“4 Resources to Build Your Blogging Business” plus 1 more

4 Resources to Build Your Blogging Business

Posted: 30 Jun 2010 10:14 PM PDT

Every week I am contacted by people producing training resources, courses, eBooks, books etc for people wanting to make money from blogging and other online activities.

If I were to write a post about every one it’d almost take over this blog completely so I’m pretty fussy about which ones I promote. However lately there have been a lot of them coming from people that I know and respect.

Not all will be ideal for every person (they have a huge variation in price points and a fair variation in topics covered) but I do know that some are going to be very valuable to different readers so here’s a summary of the latest products coming across my desk (in no particular order).

1. Freelancer’s Survival Guide

Chris Guillebeau has done it again with another of his ‘Unconventional Guides’ (out today).

This one is for those wanting to get serious about their Freelancing Businesses. As with most of these guides Chris offers 3 price points for different levels.

Learn more about this Freelancing Survival Guide Here.

2. Beyond Blogging Project

A brand new project by Nathan Hagan and Mike CJ – authors of the successful Beyond Blogging book.

This project is a 6 months project to help you build your blog to the next level.

It includes web casts, podcasts, site critiques, Q&A calls, forum and a lot more. Both Mike and Nathan know what they’re doing – looks like something well worth considering. It’s not cheap and will price some out of participating (although not as expensive as some courses) but for a 6 month course with lots of personal touches it’s about what I’d expect.

Get all the information on the Beyond Blogging Project here

3. Product Launch Formula 3

Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula 3 has had enough buzz in the last week that you’d have to have been having an internet free week to miss it.

It’s a high level product for those looking to launch products (I took version 2 and it’s helped me double my income from product sales in the last year) and it closes its doors in the next 24 hours (Jeff tends to only open them every 6-12 months).

Again – this isn’t a cheap product but it’s the formula behind many very successful online product launches so if you’re getting into that game it’s the type of teaching that has the potential to pay for itself. At the very least get yourself signed up for the product launch formula blueprint (pdf and video) which is free (for the the price of an email address) as it’s a handy thing to have.

Learn more about it in this interview I did last week with Jeff.

Full Details on Product Launch Formula 3 are Here

4. Engage

_wp-content_uploads_2009_05_20100126-kis1nw5n1qen8kpy186ijj4d9s.jpg This is a book (yep, a paper one) that I’ve been reading for a month now. I usually don’t read too many paper books these days but this one is well worth the read.

The sub title is – ‘The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web‘ which gives you a little more on what it is about but as a mini review I’d say it’s well worth the read for anyone whose business is developing a plan for their use of social media. Much of it is useful for individuals but I suspect it’s going to be most powerful when a company gets ahold of it and implements some of Brian’s thinking in their business.

The first half is more introductory into the world of social media while the 2nd half is more about how to use social media to engage and some of the responsibilities that come with that. It’s a meaty book – enjoy.

Engage is Available on Amazon here

Disclaimer – each and every one of the links above is an affiliate link and you can assume that I stand to earn a comission if you buy any of the products. However I stand by the recommendations of the products and people mentioned. For every product mention you see here there’s another 1-2 that I’ve chosen not to include.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

4 Resources to Build Your Blogging Business

1. We Ask Questions

The best thing that we do (and I have my forum administrator help with dPS facebook page so it literally is a ‘we’) is simply asking questions of those who ‘like’ us on Facebook. Every day or two we pose a simple question that asks readers either for

their opinion on some aspect of photography
to share an experience that they’ve had
to tell us something about the photography gear that they use
to do something fun

These simple questions go crazy. Some examples include:

Interestingly when we ask the same questions on Twitter (where we have 1000 more followers than we have ‘likes’ on Facebook) we only get 10 or so answers to our questions where on Facebook we get hundreds (we’ve had as many as 700). The fact that Facebook allows our followers to see each others responses and that it’s less fleeting than Twitter is an advantage for this type of thing.

