MackCollier.com

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Here’s Why I Don’t Like Most Podcasts

And it’s the same reason why I don’t like most group blogs:  I want to hear from the HOST, not the guests.

Right now I am putting together a marketing plan for Think Like a Rock Star.  A big part of that plan is obviously to have a huge launch.  The idea is to sell a ton of books right when the book launches in order to make all those bestseller lists, etc etc etc.

But another part of that plan (that’s even bigger, IMO) is how can I create a continuous stream of value-added material that compliments the book?  The idea is to find a channel that lets me create content that will not only benefit readers of the book, but that will hopefully encourage others to buy the book.

And one of the potential channels I am looking at is launching a podcast.  But what I’m noticing is that more and more people are launching podcasts, which I think is awesome.  I love it when people give their audiences multiple ways to consume content, and in ways that’s convenient for their audience.

But…the one thing I don’t like about most podcasts is they mostly follow the same format:  1-2 people are the regular hosts, and each episode they interview someone.  What I don’t like about this format is that it doesn’t give me much of a chance to hear from the hosts themselves.  The focus is on the guests, and off the hosts.  I see the same thing on group blogs, especially group blogs that start out being written by one person who then goes to a group blog format.  The blog loses its voice.

Personally, I prefer podcasts that are run by 1-2 hosts, and guests are the exception, rather than the rule.

What do the rest of you think?  Do you like podcasts?  And if so, what type do you think?  Do you love the format where hosts interview a guest every episode, or do you prefer ones with the hosts only and no guests?

Length?  5 minutes?  10?  15?  Please let me know what your thoughts are as it will help me decide if I launch a podcast for Think Like a Rock Star, and what its format will be.  Thank you!

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Rethinking Self-Promotion: Are You Promoting Yourself, or Your Ideas?

I’ve always said that there are two types of speakers:  Those that want the spotlight on themselves, and those that want the spotlight on their ideas.

Shockingly, I fall in the latter category.  I do a decent amount of speaking, but I *hate* the actual act of speaking.  I hate being in front of a room full of strangers and having to be the center of attention for an hour.  But I love speaking because speaking allows me to share ideas that I am passionate about.  Yet if the focus shifted and I had to talk about myself for an hour, I would probably pass out 30 seconds into it.

It seems many bloggers are the same way.  I have talked to many colleagues and it seems many of us hate to promote ourselves.  We know we need to tell you about your products or services or what we provide, but it just feels ‘icky’ to do so.

And yet, if you ask us to talk about our friends and tell you why they are awesome, we can do that all day, or at least I can.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this disconnect as I’ve been promoting Think Like a Rock Star.  For starters, I love promoting this book.  Which is odd, because typically I hate promoting myself or anything that I am doing.  But I love promoting this book because of what it represents:  A way for companies and brands to embrace and empower their fans.

So in my mind I’m not promoting a product or myself, I’m promoting an idea.  I’m promoting an idea that I am extremely passionate about.  Maybe that’s why so many of us hate self-promotion?  Maybe we are spending too much time focused on the ‘product’ instead of the importance of the product?  Maybe you’ve written an ebook on how to be a better blogger.  Instead of trying to promote the product itself, maybe it would be better for you to promote why being a better a blogger is so important?  What could you accomplish if you were better at blogging?  What doors would open for you?

Many of us don’t like to promote ourselves, so perhaps we need to instead shift our thinking to promote the ideas we are passionate about?  What do you think?

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#Blogchat Topic for Sunday: How You Can Use Topic Buckets to Blog More Often

One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog is share with you what’s worked for me.  Earlier this week I wrote a post called ‘Done is better than Perfect when it comes to blogging‘.  This post got a lot of interesting feedback, but the point I wanted to make was that when you blog more often, you become a better blogger.  That’s worked for me, as well as other bloggers I know.

Now, another reason I wrote that post was because it’s something I intend to do this year: Blog more often.  Here’s why:

As with a lot of you, my blog is technically a marketing tool for my consulting and speaking.  So really, this blog at its core is a glorified business development tool.  In theory, the more I blog and create valuable content for my readers, the more my awareness grows, and the more often I will get work from this blog.

