Last week, Ramit Sethi and I recorded a private videocast for a select group of readers. The three short videos below, all 2-8 minutes in length, describe our blogging tips and techniques, as well as an examination of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing.
He and I have both had the privilege and tactical experience of:
1) Building highly-trafficked blogs in a crowded blogosphere of more than 120 million blogs. More important, both of our blogs are well-known for action-oriented readers (For data on this blog’s readers — that’s you! — check this out).
2) Publishing books that reached The New York Times bestseller lists. Ramit’s experience is fresh and most up-to-date from his last three weeks with I Will Teach You To Be Rich, while I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been on the New York Times business bestseller list continually for 23 months, since its publication in April of 2007.
Here are some of the topics we cover in the a la carte videos:
Currencies Besides Royalties and Direct Income
Google Juice and SEO Misuse
Choosing Post Topics: From Google Keyword Tool to Stumble Upon
Post Length and Publishing Time
Tactical Redating of Posts
Regarding the plug-in I mention for keeping your best content on your homepage, the very smart Lloyd Budd at Automattic explains:
Have your WordPress theme developer to update your theme to take advantage of the simple 2.7 feature “sticky posts” to have articles stay on the front page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/is_sticky
Self-Publishing vs. Big Publishers – 5:11
How to Build Traffic – 7:22
More Blogging Tactics – 2:35
In Ramit’s latest post, you will find an additional video on our mutual “false starts” and mistakes.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)
Very interesting post. I really learned a lot.
Tim and Ramit your videos are great and helpful! They were interesting enough to keep me hooked up. 5 stars for these videos!
Very useful. Thank you
Very helpful and awesome! I'm an Egoscue therapist trained under John Cattermole in Phoenix (see chapter in 4 Hour Body), and I'm now battling aggressive cancer. I blog my experiences at www.memoriesahead.com If anyone is interested, please check it out. I love feedback. 🙂
Would be interesting to know your opinion on the future of blogging and publishing in regards to Facebooks instant articles for mobile where content creators are being pushed to build their homes on rented land. This makes content unsearchable in Google and harder to monetize. Facebook works to become a self-contained world wide web with algorithms which dictate what content is shown to people. A scary thought for politics and the future. Delegating these civic responsibilities to unelected private companies (social media platforms) is happening rapidly and almost by default. What effect do you think this will have on building audiences and monetizing them? Are bloggers to become advertising agencies producing sponsored content for brands? What about small startup publishers/media outlets? Here's an edited article of a longer speech given at Cambridge http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php
Brilliant content as always you are both so generous with sharing your experiences…hmmm somethings to think about.
Really enjoyed this post. Was very informative and I was surprised to hear both of your thoughts on things such as the length of posts, time of day posting, and how to target the right audiences with content. I was wondering if you would give your quick opinion on guest blogging? My website focuses on this subject and provides it to bloggers for free. I was curious as to what you think about it. Thanks, Spencer
How long do you expect a new blogger to work (on average) until he/she hits a traffic inflection point?
Thank you.
Thanks Tim and Ramit,