Session #3: How to Get Your First 1000 Blog Subscribers

With Johnny B. Truant and Jon Morrow

[00:00:04]

Jon: Alright. Hello everybody, if I could actually talk. Hello everybody, this is Jon Morrow here with Johnny B. Truant and we are about to start the illustrious module, How to Get Your First 1000 Blog Subscribers. That's what we’ll be talking about for the next hour or so, so if you’re just logging, go ahead and close up your email, turn off your cell phones, we’re going to be covering some really cool stuff for you today and you don’t want to get distracted if at all possible.

JT: Yeah.

Jon: Alright. So I guess I’ll get this rolling.

JT: That sounds good.

Jon: Alright. So, notice in the title of the module, it’s How to Get Your First 1000 Blog Subscribers, the title of this module isn’t How to Get Traffic, although we’re going to be talking about that. And the reason why is the thing that you need to be paying most attention to to build an online business is the number of people subscribing to your email list. If you’re getting 100,000 visitors a day and none of those people are subscribing to your list, then from a business perspective those people almost worthless. On the other hand, if you’re only getting 100 people a day but 10 of those are subscribing to your list, then you’re actually building a business fairly quickly there, okay?

So it isn’t just about the amount of traffic, although a lot of traffic is great, but the most important thing is to be getting those people to subscribe to your email list so that you can build a relationship with them over time, and so when you do have something to sell them you can send them an email saying why it’s important, what it can do for them and who might want to buy it.

So unless you get them on your email list that can never happen. And one thing that we talked about last week is that the shocking and a little bit depressing truth about traffic is unless people subscribe to your email list, then they’re probably gone forever. So we all like to assume that if our content is good enough, then people will come back, that they’ll read an article and they’ll say, “That's really cool,” and the next day they’ll come see if you’ve written anything else.

But the truth is, the stats don’t lie, people don’t come back. Really only a very small percentage come back. You’re looking at, of the people who don’t subscribe, maybe 5%. Ninety-five percent of people forget about you forever, and what that means is it’s absolutely crucial that you get those people to subscribe. So what Johnny and I are going to be walking you through today is, number one, how to get traffic to your new website that you got set up after the last module, and number two, how to get those people onto your email list. Does that sound about right, Johnny?

JT: Yes, and I would just add that I know that there are a handful of people, there are at least a few people who said, “I know the technical stuff,” and we sort of framed the last session, Session 2, as being technically driven, like how to mechanically put up your website and set up your email list and all that. So I know a few people basically said, “Well, I know that stuff and I know it’s going to be 101 level, so I’ll skip it or I’ll get to it later.”

I would just encourage anybody to go back and listen to that because that was a jam-packed session. As Jon and I do, we sort of went off in any direction the people wanted to take us, and there’s a ton of sort of bottom line stuff in there about what your business really needs to be about, like what the big picture of your funnel needs to look like, what your main goals really should be, and it’ll do a really good job of boiling down a lot of the stuff before you start dealing with specify strategies. So I would just encourage everybody to go listen to that. It’s absolutely full of stuff.

Jon: Yeah, and go back and listen to the first one as well, because in the first one we talked about how to choose a good topic, so how to pick a topic that could be a six-figure business. And the real secret to traffic is that it’s easier and much, much easier to get a lot of traffic for popular topics than it is for unpopular topics. So that first module, it’s absolutely essential. I mean, if you want the first traffic tip, the first traffic tip is to be blogging about a popular topic, and we went over several ways to do that, several ways to identify those topics in that module, one of which being the dummies test, the other one the search engines.

And we gave the recommendation that you’re writing about something that concerns at least a million people. That doesn’t mean a million people searching on Google for it. That just means there are a million people in the world interested in this topic, and that's really pretty common. There are a lot of topics that fall in that category. I imagine there are probably a million people interested in, you know, albino hamsters, so you can get fairly small, fairly niched, and there’ll still be a large number of people.

But the bigger and more popular your topic is, the easier it’s going to be to get traffic, and the reason why—Derek Halpern and I were actually talking about this the other day, and we were talking about counterintuitive it is the way competition works online. You would think that there

being a lot of competition in your space would make it harder to grow a business and harder to stand out, but the counterintuitive fact is it actually makes it easier. Easier.

And let me tell you why, and this is especially true when it comes to traffic. If there is no one else in your space, there's no one else to link to you, okay? That means it’s going to be very, very hard getting that traffic. On the other hand, if there are a lot of people in the same space blogging about the same topic or similar topics, then it’s relatively easy because there are dozens or even hundreds of sites that have readers who are already interested in your topic and that they can link to you and send you traffic and send you subscribers, okay?

So if you’re all alone in your niche, if you’re the only person writing in that niche, then it’s automatically going to be a struggle. It’s not impossible. There are plenty of bloggers who have done it, but the biggest and most important thing is to be in a niche where there are lots of people interested in it, and optimally where there are already lots of people writing about it. And then we can talk about some ways to get those people to link to you in a minute, but does that sound about right so far, Johnny?

JT: So if I could connect the dots, and tell me if this is your impression as well, the first session was how to choose a topic, and we talked about sort of a minimum threshold, so there needs to be sort of this many eyes in the sea or whatever. And then some people said, “So how do I stand out?” Because the idea was, is there such a thing as a niche that's too crowded, and a lot of what we’re going to talk about today is the flipside of that coin, is saying, “Go ahead and find yourself as big of an area as you can, sort of a largest pool to draw from, and then this is how we begin snagging your people out of it and carving out your own niche within it.” I have that pretty much right?

Jon: Yeah, that's right. And also, what you write about and what you sell, one common thing that's done is you can write about a broad topic on your blog, and then on your email list get down to a smaller topic, and then your product get down to even a smaller topic, okay? So if you go look at Copyblogger, for example, Copyblogger is about online marketing and content marketing. Well, Copyblogger has a side email list that's called Internet Marketing for Smart People, so specifically about Internet marketing strategies and techniques. That's more specific than just online marketing. So they’re taking a very general topic and making it slightly more niched. Not everybody who reads Copyblogger is on that list.

And then from there, then they have products and services that they market through that Internet Marketing for Smart People list that are things like SEO tools, WordPress themes, products like Teaching Sells, which is a course about how to make money online. All of those things are marketed, and those are very, very specific. So if you’re looking about how wide do I be, how specific am I, you might decide to go specific with your actual product for sale and what it does

or who it serves, but you want to be broad when it comes to your blog topic, okay? The broader you are, the easier it’s going to be to connect with lots of other people that can read you.

Now, I don’t mean pick multiple topics or try to be serving, have a blog about—an example I gave the other day was if you had a blog about being a vegetarian and also about being an entrepreneur. Well, that serves two different audiences, okay? Because the people that are interested in posts about being a vegetarian maybe don’t want to be entrepreneurs, and when you’re writing about entrepreneurship, maybe a lot of the vegetarians don’t want to be interested in that. So you end up boring part of your audience whenever you write about one of those topics. You want to be targeting one audience.

On the other hand, you could be writing about being a vegetarian and fitness, okay? Because both of those are about health and they’re targeting people who are interested in improving their health. And by the way, there just does so happen to be a blog about this called the No Meat Athlete. So you can be blogging about multiple things but they all need to be of interest to the same audience, and that audience needs to be as broad as possible. The broader it is, the easier it’ll be.

Another great example is Zen Habits, which is about how to simplify your life. It’s one of the most popular blogs in the world. There are a lot of reasons why but a big one is because who isn’t interested in simplifying their life? There are hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people, interested in that topic that feel overwhelmed, that want to simplify their life and be more stress-free. Because of that, it’s really easy for him to build a popular blog, okay?

JT: So I have two questions for you, Jon. I’m playing the role of the audience member at this point since this is sort of your bread and butter topic.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

JT: Okay, so here are two questions. The first is, what is my blog about and how the hell do I manage to write about such crazy different things and attract an audience? So that's number one. Number two is, how would you reconcile what you’re talking about with what I would think of as Derek Sivers’ proud alienation concept, and both of us practice this, that it’s okay to alienate large segments of the general population in the interest of purifying your own unique readership. So, basically, this would be the person who’s saying, “Who is my audience? Well, it’s everybody.” So the Zen Habits model may say, “Anybody who wants to simplify their life,” and he talks about a lot of things in there. So how do you reconcile that, and then the subsequent question of, what the hell do I have going on? Because I don’t know that I understand it.

Jon: Yeah, I mean even something like Zen Habits, it alienates people who are extremely aggressive type A personalities. A lot of those people aren’t going to be interested in it because those people want to live as hard and fast as possible, okay? And he deliberately on his blog makes fun of people like that, okay?

On my blog, Boost Blog Traffic, I’m talking to people who want to be serious bloggers, who want to make a career out of this. I deliberately alienate hobbyists, people who are just in this for the fun of it and who don’t care about the results from it. So you want to figure out who you’re talking to and who you’re not talking to and deliberately target those people. In your case, Johnny, you’re mainly talking to online entrepreneurs, right?

JT: Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Jon: So, I mean you do have your audience there that you’re talking to, and you can talk about anything that that audience is interested in. So, I mean online entrepreneurs, they’re interested in personal development, they’re interested in the technical-type stuff, they’re interested in time management, they’re interested in marketing. So you can span all of these different topics, but those are all still connected to the same core audience.