Now for the past three years, my blogging here has followed more or less the same pattern:

1 – From January through March, I typically blog more than any other time of the year.  A big reason why is because for whatever reason, work is typically slow around the first of the year.  So I have more time to blog, plus I need to blog more to get more work leads coming in.  In 2011 and 2012, March was my biggest traffic month of the year.

2 – Around April or so, more work leads start coming in.  Which is good, because it means I am busier.

3 – By July and August, I am typically swamped.  I usually have to turn down work.  Now on the surface this seems like a great place to be, but the mistake I have made every year since 2010 is…when I get super busy in the second half of the year, I stop blogging.

4 – By November and December, work has slowed back down.  A big reason why work has slowed down is because…I’m not blogging as often!  When work picked up a few months earlier, I decided to focus on the work, and let my blog get put on the backburner.

5 – So around January or so I start blogging like a madman all over again, and by March or April the biz leads start coming back.

 

I mention all this because I’ve begun to realize that my blogging inactivity every Fall was keeping this blog from really going to the next level.  I realized this in 2011, and planned on blogging consistently throughout 2012.  But then I got the book deal for Think Like a Rock Star, and convinced myself I needed to focus on writing an amazing book versus writing an amazing blog.  So this year I decided to re-dedicate myself to blogging more often.

Then a few days ago I saw this video from Michael Hyatt explaining how he grew his blog to over 300K visitors a month:

Notice in the last couple of minutes how Michael talks about the growth of his blog. He started blogging in 2004 with only 110 visitors a month. After 2007, he was still only at 700 visitors a month, but the next year his readership spiked to 20,000 visitors a month.  One of the reasons that he credited for the huge jump in the fifth year was that he made a commitment that year to blog every weekday, or 5 times a week.  He says that was a big reason why his blog took off.  Heading into 2012 I realized that my blog was too important NOT to blog much more often than I had been.

And from participating in #Blogchat I know that many of you are having the same problems.  You want to blog more often, but coming up with ideas is sometimes tough.  Something that has helped me is organizing your blog’s focus into Topic Buckets.

The basic idea is this:  Pick 2-5 main topic areas that you want to cover on your blog.  For example for me, I currently have 4 Topic Buckets:

1 – Blogging tips and advice

2 – Case studies on how rock stars and companies can better connect with their fans

3 – Case studies on how companies are and can use social media better

4 – Promotional, either talking about speaking I am doing, work, etc.

Now the great thing about Topic Buckets is that they really help you organize your posting patterns.  You may be trying to think about how you can blog 2-3 times a week, but if you can create 2-3 Topic Buckets, then all you have to do is write one post a week for each topic, and you are set!  Also, it’s a good way to keep track of what you’re blogging about.  For example, if I look back on my posts over the last 2 weeks, I might see that I haven’t really written a post that comes from one of my buckets, so I know I need to try to address that one soon.

Now even with this approach I’ll still sometimes run out of post ideas.  A great tip I have for helping find topic is via Google News searches.  I search for terms like ‘music marketing’ and ‘brand evangelists’ and ‘social media case study’.  It’s a great way to keep up to take on news involving these topics, and typically these searches are coming from sources that are different from the same blogs and sites that are being bounced around on Twitter and Facebook.

So if you are like me and wanting to blog more often, check out #Blogchat on Twitter tomorrow night at 8pm Central.  Hope to see everyone there and hope 2013 is a great blogging year for all of us!

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Some Thoughts on Monetizing Twitter Chats and Getting Sponsors

As we close in on March, #Blogchat will have its 4th birthday, having started on March 22nd, 2009.  And over the past 2 years I don’t think any chat other than probably Jessica Northey’s #CMChat has done a better job of bringing on sponsors and monetizing.  And over the past year or so, I’ve had more and more current and potential Twitter chat hosts ask me for advice on getting sponsors for their chats, and other ways to monetize.  I hesitate to give advice because I can only talk about what worked for me, it’s not a guaranteed formula that anyone can replicate.

