Here Are Some of the Most Crippling Mistakes Bloggers Made in 2014 (and How to Correct Them!)

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If blogging was easy, then everybody would be doing it. Unfortunately, lots of people are doing it.

As of writing,  there are around 214 million Tumblr blogs in existence and 42.6 million posts published every month on WordPress that are viewed 409 million times. And that’s not considering the statistics of other blogging platforms!

While blogging is a fun activity for those who simply wish to write and publish stuff, blogging as a profession is serious business. Bloggers have the responsibility of not only sharing ideas and engaging with their audience, but also driving more leads and sales to their online business.

Therefore, if you’re not making enough with your blog, then you’re most likely doing it wrong. Considering that there are lots of bloggers now than ever before (and that number will only increase in the coming years), you need to cut through the noise by kicking the bad habits you’ve been making with your blog and let your voice be heard.

Below are some of the mistakes that you may have committed with your blog this year and ways on how to correct them.

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How Things Change: Going from Fun to Pro

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I’ve been very fortunate over the past three years or so to be able to make a living off of my blog. Though it has never been directly from the site itself, always from consulting and other services related to it, it is clear that my site has always played a critical role in my income.

However, the site didn’t start out that way. When I started Plagiarism Today I was just a guy passionate about a topic who wanted to write on it. When I first set up the site, it was meant as an experiment, not as a means of making my living. In fact, income was never part of the plan at all, just something that happened.

But while I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to earn a living from my site and am glad to have had the chances I have had, it is clear that things do change as one’s site goes from being a hobby to being a part of their income. Since this is an active goal for many bloggers, its important to make sure that one is ready for that before they begin to take their checks.

After all, many find that blogging may seem to be a great way to make a living, that is, until they do so and blogging becomes much more serious in nature. [Read more…]

Darren Rowse on making money via affiliate programs

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Over at Problogger, Darren Rowse has an excellent two-part series on how to make money with affiliate programs.

Part One:

1. Relevancy between Audience, Product and Content

One key to high conversion when promoting affiliate products is to align as much as possible the needs of your audience, with the product that you are promoting and the content being produced on your blog.

Part Two:

2. Track What Your Readers Respond to

Yesterday I mentioned that instead of just promoting an affiliate product once that it can be worth running a series of different types of posts to promote it over time. The beauty in doing this is that you begin to see what your readership responds to. You might find that few people sign up for a product when you first announce it but when you write a review that sales increase. Alternatively you might find that when you offer a bonus they sign up more or even that they respond to you doing an interview with the person behind the product. The key is to try different things but then to watch how they convert.

Excellent advice all around…

Speedlinking Posts

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Many bloggers take some time at the end of their day and clean out their “pipeline” with a Speedlinking post highlighting some of the better items that they read throughout the day – but simply ran out of time to post.

Here’s a great example of a Speedlinking post from Problogger’s Darren Rowse.

Darren’s post covers 11 different topics that he discovered through reading feeds, skimming Twitter and looking at other websites & news sources. Having looked at all 11 topics in Darren’s post, I’d say that 7-8 of them were great reads that I enjoyed and learned some new knowledge from.

I remember back in the hey-day of Blog Network Watch, we would often have so much incoming news that it was difficult to post it all with an appropriate level of commentary. We’d end the day with a “Remnant” post covering the news that we simply couldn’t get to — it was our own form of speedlinking.

Do you speedlink at your blog?

Want a blogger job? Take it seriously

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Over at Problogger, Darren Rowse writes on the topic of blogger jobs in a post entitled “Applying for a blogger job? Take it seriously!”:

Ultimately my main advice to bloggers wanting to get a blogging job is to take the application process seriously. Treat it as though you are applying for any job.

Advertisers are not advertising on the Job Boards simply for fun or looking for sub par bloggers. They are businesses looking to hire professionals. Present yourself this way and you’ll stand out from the crowd and give yourself every chance of landing yourself a blogging job.

In his post, Darren also references a earlier post of his from 2006 on how to apply for a blog job. Great advice all around from Darren.