JT: Do you think that it’s dangerous to go too wide in the interesting of saying that I’m talking to one type of person and this person is interested in cooking and puppies and pottery?

Jon: Well, if all of them are interested in all of those topics, then no, I don’t think it’s too wide. I mean, I actually don’t think there is a large group of people that are interested in all of those specify topics. But you want to be targeting a specific type of person. So like entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs, they’re probably not going to be interested in puppies or pottery or whatever, where if you were writing a parenting blog, then maybe. Maybe those would all work. But just ask yourself—when I’m writing, I want at least 80% of the audience, at least, to be interested in what I’m writing about.

JT: Your audience, not 80% of people at large, I just want to clarify that.

Jon: Yeah, 80% of my audience. So when I’m writing to serious bloggers who really want to get results from their blog, I want to be writing about something that 80% of them are interested in. It’s hard to ever get to 100% because there are micro-niches within every niche, but you want to go fairly broad, and you also want to be giving people a benefit to reading. So this is another big, big mistake that I see.

And if you’re wondering when we’re going to get into tactics, we’re going to do that in just a minute. I’m laying the groundwork here because if you get this wrong, then all of the tactics in

the world aren’t going to help, okay? So the other big thing is having a benefit. Like the name of my blog is Boost Blog Traffic – I actually write about more than just traffic.

But having a benefit in there, if you’re a blogger and you come across that and you want more traffic, you immediately know, A, what the blog is about, B, how it’ll help you, as soon as you see the domain name. So you need to have a benefit for people to read your blog. If there's not a benefit, something that people want, then you’re going to have a hard time building your subscriber base as well. And the benefit could be anything. It could be losing weight, it could be increasing your income, it could be whatever. The more concrete that benefit is, though, the easier it’s going to be for you to get traffic.

JT: Never forget that you’re writing—your readers need to be able to see themselves in your content. I think a lot of people make a mistake of writing solely about themselves and their experience, and it can be illustrative to talk about yourself and your experience, but those lessons that you learned from the stories you’re telling about yourself and your experience need to be relatable to the people in your audience. It’s really common that you’ll see people and they’re just writing about themselves, and I have a good example of this. This is a headline example but the same principles apply.

I had a post that I believe Jon called it one of the best things he's ever seen written or something like that, and I don’t know if people are in offices so I won’t give the whole title, but it had profanity in it and it was The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying F*** About You. And then I wrote something that I thought was similar, and it had the same feel and it didn’t go nearly as far, and then I talked to somebody and she said, “Well, I think the first one.”

It’s very clear. It’s about you, the universe doesn’t care about you, whereas the other one, it looked like it was kind of about me and something that I’d been through. And once I changed the headline of the second one to indicate clearly that it was about something that you as the reader could learn, that you as the reader could apply or see yourselves in, then suddenly it took off like the other one did.

Jon: Yeah. My most popular post that I’ve ever written is How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World. It’s up to like 10,000 tweets now. That post isn’t how I quit my job, move to paradise and get paid to change the world. It’s how to, meaning it teaches other people how to. Now, I used my own story as examples throughout that post, but it was about other people, inspiring them, getting them to the place where they could do that. So you want your blog to be about your readers.

One metaphor that I really, really like is called “rooted in readership.” So if you imagine that your blog is a tree, your blog is planted in your readers, so your readers are the ground and

you’re the person watering the tree, okay? What a lot of bloggers make the mistake of is they think that their blog is rooted in themselves. So my blog is about me, so therefore I’m the ground. The roots of my blog are rooted in me, and then I’m hoping to attract readers. That doesn’t work unless you are the most interesting person in the world, and very few people are that interesting. We could probably count them on one hand.

The thing to do is to make your blog all about your readers, how to improve their lives. You can still tell some of your own stories but only in relation as an example of a point that you’re talking about. So the more of that you do, the better time you’ll have getting traffic, too.

JT: So Jon’s other popular post is On Dying, Mothers, and Fighting For Your Ideas on Copyblogger.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

JT: And that one is less obviously about other people because it starts out with his story and it tells Jon’s story, but as you read about halfway through it, it becomes, this is really about you. This is about you and fighting for your ideas. I do this a lot on my blog too, and my blog will tend to look like it’s about me, but I never ever—I always ask myself as I’m writing something, this needs to be something where if I’m telling something that happened to me, something that I have observed, I always need to turn it around and indicate in some way that you should be able to see the same things in your life, and I routinely go through and change “I” to “you” or vice-versa to indicate that this is something that they need to be able to see, and through my example if necessary, but it’s ultimately about the reader.

Jon: Yeah, I think somebody actually did a mathematical analysis of this, and they found out that the most common word on popular blogs is “you.” It’s the most common word. It’s more common than any other word. And that doesn’t surprise me. Actually, sometimes I’ll go through and do a Microsoft Word search for how many I’s do I have in this and how many yous do I have in this. You want there to be at least 4 or 5 times as many yous as there are I’s for a post to work.

And also, that post in Copyblogger, it was very popular, very, very popular, it went viral, but what I think is interesting is the other post that's more about other people, so How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World, it’s another facet in my story but it’s more focused on other people, and it actually went more viral than the other one. So while the one that kind of started off about me was popular, the other one was more popular.

And also, I have a really, really good story, one of those stories that is like one in a million, and because of that I can lean on it a little bit because it involves almost dying a lot of times, about

my mother fighting to take care of me, and if ever I tell that story there's not a dry eye anywhere. So if you have a story like that, then you can use it a little bit more.

But if you don’t have a story that just like makes people break down into tears when they’re listening to you, if you can’t immediately captivate an audience full of people with your story, then you probably don’t need to lead with that. You need to lead with how-to-type content teaching them how to improve their lives, and then just use little anecdotes out of your own life as examples.

JT: One last thing I’d add on this before we leave this topic to get into some more strategies is that some advice I heard Naomi Dunford give once was to remember that your reader is not imagining themselves as part of a crowd. They aren’t imagining themselves reading your blog as one of hundreds, thousands or millions. They’re imagining a connection between you and them, and if you write well, it should feel sort of like the blog author is talking to an individual reader.

And so her advice I think was specifically to avoid using terms, I can’t think, like “you guys” or something that indicated large groups. But if you just keep that in mind and you remember that you’re talking person to person, and this is a person with maybe a problem that you had that you’ve overcome—that's a really popular strategy—a problem that they may not be aware of that you’ve recently realized that you’re aware of, and you’re able to put that one singular person in your shoes as a singular person that is writing that tends to be magnetic.

Jon: Yeah, I would agree absolutely. When people are reading your blog for a while, they need to feel like they’re having personal correspondence with you, and when you talk to them, like if you ever talk to them in person, it’s funny that the word like I’ve gotten on—or even on the phone, I’ve gotten on the phone with some of my readers, and they’ll start off a sentence that’s like, “You know a few weeks ago when we were talking about blah blah blah blah blah?” which was something I wrote about on the blog. They don’t say, “You know a few weeks ago when you wrote about such and such?” They say, You know a few weeks ago when we were talking about such and such?”

In their mind there's actually been a conversation going on. It’s actually been me and them conversing. When you write, you want it to be that personal, so you want to target just one person. And you know you have it right when people start saying things like that to you, “when we were talking about…” So listen for that when you’re talking to your audience, too.

Okay, so those are the foundations. So I think we’re ready to get into strategies unless you had anything else to add there, Johnny.

JT: I have nothing else to add. Like most topics, I could continue to beat that one into quivering submission but I think we’d better move on.

Jon: Yeah, and just so you guys know, I mean, go back and listen to this again, I cannot overemphasize how important the fundamentals are. So these kind of boring things about be in a niche where there are a lot of people interested, talk about benefits, talk to individuals, those things are more important than any tactic and technique that Johnny and I could give you. We will give you the techniques because you’re going to need them eventually, but really focus on those fundamentals. They can take you a long way.

Okay, so I guess the first strategy that we’ll cover is guest blogging because that's one that Johnny and I have both gotten a lot out of and both really believe in, and the way that…

JT: I would say that that's my number one. [Laughs] There's almost no number two.

Jon: Yeah, and let me explain why, guys, that I’m so excited about this, too. It’s not only me that's gotten great results from it. If you look at any of the most popular bloggers out of the last 3 to 4 years, maybe even the last 5 years, and you ask them, “What was your number one traffic strategy when you just got started, when you were just a beginner?” They will all tell you guest blogging. Every single one of them. If you go and you do a search, you can find guest posts that almost all of the popular bloggers have written for other big blogs. Almost all of them. So it’s the one consistent strategy that works for every popular blogger in every niche.

I’ve taught guest blogging now to over 500 people. We’re actually getting close to 600 people in my guest blogging class. I’ve never run into a niche where this doesn’t work. It works for every single type of blog. So if you get discouraged about this and you think, “Well, this isn’t going to work for me,” it’s possible that maybe you’re the first person in history, but I doubt it. Chances are this is going to work really well for you, so go ahead and try this.