Having said that, the one thing that has always driven any attempt at monetizing #blogchat has been answering this question: If I do this, how will the #Blogchat community benefit?  If I was trying to monetize via sponsorships, I would ask how the sponsorship would benefit BOTH the sponsor and #Blogchat.

But if I had ever started trying to monetize #Blogchat because I simply wanted a new source of income, then that would have changed the dynamic completely.  Then the end goal becomes making more money, and it’s a very slippery slope to go down, because if making more money is your top goal, the benefit to your Twitter chat community can easily take a backseat.  Which can lead to the community resenting your efforts to monetize, and the whole ball of wax quickly backfires and you lose what allowed you the chance to monetize in the first place: Your community.

So my advice is if you want to monetize, make sure there’s a clear benefit to your community from doing so.  I have turned down several sponsorship opportunities simply because I didn’t see how the sponsor’s involvement would benefit #blogchat and make it worth the community’s time.  Likewise, I have turned down some brands that wanted to sponsor #Blogchat simply because I didn’t think it was the most effective way that brand could use its money.  There’s a potential short-term loss from doing this, but in the long-run it benefits you.  I’ve had very little pushback over the last couple of years as I started selectively bringing on sponsors to #Blogchat.  The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive to having sponsors and I hope that’s because the people that show up to #Blogchat every week understand that I’m not going to bring on a sponsor unless I think it’s a good fit for us.

For example, there’s no sponsor for #Blogchat this month.  Why?  Because I couldn’t find a sponsor that I thought was a good fit for us.  There’s no need to monetize just for the sake of monetizing.  If it works for both the sponsor and #Blogchat then awesome.  But if not, then I walk away.  BTW I could not be happier with the recent sponsorship that #Blogchat had with Paper.Li and I’ve roped Paper.Li’s Community Manager Kelly Hungerford into writing a post here soon that will go into more detail about that, and Paper.Li itself.

So if you are running a Twitter chat and want to bring on sponsors, here’s the steps I would follow:

1 – Always start the monetization/sponsorship discussion by asking yourself this question:  How is this going to benefit this community and help me take the chat to the next level?  It is FAR too easy to think that you need to start making some money from your Twitter chat in order to justify the time you spend with it.  On this issue I will side with Twitter chat organizers because I don’t think a lot of the people that participate in Twitter chats really understand the amount of work that the organizers put into them.  It can easily become a part-time job.  But as an organizer, I think you will ultimately make MORE money from your chat if you focus those efforts around how that money can help you grow the chat itself.

2 – Make sure that people know that you are wanting and accepting sponsors.  In 2011 I did 7 Live #Blogchats, and these events were my main source of income that year.  Here’s how they got started:  In early January 2011 I was crunching the numbers to see if I could afford to attend SXSW.  I realized that it was going to cost well over $2,000 for my flight, badge, hotel and food.  There was just no way I could justify spending that much money.  I was pissed, but I refused to give up on going to SXSW.  So I started brainstorming ways to come up with the money for the trip.  Completely on a whim, I threw up this post here asking if anyone wanted to sponsor a Live #Blogchat at SXSW.  Amazingly, within 15 minutes I started getting offers from potential sponsors, and within an hour the main sponsor was on board.  I. Was. Stunned.  But it goes to show that you can’t assume that sponsors will come to you, you have to let them know that you are interested.  BTW if you are interested in sponsoring #Blogchat next month, now’s a great time to email me for details.  I would advise you to create a page on your blog with sponsorship details like the one I have here for #Blogchat sponsorships.

3 – When you find a sponsor that is interested, make sure you structure their involvement so that it enhances the chat experience, instead of detracting from it.  One way I do this is by being extremely picky about the topics of the chats during a sponsor’s involvement.  Whenever I flesh out the topics for a month that a sponsor is involved in #Blogchat, we work to find a happy medium between covering topics that benefit the sponsor, but that are also interesting and valuable to the community.  The last thing you want to do is bring on a sponsor, and suddenly change the topics to subjects that benefit the sponsor, but have little to no value for your community.  That’s a big signal to the community that bringing on the sponsor changed things, and not for the better.

