“Interview with Six Figure Blogger Pat Flynn Available for ProBlogger Newsletter Subscribers” plus 1 more |
Interview with Six Figure Blogger Pat Flynn Available for ProBlogger Newsletter Subscribers Posted: 28 Jan 2010 11:14 AM PST A couple of weeks ago I hooked up on Skype with a great blogger by the name of Pat Flynn who has a fantastic story to share. Pat was working as an architect and was about to get married – life was good – but unexpectedly he was laid off from his job and was left wondering what to do. It turns out that getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to Pat – he took a small blog about an architectural exam (the LEED exam) that he’d been using to help himself study for the exam and turned it into a six figure income generation machine. He launched an E-Book off the back of his blog and in its first month he made $8000. That was just the beginning though – in his first year of business the site generated over $200,000! You can check out Pat’s blog at Green Exam Academy and his newer site at Smart Passive Income. My chat with Pat was both inspiring and informative and today I’m sharing it with those who have subscribed to the ProBlogger Newsletter and will be adding it as a free bonus to anyone who subscribes in future. Sign up below to get access to our weekly newsletter and this free Podcast with Pat Flynn. If you don’t see a signup form above you could be using an Ad Blocker program that also blocks signup forms. Please disable it for a few minutes and refresh this page to see the form and sign up. Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Interview with Six Figure Blogger Pat Flynn Available for ProBlogger Newsletter Subscribers |
Leverage What You Have and Take Your Blog to the Next Level Posted: 28 Jan 2010 06:07 AM PST This post continues my series exploring Principles of Successful Blogs. Have you ever seen a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering speed and momentum and growing in size as it rolls until it gets to a size that will destroy anything and anyone in its path??? Me neither…. not outside of cartoons anyway…. While the image may not be one too many of us have seen in reality – it is a great metaphor for what seems to happen to many successful blogs. They start small (like any other blog) but gradually (at first) grow (a reader at a time) into blogs with more and more loyal readers. Along the way events (some lucky and some strategic) happen that make the blog grow and roll faster down the slope. In time momentum grows and it seems that the blog can’t help but grow as it rolls on and gathers new readers, builds its brand, expands with new features…. in time people start referring to it as an A-List blog and what was once a simple blog with no readers has ‘made it’. How do successful blogs grow?There are many reasons that successful blogs grow bigger and bigger over time but one principle that I observe in many such blogs is that they use the power of leverage to grow what they have to the next level. The principle is simple yet it can be applied in many different ways and levels to blogging. It revolves around this question: “what do you have now that you can use to help you get a step closer to where you want to be?” Leverage: “the mechanical advantage gained by being in a position to use a lever” (source). Another way to ask the question – what ‘lever’ do you have at your disposal that might help you to lift your blog to its next level. Illustrating Leverage – an ExampleMost readers of ProBlogger will pretty familiar with my photography site. I call it a site and not a blog because today it has a forum, 3 blog areas, strong Twitter and Facebook presence, 2 E-Books (portraits and Photo Nuts and Bolts) and continues to expand. It is read by 3 million or so visitors a month and generates some decent income. However it wasn’t always what you see today. In fact when I started it in April 2006 it was a simple blog with a free template design that had 3-4 new posts a week and that made less than a few cents a day. The last 4 years of building dPS have seen many many points of leverage. Let me highlight a few:
Of course there are many other small points of leverage along the way but hopefully you get the point. Each time I’ve launched or grown the site I’ve looked at the arsenal of what I already have and pooled those resources to help build what comes next. Points of leverage can come in all shapes and sizes. Some might not seem that big but they can lead to things that are. For example my initial Flickr network of 40-50 people led to a Flickr group of over 10,000 which led to a forum of over 80,000! What do You Have that You Can Leverage?I’ve raised this topic in a number of presentations over the years and the reaction of many is ‘I don’t have anything to leverage’. I can relate to that feeling – in 2002 when I started my very first blog I didn’t really have much either. I’d not done much online beyond using hotmail, IRC chat and an occasional search on Netscape. I didn’t have an online network, knew virtually nobody who did and had no idea where to start. I’d not had any experience in building a website or writing copy for the web – I’d only seen my first blog hours before I started my own. So I started with what I did have – my friends and family. They were my first readers. Interestingly one of my friends had another friend who was a blogger on a similar topic to me. That generated my first link which generated my first comment from someone I wasn’t related to (a momentous moment in the life of any blogger)! Homework – Make an Inventory of What You HaveHere’s an exercise that could be helpful. Grab something to write/type with and start making a list of what you have at your disposal. Thing broadly – it could include almost anything:
This list only scratches the surface – what you have will be unique to you. Another thing you might like to add to your list is things that you don’t have but that you have the ability to have. Next step goals if you like.
One Last Tip – Build It Before You Need ItAs I wrote my 7 point list of points of leverage that I’ve had at dPS above it struck me that what I was writing sounded pretty strategic and as though I knew what I was doing. The reality is that I’d say that about 20% of that was strategic and 80% of it was not. When I started out I knew I wanted to build a site that helped people grow in their photography and that would hopefully make me a decent income – but I didn’t have much idea of where it was headed. I didn’t see a forum, I had no idea about E-Books and certainly had not considered Twitter or Facebook (I’m not even sure if they existed back then). My approach instead was to grow the site organically – to try new things and see where there was energy and to keep building upon what worked. I wanted to build a presence in any way that I could and that was relevant to my potential audience and then to see what opportunities opened up to grow things further both in terms of size and financially. I didn’t really need to have a way to email readers in the early days because I wasn’t selling anything – but I built a newsletter list from day 1. I didn’t really have much to say on Twitter or Facebook when I started with that but decided to build that network early because I knew one day I would. In a sense a lot of what I did in the early days was to build a network/community knowing that one day I’d need it to do more than make a few dollars from ad revenue. This of course came to be true when I launched our E-books in the last 6 months. I’m glad I didn’t wait until I needed the network to build it but instead built it well in advance. Further Reading:
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