And what guest blogging is, the best way I know to describe it is it’s like being the opening act for a famous band. So imagine if you were a rock band and you had a call from, I don’t know, I want to just prove how lame I am right now by thinking of a lame example, but let's say you got an invitation from the Rolling Stones.

JT: I was hoping you’d go for an ‘80s band, maybe like, you know, who’s the one that did I Ran (So Far Away)? That’d be cool, with the hair…

Jon: Yeah, what was that?

JT: Flock of Seagulls, yeah.

Jon: Yeah. Let's just say for the sake of getting through it, Rolling Stones, okay? They pack stadiums full of people. A lot of times big bands, I don’t know if the Rolling Stones does right now, but a lot of big bands will have an opening act, so they’ll have another band that travels with them and that band performs first to kind of get the crowd pumped up, to get everybody really excited when the big main act comes on. Blogging is kind of the same thing, okay? Popular blogs have these huge audiences of people. The Rolling Stones may be able to fill like a football stadium with 80,000 people. Well, a big popular blog—Copyblogger has 170,000 readers or so, subscribers. That's basically two football stadiums full of people, alright? That's the way to think about that.

And one person, it’s hard to keep all of those 170,000 people entertained all the time and do it all yourself, so what most popular bloggers do is they end up going out and looking for other new voices, other people that are really good, that have important ideas, that are really good writers, and they invite those people to come write for them. And in exchange, you get a massive amount of exposure. Massive.

Not only do you get a chance to write for that audience, but down at the bottom of the post you get what’s called a byline. So at the bottom of the post it’ll say something like, “Jon Morrow is showing smart, hardworking bloggers how to get more traffic. If you’d like to read his blog, click here.” And if they click “click here,” then they’ll go through to my blog, okay? So in exchange for writing for them you get that link back to your blog, and if you do a good job, if you write a really good post, then you might get hundreds or even thousands of people that’ll click through your blog and read it. So that can send you a lot of really, really good traffic.

And the reason why guest blogging is even better is these people aren’t just stumbling randomly across your blog. If they come to your blog, they’ve already read one thing you liked and they wanted more, so they clicked through on your byline to get more. That makes them extremely qualified.

And actually, if you send those people to an opt-in page, which is something we talked about last week, you can get a huge number of those people to subscribe. For every guest post that I write on Copyblogger, I get somewhere along the lines of 200 to 300 new subscribers, alright? On every guest post, 200 to 300 new subscribers. On a lot of the blogs, a lot of times if you link to an opt-in page, you’ll get 50, 200, 500. I had a student, I’ll not say the name of the blog because I don’t have permission, but she wrote for a really big blog, and that's actually invitation-only to write for them, and she got 1500 subscribers from one guest post. So it’s a really good way to get subscribers to your blog, and it’s free.

And really, the byline traffic is only the small benefit of it, okay? I like to tell my students, that's actually only 5% to 10% of the benefit. The real benefit is the relationship that you’re building

with the blog. So I don’t know if you noticed, but I wrote a post called The 5 Harsh Realities of Making a Living Online and ran that on Copyblogger, and at the end of it we announced a webinar. It was a long post, but we announced a webinar at the end of it. That may have been how you heard about the class. Something like 700 or 800 people signed up for that webinar, okay? Copyblogger didn’t ask for an affiliate link, and the reason why is both Johnny and I have been regular contributors for a long time. We’ve built a relationship with the people at Copyblogger, and in exchange they’re happy to promote our stuff.

For my own blog, Boost Blog Traffic, so far Copyblogger has tweeted all but one of my posts. Why? Because I’ve been writing for years. I’ve also gotten a lot of tweets from ProBlogger. Why? Because I’ve written [00:36:51] for them a couple of times now, built a relationship with Darren for years. So what you want to do, the best thing you can do, is find 4 or 5 different blogs to become a regular contributor on. So plan on writing for them once a month or every other month for the couple of years, really give that audience a chance to get to know you, really build a relationship with that blogger.

And just so you know, let's say Copyblogger sends me 500 visitors and 250 of them subscribe, well that's not bad. When I get a tweet from Brian, though, usually a tweet from Brian sends me anywhere from 1000 to 2000 visitors, okay? So that means a tweet—now the traffic is not as high quality, okay? Because they’re not coming through a post and asking for more first. But one tweet can send me more traffic than a guest post.

Now, what do you think the odds are, even if a lot of new guest posters that come to Copyblogger or any other blog, if you write a really awesome guest post for a blog and it gets a lot of positive comments, the audience really enjoys it, it gets tweeted, it brings a lot of traffic into the blog, everybody’s really happy, if you come the next day and say, “Hey, I wrote a followup post on my blog. Would you mind tweeting it for me?” Do you think they want to say no? No, you just gave them this awesome, awesome post. It would be like being the opening act for the Rolling Stones, and then when you come out with your album they refuse to give you a quote to put on the cover. It just wouldn’t make any sense.

JT: I’d like to mention two things at this point. So one is that part of the reason that we’re able to build these good relationships with these other bloggers and part of the reason that they’re willing to help us out and promote our stuff is because we’re giving them really good stuff. So that's really important, is when you’re guest posting, you want to knock it out of the park.

So to use the opening for the Rolling Stones example, you could get a gig opening for the Rolling Stones and you could have this awesome material that really kicks ass, and then you say, “Well, I’m going to save that for my own concert, and then I have some sort of B list stuff that I could perform when I’m opening for the Rolling Stones.” And that would obviously be a

mistake because, number one, you’re not going to wow the audience and they’re not going to be inclined to come back and check out the other stuff that you’ve got and buy your CD and all that, and number two, you’re not helping the Rolling Stones. You’re not helping the venue. You’re not helping the other blog.

The reason that Copyblogger and ProBlogger like Jon so much, I mean, I guess they like me too but we’re talking about Jon here, his post, is that they’re absolutely killer posts. The most popular post that he was mentioning, the how to change the world, move to Mexico, some iteration of that, that is the most popular post on ProBlogger, so that gets Darren Rowse, who runs ProBlogger, a lot of mileage, it gets him a lot of traffic and it helps his blog. So remember that this is about you helping the other person as well, so you want to have A-plus content.

And the other thing I want to mention is the importance of qualified traffic. So you can get a crap ton of traffic from Digg or StumbleUpon, but it is worthless traffic.

Jon: Yeah, it’s crap. It’s crap.

JT: It really is. I mean, I got Stumbled when I had that big post of mine go viral, and it was just like most people just skipped right up because they’re just mindlessly clicking, or those were the ones where I’d get like really critical comments because they didn’t really come in predisposed to like me, which is what happens with qualified traffic.

So if you write a guest post and it totally kills, and you get a certain amount of traffic because of the opt-in page and a certain amount of people actually do opt in, each stage you’re losing some people, which is great because it means that the people who do opt in are really, really engaged, like they liked you enough to come to your blog, to read what you had to say, and then they liked you enough to opt in. And each time you add an obstacle like that, within reason of course, the more responsive and pure your list gets. I mean, I don’t know if people are going to have a frame of reference for this especially if you’re new to it, but Jon, what kinds of open rates and clickthrough rates do you get on the messages you send your list?

Jon: Well, they’re really high. I mean, on my Boost Blog Traffic list it’s usually in the 60s, over 60%. It’s really, really high. And just so you know, a lot of the people in the Internet marketing space, they’re used to getting less than 10%, okay? So my list isn’t that huge but they’re all really, really engaged, and because I’m getting such massive open rates and everyone is so engaged, I can actually send as much traffic as somebody with a much bigger list who isn’t as engaged.

JT: And Jon’s relatively small list that he's talking about makes my list look really small. I mean, I have a decent-size list, but it is not a “big list.” There's a lot of measurement and chest

puffing that occurs where people talk about how big their lists are, and I have relatively speaking this rather small list, and as Jon mentioned before, I’m his number one affiliate for his guest blogging class.

Jon: Yeah.

JT: And I have this little list, like I beat these people with these giant lists because my list is so engaged.

Jon: Yeah. It’s really true. Johnny has outperformed a lot of people with lists that are 20 times bigger than his just because his list is so engaged and so tuned in to what he's talking about.

JT: And the reason this matters, sorry, before you move on…

Jon: Mm-hmm.

JT: …is because you paid by the lead. Like if I had a list that was 20 times as big, I would be paying one hell of a lot more to my email service provider. So you keep your lists small and pure, that's to your advantage, just so that we’re clear on why you would want to do that.

Jon: Yeah, I mean, just so you guys know, I’m paying a total of 450 dollars a month to host my email list.

JT: I pay under a hundred.

Jon: I mean, that's like rent for a lot of people, okay? And Copyblogger, I don’t even know how much we pay at Copyblogger. I would say it would be several thousand dollars a month to host the emails there. So yeah, the engagement of your list is the really big thing, and the reason why guest blogging works so great is those people are really, really engaged.

Now, I’m guessing that a lot of people are probably wondering, “How do I figure out which blogs to guest post for?” And the answer to that is you want to look for blogs that are targeting the same audience, okay? Targeting the same audience. They don’t have to be about the same topic, but they need to have audience members who are interested in that topic.

