viral post

B – I time the publishing of that post for a Thursday morning – an update goes out via RSS to my subscribers

C – I use some of the above techniques to get the post seeded (Twitter, Facebook etc)

D – I wait until the post is submitted to Digg and then add a Digg button to the post (or some other social bookmarking site)

E – I then send out a newsletter to my list including a prominent link to the post

What I find is that without the last step (sending a newsletter) the post can do quite well – but when I send the newsletter I quite often see a ‘tipping point’ with the post and it’ll go viral on multiple social media sites at once on the back of the extra traffic that I’ve been able to send to the traffic via the newsletter.

2 Final Words of Advice

Let me finish with two words that I think are key to much of the above – persistence and relationships.

1. Persistence – There’s a real need for persistence in seeding content. Much of what I’ve described above are things that I’ve been doing for years and they’ve only become more effective the longer that I’ve done them.

My experience of finding readers is that it is all about momentum. In the early days to find just a handful of readers can be a real challenge – the above methods may not bring thousands of people through the door – however the 10 than they do bring in on your first day could lead to 100 next month which could lead to the thousands in the coming year.

You may get lucky and your seed may grow into something big in the early days of your blog – but even small results can grow slowly into big things over time. Each reader that you bring into your loyal readership is important because they have a network of their own that they could help spread word of your blog to.

2. Relationships – The other key to much of the above is to be as relational as possible. Much of the above relies upon people sharing your posts with others once you alert them to the existence of your posts. So put aside regular time to grow your network, to build a presence on sites like Twitter, to build trust and influence on other sites outside of your blog – this networking can pay off in a big way over the long term. Just do keep these other social networking sites in perspective – they’re not the main game themselves but should be used to build up your home base.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

9 Things to Do To Make Sure Your Next Blog Post is Read by More than Your Mom

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