4 – Make sure the sponsor will get their money’s worth.  When the sponsor is interested, have a frank discussion with them about what they want to see happen as a result of the sponsorship.  And don’t settle for ‘oh we just want more exposure’.  Figure out what positive change you want to happen for the sponsor as a result of being associated with your chat.  Maybe it could be signups, maybe it could be a trial of the sponsor’s service (like Paper.Li did last month), but there needs to be something that the sponsor can measure and when their sponsorship ends, they can look at and easily decide if the sponsorship is worth their time and money.

Here’s an example of a sponsor I turned down.  They provided hosting for bloggers, and although their service is very highly-rated, I felt the price-point would be too expensive for many #blogchat members.  I told them that a sponsorship would likely get them few if any new signups, and wouldn’t be worth their money.  Even though they were ready to pay, I turned down the money.  You have to look out for the best interests of potential sponsors as well as your chat community.

5 – Always strive for a win-win-win solution.  When the smoke clears, you should be able to look at see how you benefited as the chat host, how the chat members benefited, and how the sponsor benefited.  If all three parties don’t benefit, then it doesn’t work.  Always strive for a solution where everyone wins.  Oh and if someone has to take a slightly shorter stick, make sure it’s you.  It will benefit you in the long-term.

 

So there’s some thoughts and tips on getting sponsors for your Twitter chat based on what’s worked for me.  Your mileage may definitely vary, but I hope this is helpful.

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Lady Gaga Starts Offering Free Counseling to Little Monsters at Concerts Via #BornBraveBus

In the foreword for Think Like a Rock Star, Kathy Sierra talks about how rock stars want to make their fans better.  Rock stars, unlike most brands, have a great connection and empathy for their fans and who they are as well as their wants and needs.  I’ve blogged several times about how Lady Gaga consistently communicates to her fans (her Little Monsters) that she appreciates and loves them.

Now she’s upping the ante again:  On the US leg of her Born This Way Ball tour, Gaga will have as part of the experience a bus that will provide free counseling for her fans.  As she explains on Facebook:

At the BornBrave Bus you have access to professional private or group chats about mental health, depression, bullying, school & friends. There will also be food and games, DJ White Shadow andLady Starlight will DJ with host BREEDLOVE to keep the experience fun.

BornBrave Bus Is a place where mental health + depression are taken seriously w/ no judgement, FREE real help available to all. I feel like most kids don’t look for help because they feel embarrassed so mom + I wanted to break the stigmas around “help” and make it fun.

Now this move may draw some criticism and questions about these counselors and concerns over who they are and if they are qualified to provide counseling to troubled children and teens.  That’s understandable, but what you cannot question is Gaga’s devotion to her fans as people, not just as customers.

And this is the difference between how many rock stars cultivate fans, and how many brands do so.   At best, a brand will create an amazing product that delights its customers.  Perhaps so that those customers evangelize the brand to other customers.

But rock stars go out of their way to show their fans that they appreciate their support.  They don’t try to have a strictly transactional relationship with their fans, they strive to have an emotional one.  That means they invest a lot of time and money in doing things that don’t directly generate sales.  Like signing autographs for an entire day for free, or giving their fans a free concert or free counseling.  These efforts are met with a confusing shoulder shrug by some marketers because they don’t lead directly to sales.

But that’s not the intent.  The goal for the rock star is connect with their fans and strengthen that emotional connection.

Because that leads to sales.  The rock star’s fans don’t evangelize the rock star’s music because they love it, they love the rock star.  They love the rock star for their music, but also for how they love their fans, it means their devotion for the rock star is much deeper, as is their motivation to see other people support the rock star by buying their merchandise.  When a rock star like Lady Gaga does something like offering free counseling to her fans, it communicates to them that she truly loves them, and as a result, it gives the fan a greater incentive to promote that rock star to others.  The fans become vested in helping the rock star become better, because the rock star is invested in helping their fans become better.