So like one thing that I was really fascinated with was on the big personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly, by J.D. Roth, it’s at getrichslowly.org, he did a series of posts about gardening and how much money gardening was saving him. So he actually like added up all of the expenses, added up how many vegetables he got out of it and compared that to how much he would’ve spent on the vegetables in the grocery store, and showed everybody how much money he saved. And it wasn’t a ton of money, but it was still really interesting to see somebody outline it all out with

how much money they saved, okay? And it was a really popular series on his blog. He was writing about gardening, but the personal finance aspects of gardening.

So what that means is, is you had a blog that was all about gardening, you could actually write for a personal finance blog. You know, The 7 Vegetables That You’ll Save the Most Money On By Growing Yourself, okay? The audience is still interested in that topic, alright? So look around for big blogs. If there are no other big blogs on your exact topic, that's okay. But you want blogs to be targeting the same audiences of people and you want what you write to be of interest to that audience.

The best place to look for the popular blogs on any given subject is Alltop.com. That's A-L-L-T-O-P dot com. It’s a site by Guy Kawasaki. It’s a directory of the most popular blogs in the world by topic. The ones up at the top, generally speaking, are more popular than the ones at the bottom, although that's not always true, but generally speaking that's the way it works. So if you want to say, “Okay, what are the most popular blogs about personal finance?” You can type in “personal finance” and it will show you. What are the most popular blogs about marketing? You can type in marketing and it will show you.

And what you can do is you can go through those blogs and you can look to see which ones accept guest posts. So, usually it’ll be pretty obvious. They’ll have “this post is written by” so and so, and a lot of times they will even have a form where you can submit an idea, but if you can’t find just ask them. Most of the big blogs do accept guest posts if they’re really, really good. Even the blogs who say they don’t, if the guest post is good enough, they’ll usually still accept it.

So go through and look through Alltop for those different subjects, and if you get stuck I’ll go ahead and give you the big 5 where there are tons of blogs to guest post for. And this is a shortcut, okay? There are plenty of opportunities outside of this, but I’ll just go ahead and give you the 5 big topics. So if you’re wondering where to start guest posting, you can start with one of these.

Personal finance is one of them. There are over a dozen big blogs that accept guest posts in personal finance. Parenting and mommy blogs are a second one. Huge category. Tons of blogs to guest post for in that category. Social media is the third one, okay? Which would include blogging, Twitter, all of that kind of stuff. There are lots of blogs about social media where you can guest post. Another one would be personal development, which would also include any sort of self-improvement topic. There are dozens of blogs in that category that are big and accept guest posts. And the last one is, so even if there are any I missed, the last one is business and entrepreneurship, okay? Which would also include topics like marketing, careers, things like that.

If you’re looking for places to guest post, so just to repeat them all again, and this is recording, guys, so if you don’t catch this right now you can listen to the recording later. It’s personal finance, social media, parenting and mommy blogs, personal development, and business and entrepreneurship. Those are the best places to start.

If you do want to get the master’s class in guest blogging, I do have a class at GuestBlogging.com that you can sign up for if you like. I don’t want to do a pitch or anything, but I will just say if you are really interested in that you could go sign up for it. It’s a 3-month class exclusively about guest blogging, but I gave you the nuts and bolts of it here.

JT: I’ll do my pitch because it doesn’t cost anything. If you go to my blog, to johnnybtruant.com, if you aren’t already on this list, in the upper right-hand corner you can sign up to get a call that Jon and I did about guest blogging. It’s called How We Make $2000 per Guest Post. And just a little spoiler on that. We aren’t getting paid literally for guest posts. It’s that we went and we backed out income that we made as a result of making guest posts. And that is a fantastic call and there's a few more in that series, I think there are two more, and they’re all guest posting related.

So I would say if you haven’t heard those calls, go and just sign up there in the upper right-hand corner of my blog and get them, and I just have them, I mean I listen to them all the time, and I’m 50% of the call. I listen to them all the time because there's so much great info. So I would strongly suggest that.

Jon: Yeah, I mean, just so you guys know, since we’re on a private call, I’m going to tell you guys, last year I was up over 7000 dollars a post, okay? That's more than anybody at the New York Times makes. And the reason why, the flow is guest post that links to an opt-in page, that opt-in page puts people on an autoresponder sequence, the autoresponder sequence sells my class, that's it. For every guest post, I end up making something like 7000 dollars in sales.

JT: I would add that the guest post that Jon wrote for Copyblogger that he mentioned earlier was probably a 10,000-dollar-plus guest post.

Jon: Yeah. Now, I don’t want to imply that everybody will be able to do that from the beginning, okay?

JT: Absolutely not, by the way. I don’t want anyone to think, “Well, hell, Jon can do it but I can’t.” That's not the point.

Jon: No. Don’t be surprised, if you do a guest post and you make 500 dollars on one, you’re doing pretty well on your first one, okay? I mean, my sales process is really optimized. I’ve tweaked it to where it’s perfected. But in the beginning, you might make far less money. But

just the sequence is, to give you the big picture, guest post, opt-in page, autoresponder sequence. And if you’re wondering what the opt-in page and autoresponder sequences are, we talked about that on the last call.

JT: Or, in our case, we had a webinar in the middle there.

Jon: Yeah, and a webinar’s really just a type of opt-in page when you get down to it. So you want to offer them some sort of an incentive to get on your list, whether it’s free videos, webinar, interview, whatever. So that's the sequence I would recommend, and this is a primary strategy that I recommend people focus on. Now, unless you have anything else to say about guest blogging, I can give one other strategy real quick, Johnny?

JT: I don’t have anything else. No, I don’t have anything else on it.

Jon: Okay. So the one other strategy that I’ll give real quick is a new one that I’ve actually never talked about probably before. I’ve never written a post about it. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it on a webinar. But this works really, really, really, really well for every topic, and that's this. I call it Twitter targeting, okay? And the way that it works is, when you sit down and write a post, ask yourself, who do you want to tweet it for you? Because Twitter, by the way, is the most common way that people link out to posts these days.

You can also do this on Facebook. It would work just as well for Facebook, but Twitter is the main way that people share links these days, especially popular bloggers. But this'll work for Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever. But the idea is, figure out who you want to tweet your post or share it on Facebook, and then write a post that would be irresistible to that person that's also on-topic for your blog. So write a post for your own blog that's irresistible.

So like when I was a beginner, I was writing about how to increase your income at my blog on moneymaking. That was before Copyblogger, before I kind of got to be sort of an Internet celebrity. This is back when I was just a beginner. I had a blog about how to increase your income, and I wanted to get a link from Lifehacker, which is a really, really, really big blog. And what I sat down and thought was, “Okay, what could I write that would be about increasing your income but would also be about productivity?” which is what Lifehacker is about. Lifehacker’s big topic is productivity.

So I said, “Okay, so what can I write that's about increasing your income and about productivity?” It was Christmastime, and I wrote a post that was something like, “12 Reasons Why I’m Working on Christmas, and I Think You Should Too,” and it was about how Christmas can actually be a really good time to get things done and it’s a really good time to get ahead of other people too. Now, obviously it was controversial. Some people got mad, said “it’s time for

your family, you’re a workaholic.” But I gave several good reasons why working on Christmas can be a good idea, and I pitched it to an editor at Lifehacker and they linked to it on Christmas Day, okay? Sent me something like 10,000 visitors.

Because I had them in mind when I wrote the post. If you wanted to target Copyblogger, at Copyblogger everybody is copywriting geeks, okay? So if you wrote some sort of a post about copywriting that overlaps copywriting and your subject on your blog, and then you asked Brian for a tweet, pretty good chance he's going to do it.

So whatever the authority is, we could actually—probably a better name for this is traffic targeting, because it can work with getting links from blogs, Twitter or wherever. But you need to have a target when you’re writing content on your own blog of who you want to link to you. So figure out that out in advance. What most bloggers do is they write a post, and then they go figure out, “Okay, who can I get to link to this?” That's backwards. That's why a lot of bloggers struggle.

What you need to be figuring out is who you want to link to you, and then writing stuff that will be irresistible to them. And then once you’ve written it, send them a tweet or an email, and all you have to say is, “Hey, I wrote this post that I think your audience would really love. It’s about…” and then give the headline, you know, 12 Ways to Do This or How to Do This or whatever. And then say, “If you think they would enjoy it, would you mind giving me a tweet?” or “Would you mind sharing it on Facebook?” or whatever.

And that's it. Don’t be pushy. Just explain, “I think your audience will really like this.” If you want, maybe explain how it would help their audience just in 1 or 2 sentences and send them the post. It won’t work every time but it will work probably, if you do it right, 25% to 50% of the time, you’ll get that link.

JT: None of these strategies that Jon and I are advocating here or would ever advocate, you’ll notice, none of them involve writing really good stuff, sticking it on your blog, and then crossing your fingers.

Jon: No.

JT: And that is what most people do. So when most people say, “I can’t stand out,” this is why: Because what they’re doing is they’re writing for their blog, and then they’re standing in their little quiet corner of the Internet where nobody knows where they are and waving a flag and saying, “Hey, look at me,” or they’re tweeting or they’re facebooking to the audience that they already have, which is small because they’re starting, unless you already have a successful blog in some other niche and have a platform.

