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| Become a Blogger Premium Training Program has Launched Posted: 04 Dec 2008 02:13 PM PST After releasing a great free report earlier in the week - Roadmap to Become a Blogger - Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick have today released the premium section of their program. This is for those who want to go beyond the 10 free videos and free report and goes a lot deeper (although the report and videos will give you a great insight into the style and content of this course).
The training is video based and is centered around a series of 9 modules over six months (each month you get 8 videos):
This course is probably not going to rock the world of advanced bloggers - but if you’re about to start a blog or are in your early days of doing so then this is an investment in your blogging education that you’ll want to consider. Yaro and Gideon are great teachers, the content is solid, they’ve been successful in building their own blogs (particularly Yaro) and the course covers a great spectrum of useful topics. BonusesThere are also a series of bonus - some of which expire in the next 24 hours after the initial launch of the program. The non time specific ones are:
The 24 hour bonuses are:
What does this Investment Cost?The cost is a lot cheaper than other blogging courses going around (including Yaro’s own BlogMastermind) and is currently $27 a month for the six months that the course runs. This price is set to go up to $47 a month after the first week (on 11 December) so if you’re going to sign up you’ll save yourself $120 by doing it this week. As with all Yaro’s products - this one has a money back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied you can get your money back within 60 days. Check out this link For more information and to Sign Up for Become a Blogger Premium. |
| The Final Frontier to Exquisite Writing - Avoid Clichés Posted: 04 Dec 2008 12:50 PM PST Today Bamboo Forest from Pun Intended shares some thoughts on the topic of avoiding Clichés. I’ve co-authored a blog for less than a year, and prior to beginning, my writing was natural - which is precisely why it wasn’t good. Good writing stands on good principles. These principles aren’t natural; instead, they are forged by reading blogs like this one – and quality material in general. Once you begin to internalize effective principles, the challenge then is to constantly have the necessary awareness while writing. Developing awareness as a writer is an ongoing process; one we must continually perfect. If you were to make a feast, and lacked mindfulness during preparation, you may forget a few integral ingredients resulting in the meal tasting a bit bland. Your guests would be disappointed. The same concept is true with writing: forgetting important principles during the creation stage will lead to a lackluster outcome. I could cover all the important aspects one should constantly be aware of – but I’m opting instead to cover the final frontier to exquisite writing: omitting clichés. A cliché is a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially when at some time it was considered distinctively forceful or novel. A superior way to raise your awareness of these vile concoctions is to read a good sampling; I found this list via an article by Robust Writing. The reason we have an unconscious tendency to use them is because they have been repeated a trillion times; they have become deeply imbedded in our brains; not only ours, but our readers too. If an audience finds a page full of clichés, their judgment of the content will decline. In short: reading clichés is reading what has already been written. That’s boring. In a recent article, my final sentence was “Long and strong my friend!” I then changed it to, “Keep your heart in it my friend!” A small alteration, yes. But how many times have you read “long and strong?” The edited version is much better. How to Ensure Clichés are Minimized from This Point Forward You must install a cliché radar in your mind. Any metaphors, similes, or idioms that look familiar and tired – must be eradicated from your prose. Of course it’s easier to speckle your writing with clichés but it’s also lazy thinking, and unimpressive. Everyone can pluck the mundane growth of clichés out of their prose with a little awareness, and by doing so you will have significantly upgraded your writing. Tags: Clichés, Copy Writing, writing, Writing Content |
| You’re Losing Subscribers, Here’s How to Get them Back Posted: 04 Dec 2008 09:01 AM PST Today Glen Allsopp a Personal Development blogger at PluginID shares a great technique for capturing lost subscribers to your blog. You can subscribe to his blog here. A few months ago, I was messing around in feedburner and noticed something pretty drastic, I was rapidly losing subscribers on a regular basis. I bet that you are losing subscribers too, even ones that have signed up for your feed. Since this discovery I’ve been regularly ‘getting them back’ and I’m going to explain exactly what I mean today. What brought me to remember this (and decide to do a guest post for ProBlogger) is a new tool I’ve been testing out called BLVD Status, it’s brought to you by a team of internet marketers and includes some awesome features. My favourite: live analytics. So, on a normal day my blog was receiving quite a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon as shown in the screenshot below:
The panel for BLVD Status is very simple, giving you a brief overview of what is going on in your site at any one moment. I particularly like the outgoing links section to see where I’m sending traffic too, this also includes people subscribing to your RSS feed. I noticed quite a few of the StumbleUpon visitors were opting to sign-up for my email feed:
And then BAM! I instantly remembered the little area of Feedburner where I noticed that I’ve been losing subscribers, lots of them. Lost SubscribersFirstly, if you aren’t using Feedburner then I highly recommend that you do. It comes with a host of features such as:
Now then, once you’ve logged into your Feedburner account, click the ‘Analyze‘ tab then click ‘Subscribers‘ on the left navigation menu. Next, scroll down the page to see your email subscriptions through Feedburner. You should have this enabled if you don’t as not everyone will know how to use normal RSS feeds, especially if you don’t have a tech savvy audience. I’m not sure if you get the same options if you use a different email provider within Feedburner, but if you go directly to them I’m sure they’ll be able to give you similar information.
If you click on that link you should then see a list of all your email subscribers. My site is quite new (~ 3 months old) so there are only 41 right now but every subscriber counts. Once there, you should see a list that looks a bit like this:
Of course, I’ve blurred out the actual email address’ for privacy reasons, but your account will show them clearly. Now then, on the column on the right hand side you can see subscribers which are ‘unverified’. What this means is that the person has entered their email address in the box, and gone through the captcha process. However, they have never actually confirmed their subscription which should have been sent to their inbox and therefore aren’t being ‘counted’ as a subscriber. If you have a big site, you might find quite a lot of people who are unverified, these are people who want your feed, but for whatever reason didn’t finish the process. Some possible reasons:
Getting them backLuckily, all is not lost. Just because somebody didn’t verify their address, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to. It would be great if there was an option within Feedburner to re-send the activation email but that doesn’t seem to be the case. However, you do have their email address so all I recommend that you do is send all unverified subscribers a quick, friendly email to let them know that they can try again, or ask if they had any problems. If you want some pointers on this, here is the email I sent:
If you are sending this to multiple people at once, make sure you add them to the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field of your email client so they can’t see each others email address. The result: about 40% of people got back to me and said they had either not received the email or received an error when they tried. I simply took 10 minutes to enter their emails for them and they activated their subscriptions. For some bigger sites this might be a job that takes you a day, but subscribers are an important factor in any blog, and not something that you want to lose. I would not recommend doing this more than once as you will annoy people, but check regularly for new people that sign-up but are unverified. Hopefully, you’ll get a lot more subscribers back that you actually (kind of) had before. Glen Allsopp writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. You can help him help you by subscribing to his feed, here. Tags: , Blog Promotion, Email, RSS, Subscribers, Verification |
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