But all this starts because rock stars don’t view their fans as potential marketing channels.  The view their fans as special people that they truly love and strive to have an emotional connection with.  Because rock stars have long understood that people don’t support someone or something because you give them a coupon or ask them to.  They support things and people that they believe in, that they love, and that love them back.

Which is a big reason why rock stars have fans, and companies have customers.

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‘Done’ is better than ‘Perfect’ when it comes to blogging

I’m enjoying reading Ekaterina Walter’s new book Think Like Zuck, which is about the five keys to business success that you can learn from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  In the book, Ekaterina talks about one of the sayings often heard at Facebook is ‘Done’ is better than ‘Perfect’.  Reading this reminded me of a recent blog post I read by a person in this space lamenting the fact that there were too many ‘bad’ blogs out there.  Too many people creating worthless crap, and this person announced that they weren’t going to contribute to the problem.  They proclaimed that they were only going to write when they had something worthwhile to share.  And if that meant that they didn’t blog for weeks or months, that it didn’t matter because when they did, their blog post would be more valuable to everyone, including themselves.

This person was lying to himself.

Many of us have had this same conversation with our blogging selves.  We tell ourselves that we just can’t blog every week, or for some of us, not even every month.  There’s too much going on, and besides, if we write a new blog post and no one comments or RTs it, well…I just don’t even want to think about it.

Blogging is like anything else, it’s a learning process.  The more you blog, the easier ideas come to you.  The more chances you have to see how people react to a particular topic you cover, or the tone you use.  As a result, your overall writing becomes better and the entire blogging process becomes easier for you.

As a byproduct, your platform expands.  Not only is your blogging improving, but more people are being exposed to your ideas because they are being shared more often.  And as they are being shared more often, you get more engagement on your blog, and more ideas for better blog posts.  Which leads to more (and better) blog posts, which grows your platform even more, and the cycle is created.

At first I wasn’t going to write this post today.  I have one ready to go for tomorrow, and besides, I wanted to wait before publishing this post.  I wanted to make it ‘perfect’.  What would have likely happened is I would have kept putting off finishing this post, and after a week or two, I would have deleted this draft.

But in 2013 I am going to publish more imperfect blog posts rather than saving more ‘perfect’ drafts.

 

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Randi Zuckerberg Just Reminded Us Why It’s Important to Understand Your Customers

If you use Facebook, you’ve been there.  Either you post a goofy picture that you THINK is only going to your ‘Close Friends’ and it ends up being shared with the world, or someone tags you in a photo that goes public when they didn’t intent it to.  It’s long been a problem for Facebook users, and it speaks to how incredibly convoluted and confusing the privacy settings are on the site.

Well yesterday, it seems Randi Zuckerberg, Mark’s sis, got stung as well.  She posted a pic of her family having wild reactions to seeing the Poke app on their smartphones.

She meant to post it privately to her Facebook wall, and that’s what she thought she was doing.  It turns out with the way her privacy settings are set, she apparently didn’t realize that her subscribers could see the pic.

And one of them did, and posted it on Twitter.  And then Randi went apeshit.  And then a LOT of people pointed out the irony that facebook’s privacy settings are so confusing that even Zuck’s sis can’t figure them out.  After much teeth-gnashing, finally this happened:

In social-media circles, we call this a ‘tone-deaf response’.  To be fair, we probably shouldn’t be sharing her photo, even if she did (unwittingly) make it public.  And I’ve shared it twice now on Facebook via articles that included it, so if that makes be an indecent human being, then I guess I’ll have to take the blame for that.

But I don’t think people are sharing Randi’s photo because they are indecent people that are trying to hurt or embarrass Randi.  I think they are sharing Randi’s photo to back up what they have been saying for a while now:  That Facebook’s privacy settings ARE damn confusing!

The big problem I have with Randi’s response is that she’s placing the blame on others for sharing her photo, and not on her brother for creating a site that has such confusing privacy settings.  By blaming others to the point of lecturing them on human decency, all she is doing fanning the flames of a her self-created firestorm, and making it obvious to Facebook’s users that she either doesn’t understand their concerns over the site’s privacy settings, or she doesn’t care.