So, if you just sort of boil this down, guest blogging, this Twitter or traffic targeting, whatever, they all involve getting the help of other people. That's a key issue, is you can’t do this alone. I mean I suppose you can, but it’s really, really, really hard.

I got up on Naomi Dunford’s stage, ittybiz.com, first. She was where I started guest posting first, and that was regular. I posted every week. I had a series. And from there I started talking to ProBlogger and to Copyblogger, and that's how I met Jon and all this, from the connections that I built through other people. And if you don’t remember that this is about building a network and getting to the audience that somebody else already has, then you’re going to struggle. So just keep that big picture idea in mind. You need to go and get in front of somebody else’s audience in some way.

Jon: Yeah, I’m really glad you said that, so so glad, because that is the big point here, guys. Subscribers don’t come from nowhere. They don’t appear out of the ether and just show up on your blog. Someone sends them to you, okay? So the question is, number one, who is going to send you those people? And number two, how? How are you going to get them to link to you? And really, we just gave you two strategies that work really well for every topic, and believe it or not, there aren’t any other strategies I would recommend.

I wouldn’t recommend SEO. Would not recommend it for a beginning blogger. In 90% of the cases, I think focusing on SEO in the beginning and optimizing your keywords is a huge waste of time for most bloggers. I would not recommend anything like article marketing, where you’re writing anything for Ezine…

JT: EzineArticles.com…

Jon: EzineArticles.com.

JT: There are a few others but yeah, article marketing.

Jon: Article [01:03:45] Finder or Link [01:03:46] Finder or whatever…

JT: GoArticles, yeah.

Jon: Yeah. That was really big for a while. I’ll just go ahead and tell you guys, not a good idea anymore.

JT: It didn’t work for me. I tried it.

Jon: Yeah, I tried it too. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work that well. And what are some of the other ones? Buy Links, horrible idea. Google is very, very—not only will it probably not work, but it can actually hurt you. It’s a good idea to start thinking about SEO once your site is bigger

and successful. So as you get past the 1000-subscriber mark, that's maybe when you start thinking about SEO a little bit, if ever. I still wouldn’t recommend being hyper-focused on it, but it can pay to learn the basics of it once you get to that point.

But if you start buying links, you can actually get banned from Google. If your site is getting no links and then next week it gets a thousand links, Google says, “Okay, that looks suspicious. You must be a spammer. I’m going to ban you from Google.” You can get banned, and once you get banned you never get back in. There's no appeal process. It’s over for that website forever. So, don’t buy links. It’s not worth the risk. And anyone who’s telling you to buy links, I would say they’re probably not showing you how to build a long-term business, okay? So don’t do that. Please don’t do that.

Oh, another thing that we should probably mention, headlines on posts – hugely important. They’ve actually studied this. A headline has more of an impact on how much traffic your post receives than anything else, so the title of the post. Pick The Brain actually did a study where they took a post, they submitted it to Reddit. It only got like a hundred visitors from Reddit. Reddit is a big social network. They changed the headline of the post, submitted the same post again to Reddit with a different headline. It got 5000 visitors. The only thing that was different was the headline. It went from 100 visitors with one headline to 5000 with the other, okay?

JT: The post that I mentioned earlier, I mentioned just an anecdote earlier when we were talking about making sure that you were thinking your reader, the post that I was talking about, it’s in my sidebar, but the original title was Edgework, and it was because it was based on this sociological concept called Edgework where people seek out various edges of endurance or pain or discomfort or being an outsider or whatever in order to experience the fullness of life, basically. It’s sort of a human potential concept. And I really liked it, so I called the post Edgework, and it didn’t really go anywhere. I tweeted it and I shared it on Facebook and I did the things I normally do and it kind of didn’t go anywhere. People weren’t sharing it.

And that was the post where I talked to somebody and she said, “Well, your other post was the universe not caring about you,” and so I said, “Well, let me try something,” and I changed the title. Now, here’s the new title. By the way, the things that I do are not things that everybody should do. These are things that work for me because of my audience, so don’t think you need these crazy inflammatory titles. But the title I changed it to was, You Are Dying and Your World is a Lie. Now, it still fits post but it’s much harsher. It’s much more like a slap in the face. And as soon as I did that, it really took off. It has almost a thousand Facebook shares and 400 tweets and over a hundred comments because I changed the headline. Same post.

Jon: Yeah, same post. So guys, headlines – huge. Now, we could spend 20 hours just talking about how to write a great headline. The best shortcut I can offer you is a free report that I

wrote. It’s called Headline Hacks, where it gives you templates for good headlines. It’s totally free. Go to headlinehacks.com. Headline Hacks is H-A-C-K-S. headlinehacks.com. You could download that, maybe we can also link to it in the members area, but that's a 52-page report that will help you write better headlines.

So the big things to focus on, just to kind of wrap up here, subscribers – huge. Hugely important. Having the right topic, relationships with people who can send you the right traffic…go ahead.

JT: No, go ahead.

Jon: I consider my subscriber base to be my number one asset, but I consider my relationships with other authorities to be a very close second asset, and for a while it probably would have actually been first. So your relationships with other authorities in your niche, those are the people that can promote your products and services. They’ll link to your stuff. They’ll tweet your post for you. Those relationships, you need to be investing a lot of time and energy into building relationships with those people because it’ll pay off for years. Years and years and years.

JT: Yeah. I like the big picture stuff. Just to connect the dots so far to Session 3, basically, here’s what your business looks like just at the biggest mile-high level. You create a blog in an area that you know to be popular that passes the 7-criteria test that we did in Session 1. You are either creating great content for that blog that is of interest to other people with large audiences and trying to get them to link to it or you are submitting guests posts that are sort of related to your topic and that other blog’s topic and getting subscribers that way. You are driving those people to subscribe to your blog, not just to read it, to join your email list. And from there, you have either an autoresponder series or a webinar—the webinars are a little more advanced, that's probably not a beginner strategy—or you’re ongoing, you’re sending them emails, and then eventually a pitch for a product. So that what it looks like from way above at this point.

Jon: Yup, that's the strategy. I mean, obviously writing great content is important. We talked about teaching to do things. We also talked about the importance of headlines. But really, it’s about subscribers, relationships, relationships with other authorities, and then also your relationship with your list. And then once you get them on your list, sell them things that will help them. If you do that, you’ve pretty much got it covered.

JT: Ready for Q and A?

Jon: I’m ready. Let's do it.

JT: Alright. So, everybody, just so you know in case you’re new to the Q and A, we never get to everybody if we did live vocal Q and A because we get into discussions on [01:12:26] all kinds of topics. So what we’ve been doing for the past few is if you’re on the Instant Teleseminar link, just type them in. And this seems to work pretty well, so there's no need to—unless you have something that's so complex and we need to get to you.

Alright, so let's start with Donna, who says, “How narrow in scope should your post be as a guest blogger? Can you give an example?”

Jon: What you want to do when you’re writing your guest post is actually look at the popular posts that have already been run on that blog and try to write something on the same topic but on a different aspect of that topic, okay? So a lot of big popular blogs, they have a selection of topics that are always popular. If you look in the popular posts section, you can usually kind of see what those are and see what the patterns are. So just search around their blog, find an aspect of that topic that they haven’t talked about and write a post about it. And you can get pretty granular with this. You can get very specific. You just need to make sure that it is something that people are interested in.

JT: One of the examples that Jon gave on one of those calls that I mentioned, you can get if you sign in the box in the upper right-hand corner of my site to get that series, is Jon gave the example of if you’re an accountant, what a lot of people who have an accounting blog would do is they would try to submit to other accounting blogs. Well, the problem with that is that you’re largely then talking to other accountants, and if your goal is to get customers, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. So even though that's topically related, it’s out of whack businesswise.

So what Jon suggested in that discussion was, in this example it was writing a post that would air on a big sort of general business blog like ProBlogger, in this case about bloggers, on tax tips for bloggers around tax time, because everybody needs tax help, not just like accountants like to talk about tax. That's something that applies to everybody. So you find a large audience and write about your topic as it applies to them and you can drive traffic that way.

Jon: Yeah, and just so you guys know, what I’ve recommended you is what I do. It’s what Johnny does. These are our traffic strategies. Even though we’re fairly successful, we continue using those. I mean, right now I’m getting 500 to 1000 new subscribers per week, okay? Five hundred to 1000 subscribers a week, which is really, really amazingly fast growth. I’m doing a few advanced strategies, but I would say over half of those people are coming from the strategies I just told you about, so it really works.

JT: A couple of people have asked what the title of the blog post we mentioned about Jon’s mother. It’s on called On Dying, Mothers and Fighting For Your Ideas, and it’s on Copyblogger.

So if you search for On Dying, Mothers and Fighting For Your Ideas—that's On Dying, comma, Mothers. It’s not like On Dying Mothers—you’ll find it.