2. Promoted ‘Hot Facebook Status Updates”

When we have one of these question status updates/discussion going on Facebook we try to get more traffic to it from other sources. This largely happens in two ways:

Weekly Newsletter – in our weekly email newsletter we’ve been linking to one facebook discussion a week as a ‘hot on facebook’ link.
Twitter – because the ‘conversational aspect of facebook’ is so great I’ve started to tweet when there’s a good discussion going. It might seem odd to promote one social media account on another but it’s led to significant increases in interaction.

The benefit of highlighting what’s going on on our Facebook page has been two fold – firstly it boosts the numbers of responses to the questions we ask significantly.

Secondly it’s led to a big increase in the number of people who ‘like’ our pages. We’ve gone from several thousand connections on our facebook page to over 27,000 in a couple of months.

3. Reader Involvement in Shaping the Site

Every Friday morning as I’m scheduling posts on the blog for the weekend I ask the same question on Facebook. The question asks readers to suggest a theme for our weekend photography challenge (something we run each week on the blog where we name a theme and everyone goes away and takes a picture to come back and share relating to the theme).

We get a lot of great suggestions in this weekly thread of conversation and the added bonus is that it builds a little anticipation for the challenge itself.

Another thing I did last week was create a survey for our facebook friends that asked them some questions about the content that they’d like to see on dPS. Over 600 people took the survey from facebook giving us some amazing insights into topics for future posts.

4. Promotions

We recently launched a Travel Photography eBook on dPS and saw some really positive response from our promotional efforts on Facebook. I’ve never seen much success with ’selling’ on Facebook before but this time around we built some pre-launch buzz on the facebook page and released it to our facebook community before anyone else.

Our best conversions did come from email promotion but Facebook was probably our 2nd most effective place of promotion this time around. We did some status updates about it but also sent direct messages to all of those who have ‘liked’ our page.

5. Landing Page

This is very new – but I’ve recently added a ‘welcome’ landing tab for those arriving on our page who have not been there before and ‘liked’ it (I’ve also added it to the ProBlogger Facebook Page).

Screen shot 2010-06-30 at 12.15.39 PM.png

The idea here is to create a tab (using the FBML application) which is a customized greeting page for new people to your page. The page directs people to the ‘like’ button and sells benefits of making the connection. Next time they arrive on the page they are taken to the ‘wall’ tab and don’t see the welcome (Facebook allow you to set this up in the ‘page’ settings.

It’s too soon to tell what impact it is having but in talking to a few other web publishers this has seen significant increases in connections.

I’ve also seen others add other things in such a page including welcome videos, email newsletter subscription forms and other things that help them achieve some kind of ‘conversion’. The FBML application lets you add pretty much any html to the tab. I’ve so far just used an image file but hope to convert it to live html with links in it in the coming weeks.

What are You Doing that is Working on Facebook?

I feel like I’m still finding my way with the use of Facebook and am still experimenting with different aspects of it. We have a ‘tab’ for our eBooks which I’m not sure is overly effective, I want to find a way to get our readers sharing photos better and I’m sure I could be promoting our newsletter better – but it’s one of those things where I find experimenting with one thing at a time is best.

What are you doing with facebook that is working (or that isn’t)?

PS: I’m pretty sure that facebook is not a site that will work for every topic. For example on the ProBlogger facebook page we’ve not seen the same sorts of results – for ProBlogger Twitter seems better. I’ve heard from a few other bloggers mixed results including some amazing stories of increases in traffic.

Also worth noting is that earlier this year I made a significant change in the way that I used Facebook when I defriended around 4800 friends and made my personal facebook profile purely for personal friends and family and concentrated all of my facebook efforts on creating ‘fan pages’/'pages’ for each of my blogs. This was the best thing I’ve done on facebook and released me to develop the pages and use my personal account to build friendships and connections with real life friends.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

5 Ways I’m Using Facebook to Drive Traffic, Build Brand and Increase Reader Engagement