On the other hand, if she had laughed this off with something like ‘Wow, guess it’s time to talk to my brother about making those privacy settings less confusing!’, it would have garnered her a lot of goodwill with FB users, and likely would have resulted in far less sharing of the photo.

Remember, it’s not the initial action that determines the social media crisis, it’s how you respond to it.

Again, I totally get why Randi is upset about her photo being shared when she didn’t want it to be.  But I don’t think she understands why people are sharing it, and that’s where the disconnect lies.

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How to Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile-Friendly In Less Than 60 Seconds

Oh how I love quick and easy solutions!  I’ve been meaning to make a mobile-friendly version of this blog for a while now, and it just stayed buried on my To-Do list.  Then a couple of weeks ago I was out and I checked Facebook on my iPhone and someone linked to a post that Peter Shankman wrote.  I pulled it up on my iPhone and what I loved was the site was optimized for a smartphone!  It just served up the post, not the entire site, so it was much easier to read on my iPhone!

Then earlier this month I saw someone mention WPTouch as a plugin that optimizes your blog for viewing on smartphones, and I decided to check it out.  First, here’s what this blog looked like on my iPhone before I added the plugin:

Yeah you’re not reading that without some serious pinchin’ & zoomin.  So I went and installed the WPTouch plugin, and less than a minute later, here’s what the blog looked like on my iPhone:

MUCH better!  Now you clearly see the headline, date, plus number of comments!  Same content, but it’s been optimized to improve viewing on a mobile device.  I went in and changed it to show the full post title and this is what that looked like:

I like that a bit better!  And if you click on one of the posts, here’s what it looks like on your iPhone:

So much prettier than before!  If you want to add WPTouch to your own WordPress blog and make it mobile, it could NOT be easier:

1 – Log into your WordPress dashboard.

2 – Click on Plugins

3 – Search for WPTouch

4 – Install it

5 – Activate it

You’re done!  60 seconds, tops, you can probably do it in closer to 30 seconds.  Then you can go in and edit some of the features as I did.  It will be interesting to see if my mobile traffic, especially from iPhones, increases any.  See, you get the best tips and tricks at #Blogchat 😉

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A Case Study in How Your Blog’s Traffic Stats Can Fool You

I’ve been blogging since 2005, and in those last 7 years, I’ve learned that every year my blog’s traffic begins to fall off around the 12th or 13th of December.  Every year without fail.

But it turns out that last week was the 3rd best traffic week ever here.  What’s really interesting is that the first two weeks were driven by a spike one day due to a particular post, and then the traffic died down the rest of the week.  But as you can see, traffic here last week was high every day:

So I was excited about that, but as I said, I know that in the past traffic for the blog typically starts falling by now.  So I decided to do some digging into traffic sources to see what was going on.  Here was my first clue that something was amiss:

That’s my search traffic here over the last 7 days.  As you can see, the high point was Monday the 10th, and then it starts dropping.  That is the pattern I expected to see with the blog’s overall traffic as well.  So if Search traffic is acting normally for this time of year, and overall traffic is still up, that must mean that there’s another source of traffic that’s making up the difference.

So next, let’s look at the top traffic sources here over the last 7 days:

Another ‘A-Ha!’ moment.  The #2 source of traffic to this blog over the last 7 days was Paper.Li.  That’s a referral source that I haven’t had in past years, so that helps explain why overall traffic isn’t falling yet like it typically does this time in December.  It seems that the boost from Paper.Li is making up for the fall in search traffic, which is typically 50-60% of my traffic here.

So at this point it’s safe to assume that the traffic I am getting from Paper.Li is coming from The #Blogchat Weekly that I set up, right?  Well, not exactly.  In fact, let’s look at the traffic that Paper.Li has sent here over the last 7 days:

What the hell?!?  From Monday to Thursday, Paper.Li sent about 20 visitors a day here, but from Friday to Sunday, it sent over 250 visitors a day!  That explains why traffic was up Friday-Sunday, when typically traffic on those 3 days is the lowest of the week.