Jon: Joseph asked, “How about The Huffington Post as a site to guest blog?” For a long time I didn’t actually have a really good answer to this, but I’ve had a few students that have written for them and here’s what I’ll tell you. If you’re writing for a popular category on The Huffington Post and you write a really good article that gets featured, like on the homepage, then The Huffington Post is fantastic. I had a student that just got 300 to 500 subscribers off of The Huffington Post guest post. I’ll also say, though, that it’s about taking advantage of that stage, okay? So Huffington Post is a really big stage but if your post isn’t that good, if it doesn’t get featured, if it just gets buried, they publish this on the content, so if it gets ignored then you might not get 5 subscribers out of it. But it’s a big opportunity. You just have to make sure that if you get on The Huffington Post that you kill it with your post.

JT: Yeah, The Huffington Post is a huge blog. It’s a huge blog in terms of traffic and it’s a huge blog in terms of just being huge, like go and look at The Huffington Post if you haven’t been there. There's so much stuff. And I’ll give credit to this to Lee Stranahan, a friend of mine, and he also co-created my course Question the Rules with me, Lee built a lot of his traffic by being a writer for The Huffington Post. This was his primary thing, and he built quite a large following. And he gave the exact tip that Jon just gave, is—well, actually it’s a variant on that, but it involved making sure you’re featured. And his suggestion was—hopefully this isn’t proprietary, Lee’s just like verbal diarrhea, so I doubt it. He’d just spout this out.

So he said it’s a good idea to take something that's topical in the news because it’s a news site first and foremost, and then see how you can write something that's related to news. So, for instance, if a bunch of Bank of America employees have just been laid off and that's in the news, then if you’re like personal development, you could write a post that's an open letter to a laid-off Bank of America employee, Now Is Your Chance to Do Your Own Thing. So it ends being about your topic but the hook is that topical news thing.

Jon: Yeah, that's a good piece of advice for that blog. Yeah.

JT: Alright, what else have we got? Somebody said, I’m trying to find it now, well, some variant on how do you pick a blog, but specifically, how big should a blog be to bother from guest posting?

Jon: What I would recommend if you really want to get good results, try to get one with at least 5000 subscribers, preferably 10,000 or more. And if they don’t say how many subscribers they have, then look at the number of comments they’re getting because that will tell you how

engaged the audience is as well. So you want them to be getting at least 20 or 30 comments for every post that they publish.

JT: I would add that it probably makes sense to look at the activity on guest posts. So I don’t accept guest posts, and the reason that I don’t is because guest posts do terribly on my site. I don’t know why exactly. It probably has something to do with my voice, and guest posts aren’t in my voice, and I think people are there a lot for my voice and my take on things. I have like 3 or 4 guest posts that people wrote years ago, and it’s like crickets. So I would just add that just as a little aside as well.

Somebody asked, “Are the blogs on the Alltop homepage the top blogs?”

Jon: Usually. It’s human-reviewed, so somebody decides where to put those up there. Sometimes they get it wrong, but in general, yes, the ones at the top are more popular than the ones lower down.

JT: Samuel asks about guest blogging, “So in a guest post we need an opt-in page leading to an autoresponder series that sell my product, so having a product ready to sell before guest posting?” Maybe your answer is different, Jon, but I don’t think that's necessary. What’s more important is to get them engaged and get them liking you and your topic. You can sell at any point.

Jon: Yeah, you can. If you get them on your list, you can start up the autoresponder sequence whenever. So you don’t even need the autoresponder sequence then when you write the guest post. That's not essential either. And if you’re searching for something to sell, just sell a coaching session or something. Or if there’s an affiliate product that you really want to recommend, like if Johnny wanted to he could write a guest on Copyblogger and he could link to my Guestblogging site, and then get paid a commission on everybody that comes from Copyblogger to my site.

JT: What do you think is proper decorum on that? Because I would not do that, and I don’t know whether this is correct thinking or not, but the reason I wouldn’t is because if Copyblogger is going to promote something that is an affiliate product that is going to make money, it feels they should be using their affiliate link, and if I’m promoting my own thing directly I think would definitely offer them an affiliate link. So what do you think about that?

Jon: Yeah, if you’re a beginner you definitely should offer them an affiliate link, unless it’s in your byline. Generally speaking, if it’s in your byline of your post, usually a blogger is going to give you one link that's yours in your byline, and that's kind of sacred. So you can link without having an affiliate link. Yeah, within the body of the post you should offer them an affiliate link,

and actually the smarter thing to do in a case like that would be to, I mean Johnny, have them email them or send them to subscribe to his list, which gives them the call How We Make $2000 per Guest Post, which then links to my list with the affiliate link.

JT: By the way, I’ve done that exact thing. I’m trying to remember what the post was, but I wrote a post for Copyblogger which prominently mentioned—it was about writing technique. I think it was about your writing having a point, like why are you writing, knowing your purpose. I don’t remember the title of the post. And I linked to it after actually giving Jon’s quote about how when he writes he imagines hitting the reader with a baseball bat, [laughs] which was compelling. So then they join my list and they get that call, and then that autoresponder list does pitch Jon’s guest blogging program.

Jon: Yeah, so you can absolutely do that. The big thing though is to get them on your list, and you can figure out what to sell them later if you want, but absolutely link to an opt-in page from the guest post.

JT: Jim asks, “Can you submit the same guest post to my multiple blogs?” I don’t know that I know the answer to that. I wouldn’t do it. I would let each subsequent blogger decline before I send it somewhere else.

Jon: Yeah. No, the general rule of thumb is only one at a time. And just so you know, usually the posts that you write for a particular blog are going to need to be customized anyway, to a particular audience, okay? So if your post is so general that it could be run on 5 different blogs, your post probably isn’t good, because to really speak to an audience you have to speak directly to that audience. So you should be able to just forward it onto 5 different blogs. If you’re capable of doing that, then you need to go back and look at your post.

Now, if a blog does turn you down, then what you can do is pitch the idea to another blog, and if they like it then go back and modify the post for their audience. And this is one thing that I didn’t mention earlier that I should mentioned, one thing that I really recommend when you’re pitching guest posts, don’t write the post and then send it to them. You can do that. There's nothing wrong with that, but this will just save you a ton of time. Send them like a synopsis of the idea, so like a headline, a paragraph about what it’s about, maybe a few bullet points on what you’re going to cover, and ask them if they like that. That way you’re getting yes or no before you write an entire blog post.

JT: The other reason to do that is that the bigger the traffic on the blog that you’re pitching—these things go together—probably the busier that blogger is and the more email they get. And the length of time it takes for you to get a reply and the likelihood of you getting a reply, very directly with the length of the thing that you send them. So if you send them a very short email,

you’re likely to get a quicker response and more likely to get a response. If you send them something long, it takes longer and longer. I know that when I get something that's more than like two paragraphs, those tend to languish in my inbox because I can’t just click them off real quick. So keep that in mind, too. You need to get somebody’s—especially somebody that you don’t know, somebody that you haven’t talked to before. You want to respect their time and just get them as quick as possible.

Jon: Yeah, what I actually recommend in my guest blogging class, I give a sequence of emails that are actually like 1 to 2 sentences apiece [laughs] where the first one is, “Hey, would you mind if I submitted a guest post?” If they say yes, then, “Okay, what do you think about this idea?” If they say they liked it, then, “What do you think about this headline?” Now, that could actually get annoying if there's all of that going back and forth, but believe it or not, working it up like that actually increases your chances dramatically of getting response to each of those emails.

JT: Sorry, I muted myself. I had to sneeze. Okay, so Amelia asks, “Is this is a correct statement? The real moneymaking opportunities behind blogging is to create awareness about a service or product you have for sale.” Yeah, I think that's true for what Jon and I are talking about. There are people who do niche websites and more passive forms of income and add revenue, including people that I really like and respect. Like Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income makes a bunch of money doing stuff like that, but for the way that Jon and I teach it, you need to have something for sale whether it’s your thing or something that you’re referring.

I think that a ton of people get into the idea that they’re going to make money blogging, and they take that very literally and they say, “I’m going to somehow make money through my blogging. I’m going to attract traffic and they’re going to click on ads,” and it just doesn’t happen. If you have something for sale or something to refer, then the business model makes a lot more sense. I mean, it should make sense to you, right? You have an audience, you have an offer, they buy it from you. All of this should make logical business sense and shouldn’t sound like wizardry.

Jon: Yeah, and just so you guys know, I mean I don’t think we’ve covered this before, for about 80% to 90% of topics, you will not be able to make a full-time income from advertising. It’s just impossible. Even the most popular blogs in the topic don’t make enough to make a full-time income off of advertising, from selling ads. And even the ones where you can, even the ones where you can make a good income off of it, if you take an ad from like Google AdSense and replace it with an affiliate link to a product that your audience will really like, or maybe a review that you did of a product with an affiliate link, that’ll make more money than the ad did, in almost every case.

JT: The other thing too—this happens in affiliate stuff too, so this is a little bit off-topic—is that a lot of times people ask me for, because I have a few things that are affiliatable, like you can sell them as an affiliate, and they’ll ask me for like a sidebar graphic or something like that. Those are little 125 x 125 cube graphics that people stick in their sidebar. I tell them that I don’t have any, and the reason is because passive affiliates and passive ads, people who run ads that are just sort of stuck in the sidebar and they aren’t actively sending people to them or pointing to them or anything, they do nothing. In my experience, if somebody just puts an affiliate banner in the sidebar for anything, the conversion is so low.

I don’t know if your experience is different, Jon, but the affiliates who make money run posts that promote it. They send emails to their list. They do reviews. They do something that's active that adds something to it and some sense of recommendation rather than just, “Hey, here’s a thing.”

Jon: Yeah, the difference in response is huge, absolutely enormous. I bought an ad on a fairly popular blog that gets I think about a million page views a month. I bought a banner ad for one of my products just to see what would happen, and I think I was getting 50 to 75 people a day who were clicking on that banner. On the other hand, a post on that blog sent like over a thousand. So the banner ads, they can send a little bit.

Now, this is a blog with a million page views a month, okay? It’s sending like 50 to 75 a day, alright? So if your blog is only getting 10,000 page views a month, then you’re looking at 1or 2 people a day. It’s almost nothing. So yeah, the blog posts work a whole lot better, or emailing the list.

JT: Stacey asks, and it’s actually Stacey for Mr. O’Brien—I’m a little curious as to that setup. That's interesting. Anyway, the question is, “In your Friday class you mentioned using webinars with email lists, and then it was also mentioned that you could do almost the same thing with the videos and autoresponders. What is a good overall length for a class? Would 3 days of 10-minute videos equaling 30 minutes total be enough or do you suggest more?” I actually think we may be talking across purposes here. So, for instance, Jon’s lead-up series for Guestblogging.com is an email autoresponder series that features what, 3 videos, Jon?

Jon: I think it’s 5 or 6.

JT: Okay.

Jon: Yeah.

JT: And they’re like 10 minutes each. I mean, they’re decent-length videos.

Jon: Yeah.

JT: But those are sales tools, and the same would be true for email autoresponders, and a webinar is a sales tool, too. So this isn’t really like a class. This is your sales tools. So if the question is, what is a good length of a promotional series? Then I would say that three 10-minute videos is probably good, but I don’t think there's a hard and fast. I think it’s how effectively you deliver the information. There are so many more variables in there than simply the length.

Jon: Yeah, and just so you guys know, in general, the longer your autoresponder sequence is the more effective they will be, just because most people—there's an old rule in advertising, it’s the Rule of Seven, that it takes people 7 contacts with you to be ready to buy anything. In my experience, that's about true. So I would recommend having at least 7 steps to your autoresponder sequence if possible. Now, if all you can do is three to begin and then you’re going to add later, that's totally fine. But yeah.

And just so you guys know, when I said that the traffic strategies that I gave you were responsible for about over half of my subscribers, the other half or so comes from webinars. The only reason why I didn’t get into that is that is such an advanced strategy. There's no possible way we could do that justice. But I will say that if you want to learn more about webinars, it can be a really smart thing to do. They’re fantastic for building your mailing list and if you’re selling things. But it’s so advanced. It’s probably a little outside the scope of the class here that we’re doing.

JT: We can almost do a separate class on that.

Jon: Yeah.

JT: If you’re interested in a separate class, let us know. Maybe we’ll do one. Yeah, so Liz asks, this is to you, “Hi Jon. Earlier in the call you said something that really caught my attention. One, write about a broad topic. Two, on your email list, narrow down to a smaller topic. Three, sell a specific product or service. Could you please go over this and maybe expand on this idea a bit?” And then she adds, P.S., she signed up for this course on an email from me, so I’ll just mention that because that's cool.

Jon: Yeah, you’re a stud.

JT: I certainly am.

JT: Yeah, and you don’t have to do it this way but this is the way that usually ends up working. So I gave the example of Copyblogger before. I could use Boost Blog Traffic, my new

blog, as an example. The blog is about getting more blog traffic. To get people to opt in to my list I give them a document, it’s a cheat sheet for writing viral blog posts. Headline Hacks is what it ends up being. So we go from traffic to, more specifically, viral traffic, okay? Then from there, down the road, I sell guest blogging, which is a specific relationship-building strategy, [01:36:21] specific traffic strategy. So in each step it’s getting a little bit more specific.

That's often the way it goes. It doesn’t have to go that way, but don’t feel like you have to stay super-broad with your products and your email lists. You can go in narrower. In fact, that's often the smart thing to do, is to go narrower. So start with broad on your blog, and then by the time you get down to the products you’ll be talking about a fairly narrow topic.

JT: Craig asks, “If we link to an opt-in page from a guest blog, should we have a home link on the opt-in page or keep it clean and focused on getting signups only?” The latter. Keep it clean and focused. On an opt-in page, on any landing page, you have one goal, and your options are sign up or leave. And that's why we recommend Premise, because it creates those distraction-free, simple, sort of optimized for one goal landing pages for you. It even removes your header graphic and your navigation and your sidebar stuff and all the things that would normally be there if you just created a page, for sure.

Jon: Yeah, you want there to be as little on the page as possible. I was actually talking with Frank Kern the other day. I was on a conference call with him, he's a big Internet marketer, and somebody asked him, “What email have you sent that got the most clickthroughs?” and he said he sent an email out to his list that was a title of the email, and then just a link pasted in the body of the email, and he sent it to them. And that's all it was. I think the title of the email was like Click This and the body was a link, and that was it. There was nothing else in the email.

And he was talking about a lot of times the best converting opt-in page is a title like Yours Free: A Viral Cheat Sheet for Getting More Blog Traffic, and then an email form, and that's it. Just a title and an email form. That's all that's on the page. So the simpler you make it, usually the better it’ll do.

JT: Are any of these questions grabbing you? I’ve been reading them all.

Jon: There was one up here from Tim.

JT: I’m going to let you answer this one and just run off for a minute, and I’ll be right back.

Jon: Okay. So Tim says, “I signed up for AWeber but I didn’t use the affiliate link.” You’re going straight to hell, Tim, for not using our affiliate link.

JT: I haven’t left yet, so I’m going to laugh at that. Thank you for thinking of it, though.

Jon: No, it’s fine, man. I mean, I don’t think we’re really concerned with that. But yeah, so, “AWeber indicated that if I gave them your affiliate number that you would get credit, which you should receive. If you tell me that affiliate number I will contact AWeber to clear up the confusion. Thanks.” That's so nice of you, Tim. Yeah, I’ll try to make sure that either Johnny or I send that over to you, but yeah. I mean, if we don’t get the affiliate commissions, like we say, we don’t care. We just want you to get great products. But if you do click them, that's great, too. So yeah, Tim, we’ll try to get you that. But it’s no big deal if we don’t end up getting that commission. That's fine.

So, let's see. Krista says, “Can you expand on what you mean by your audience being reachable?” So yeah, Krista, the big thing is—that was kind of what I was talking about when I was talking about how there need to be a lot of other big blogs on your topic who are serving your audience already, and the reason why is if there are no other big blogs serving that audience already, then who’s going to link to you? So you want to find the other places that your audience is already congregated. Optimally, it’s another blog. If it’s not another blog, maybe it’s a Facebook group that has 100,000 members or maybe it’s a LinkedIn group that has a lot of members or maybe it’s a newsletter for a particular guru or maybe it’s a magazine that you can write for or a trade association. But those are all places that are all interested in the same stuff, kind of congregate and go together.

And so, to get them on your email list, you just have to go to those audiences, to the places where they’ve already congregated, and you get them to come over to what you’re doing. So you either write an article for that audience or you speak in front of that audience or whatever, or worst case, you advertise to that audience. You pay for advertising. But in all of those cases, the audience is already congregated and all you’re doing is getting those people to come to you.

What’s bad, what we mean by unreachable audiences, is when they’re not congregated already, okay? So let's see, what would an example be of an audience that would be really, really hard to reach?

JT: I’m back. If somebody were to say, “I’m going to teach social media to older people who are technophobic.”

Jon: Yeah, that’d be a really bad idea. Those people aren’t on the Internet. They don’t have a newsletter. I’ll give another example that's a real [01:42:55] one. A friend of mine was starting a blog where he wanted to talk about finance for companies with 5 million dollars plus per year of revenue, okay? I told him, “Dude, you’re screwed. It’s never going to work.” And the reason why is those people have not congregated anywhere already. There aren’t any other blogs specifically for that audience, and also there aren’t a lot of those people.

What he would have to do if he wanted to get CFOs—he wanted to write for CFOs of companies with 5 million dollars plus in revenue. The only way to get those people, he could probably buy a list of those from a list broker, and then send them a letter in the mail or call them on the telephone. That would be the only way to get to those people. But there's not like a magazine, maybe like their CFO magazine, that he could write for. But there aren’t a lot of places those people have already congregated, so getting those people to come over to his blog would have been really, really, really difficult.

JT: Rodney asks, “How do you pitch for an outfit like The Huffington Post? The recommended strategy doesn’t seem to work.” Rodney, I had a personal in with The Huffington Post. I was given an actual email address of a person to contact, and they still never responded. So I don’t have an answer to that. That is kind of a pain in the ass. But there are other questions in here, basically a little more general, “How do you get a guest post on a popular blog?” Do you want to go into that a little bit, Jon, since that's your area of expertise?