But why the surge starting on Friday?  Because on those days, Paper.Li added a small band at the top of every Paper.Li page that encouraged users to join #Blogchat, gave them the topic, and a link back here.  Additionally, this is a wonderfully smart move on the part of Paper.Li as this month’s #Blogchat sponsor because they understand that the more they can do to help me, the more I will do to help them.  BTW, did you know they are currently offering a month of free Pro service with no credit card required? 😉

So as you can see, never assume when it comes to your blog’s stats.  If I had simply looked at overall traffic, I would have assumed that traffic for this week will be high as well.  But since I did some digging and saw search was starting to fall, I can assume that will continue and as a result, overall traffic this week will be down.  The point is, it pays to understand how your site’s traffic is influenced by multiple sources, because once you understand that, you have a better understanding of the overall health of your blog.

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The One Thing You Can Do Now to Help Your Blog Succeed in 2013

Is to create a plan for your blog.  This is the perfect time of the year to create a blogging plan for 2013.  Everyone is slowing down and shifting away from work and toward the Holidays.  Use this down time to get your plan in order now, so you start 2013 with a bang.

Now, I know even mentioning the word ‘plan’ can cause hives for some.   It can seem like once you make a ‘plan’ that you are locked into a set course of action.  But that’s not the case, the true value of creating a plan for your blog is that it helps you crystallize your thoughts around what you really want to accomplish.

For example, let’s say I ask you what’s your blogging goal for 2013 and you say ‘To make money’.

How much?  ‘I dunno…$2,500 I guess?  I just want to start getting paid for all the time I am putting into this blog’.

Now that you have a dollar amount in mind, you can start to break it down.  $2,500 a year is roughly $200 a month.  So how would you use your blog to raise $200 a month?

Could you do that with AdSense?  Probably not without a LOT more traffic than you have now.  What other options are there?  Maybe sell monthly sponsorships on the blog?   Or sell ad blocks yourself?  What about ebooks?  White-papers?

The point is, now you’ve started to think about HOW you are going to reach your blogging goal of ‘to make some money’.  You are now thinking about WHAT you could sell to make money, whether it’s ads, sponsorships or products.

And that’s the whole point of a plan.  Most of us have a general idea of where we want to be, but we don’t know what the road looks like that we take to get there.  When you start creating a plan, then you start to understand why you need to do in order to reach your end destination.  It’s a big time-saver as well.

So first, let’s think about how to create a plan for our blog for 2013:

1 – Ask yourself what do you want to accomplish with your blog in 2013.  And at this point it is ok to DREAM BIG.  Maybe you want to make $10K from your blog next year, or maybe you want to land a book deal from your blog.  Give yourself permission to be honest about your dreams.

2 – Once you have a goal in mind for your blog in 2013, then start to break that goal down and think about what it’s going to take you to reach that goal.  We talked above about making money from your blog, but let’s say now your plan is to leverage your blog in order to get a book deal.  There’s two things you really need to focus on (assuming you are a first-time author) in order to help you get a book deal.  The first is a killer idea, and the second is a big platform.  Your blog can help you in both regards, you could use your blog as a platform for establishing your killer idea, and at the same time, if your idea really is killer, then your blog readership should grow as well.  So the blog becomes a way for you to flesh out and improve your killer idea, and at the same time, your following is growing, which appeals to publishers.

3 – Regularly evaluate and measure if your efforts are working.  Say once a month look at what’s happening and see if you are making satisfactory progress.  This is important not just to make sure everything is working, but to see if something is working well that you weren’t expecting.  Let’s say you are implementing a plan to make money from your blog in 2013.  As part of this, you are posting more content, and your readership is growing.  But in March, companies start contacting you asking if you would like to post a monthly column on their site, for $100 an article.  Suddenly this is a new opportunity for you to make money from blogging that you hadn’t considered before.

 

There’s some pointers to get help on how to create a blogging plan for 2013.  Need more advice?  Perfect, because this Sunday’s #Blogchat topic is creating a plan for your blog in 2013!  Please join us on Twitter at 8pm Central by following the #Blogchat hashtag!