Jon: Yeah, to talk a little bit about The Huffington Post, my students who have done it—every category on The Huffington Post has like an editor, so you have to look around and find out who the editor is for your category. It shows their email addresses or in some cases it has a form where you can contact them. So that's how you do it, is you contact those people. And The Huffington Post does prefer if you don’t break it into multiple emails, but I would still do no more than 2 or 3 paragraphs when you pitch. Make it really short.

And by the way, guys, if you don’t hear back from a blog after you send them a post, that's normal. It doesn’t mean that they hate you. It doesn’t mean that they’re intentionally ignoring you. It just means that they have a thousand other emails and maybe your post just kind of—they forgot about it. So if you do not hear from a blog after submitting your post, wait one week and then send them a followup. And don’t be angry, don’t be upset. Don’t ask them, “Why are you ignoring me? What did I do?” Just say, “Hey, just wanted to send you a friendly followup. Have you had a chance to look at my post yet?” That's it. Don’t say anything else. Send it off.

If you don’t hear anything back, wait another 7 days, send them another email. I personally tell my students to follow up 5 times before they give up. Usually you’ll get a response by the second or the third time, but don’t be upset if you don’t get a response back.

JT: Joe asks—and this isn’t really a question but it implies a question that we didn’t mention a lot but it’s worth delving in. He says, “Although interesting…” This is speaking to you because you’re of course such a bragger asshole.

Jon: [Laughs]

JT: He's not implying that, but it is true. “Jon, although interesting citing your guest blogging examples and successes, it’s like an Olympic miler touting his sub-4-minute times as if they’re achievable by other runners.”

Jon: Go to GuestBlogging.com/reviews. GuestBlogging.com/reviews. Those are reviews that my students have left on my course unsolicited. I’ve not edited them. I’ve not touched them. They’re just comments that they’ve written. You can see like 40 different students on there who have all had huge success with guest posting, so I’m not the only one…

JT: It’s the size of the blog that you’re posting for that's more important than your own personal chops.

Jon: Yeah, it is. And you know, you have to be posting for those big blogs. You to have be building relationship with them. I recommend becoming a regular contributor so that they kind of owe you, so that when you ask for something they’re more than happy to help you out. But yeah, if you do those things—and like I said earlier, I’ve had over 500 people go through my class. All of those people were starting from nothing. Hundreds of them have done it, so it works for everybody.

I am at the top of the guest blogging food chain. A lot of people won’t be able to duplicate my success. Some of you may not get 300 subscribers a guest post, although you may. Plenty of students have done it. You may not make 7000 dollars a guest post, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad strategy. If you look around, every popular blogger has written guest posts, and if you ask them, “What’s the number strategy?” all of them will tell you guest blogging. So that means that if that works for every popular blogger that there is or almost everyone, then that should show you that's something that you should be doing.

JT: Rachel asks, “Driving people to subscribe, would you talk more about the various ways to do this?” Yes. Mechanically, there are I would say 3 main ways. These are just off the top of my head but this is all I can think of. I think it would cover it. One is, if you send them to an opt-in page as we mentioned, something like Premise, is probably the best way to create that page. So it’s a distraction-free opt-in page where you describe what it is that you’re offering, be it a bribe of some sort, like a free report or a recording or something, and give them a form to do it. Second would be a static form in the upper right-hand corner of your site like I have in mine, where basically it’s the same thing but the form is just always there at the upper right-hand, the top of the right sidebar.

And the third way would be via something like the popup that I have in my site. If you haven’t seen it or you forget, most browsers have an incognito mode, one where it doesn’t store cookies. So in Chrome I think it’s called Incognito. In Mac Safari it’s called Private Browsing. You can

go and you’ll see it. Go to johnnybtruant.com and it’ll pop up. That's from PopUp Domination, which I believe is popupdomination.com, and that gets them right in the face basically wherever they come into your blog to sign up.

And as far as what you could offer, you could offer them an autoresponder series, which would either be further information on a topic—so I keep using dog grooming as my example. Actually, somebody sent me an email because I mention dog grooming a lot, so dog email. And you could mention like 10 Steps to Keep Your Irish Setter Cleanest or whatever, whatever that would be in your autoresponder series. You could offer some sort of a recording or a video, which is the enticement that I have, is the call that I did with Jon. What else, Jon?

Jon: Yeah, it could be a video, free report. It could be interview. If you want, you could even send them something in the mail. Depending on your business, that could actually be a good idea. If you want to send them a product sample, a coupon. Just whatever your audience really would find irresistible, that's what you need to be offering.

JT: Joe asks about the value of lists and why not do like Tim Ferriss, no autoresponders, just use his FeedBurner. When he wants to pitch something or draw attention to a series of former posts, he just blogs about it and FeedBurner sends it off to his FeedBurner subscribers. I understand the thinking; however, there are a few reasons that I personally wouldn’t do it. So do I think I know better than Tim Ferriss? Well, I don’t know. I think that if he were to do this, he would probably get even more punch out of it. With FeedBurner, you don’t have any control over those subscribers. You can’t segment them. I don’t think you can search through them or anything like that.

It’s a list that's controlled by Google, who owns FeedBurner, and the only way to reach them is to write a blog post, which in my opinion the number two reason, is if I want to send a specific—okay, so here’s a good example. If you’re pitching something, if you’ve been on my list for a while and you’ve seen when I have something for sale, I usually send 3 emails, and I’ll usually send one maybe 5 days before and one maybe 3 days before the deadline or whatever, and then send one on maybe the day before the offer ends. Or if there are various price hikes or if there's a webinar, there's a recording, I want to be able to get those people several times, and if your only avenue to reach them is FeedBurner and you haven’t built an email list, then you would have to be literally writing a blog post about that each time, and I want more control than that.

Jon: Yeah, and it’s a bad idea too, because your entire blog audience isn’t going to be interested in that particular promotion. So the best thing to do, like what we did for these webinars, is we split those people out onto a separate list and then we promoted a lot to that list, a lot more than we did our individual lists, and we did segment things. So you can do things like

only send this email to people who didn’t open the previous email, so that way you’re not burning people out.

I would guess if you ask Tim, “Do you regret using FeedBurner for your list?” he would probably tell you yes at this point in his career. I would guess that he regrets that. I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that it’s probably costing him millions, millions to have done it that way.

JT: Krista asks, “Why do you launch a new domain for each venture instead of using one homebase, i.e. Boost Blog Traffic versus GuestBlogging?” In my experience, that's to give each course a home if it’s necessary. So we needed a home, we needed a place to house the content, so we created a site for it.

Jon: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be. I mean, if you want to do it on your site in a subdirectory, that's fine too. It’s just it makes it a little bit easier to talk about it, “I have a class on guest blogging. Go to GuestBlogging.com,” rather than saying, “Go to boostblogtraffic.com/gbclass which is spelled G-B-C-L-A-S-S.” I mean, that's more confusing to people. So it’s easier if it has the same domain name.

JT: A couple of people asked about the Facebook page. You can just go to Facebook and search for—by the way, just so we’re clear, that isn’t run by Jon or I. I forget, I’m sorry, who set it up. She just did it because it was a cool thing to do. So I don’t know the official on this, but I believe that you can go and search, although I remember somebody not being able to find it and they needed to add the “the”.

And then the second part in this question was, “When did you change your business structure, i.e. to an LLC? Not a date, but what was the trigger?” For me, it was just that I started to realize that I was growing, as qualitative and non-quantitative as that answer is, and I started to think of how many people were paying attention to my words, and was I worried that somebody might, I don’t know, get pissed off at me and try to sue me about something like that? It just ended up making sense. But I operate it as a sole proprietor where it was literally just me under a business name and I filed everything on my personal tax returns. I did that for a long time.

And the other thing, the other reason that I changed it is because at a certain income amount it’s advantageous tax-wise to move to—I’m actually an S corporation, as in LLC, somehow those are the same, and it allows you to reduce the amount of self-employment tax because you don’t have to pay yourself everything that the business takes in. That's a little techy. So that was it for me.

Jon: Yeah, there are some advantages down the road. I just started my own LLC earlier this year, and I haven’t even switched my assets over to it. That's actually something I was working

on yesterday. But yeah, it’s a good idea once you get to a certain level of income. There are a few tax benefits down the road, and also, the liability coverage is nice.

But in the beginning, if you’re just a sole proprietor—and by the way, you don’t have to file anything to be a sole proprietor. You just do business and you’re a sole proprietor. So if you’re concerned about that, you can absolutely start that way and then transition to an LLC or something later. It’s not a big problem.

JT: And it’s not like I’m so on top of things. My wife is in accounting, so she knew what to do when she files my payroll taxes. There’s a bunch of compliance crap you have to do and she just does it for me, so it’s awesome.

Jon: Yeah, so don’t worry about that in the beginning, or don’t let it stop you from starting your business for sure.

JT: Yeah, exactly. Just start. Bill asks—and I think he has two in here, so let me see if I can find them both. Bill says, “I’d like input on picking a blog topic. I have a hard-to-reach niche, harness horse bettors. Would it be good to start a blog on a broader topic of gambling or sports gambling? Any other suggestions?” And his followup question, which I don’t know if it’s directly related to that, is, “Do I have this right? My target is harness horserace players, which is a hard-to-reach audience, so I could target gamblers with a blog and then identify the horseplayers for the email list second.”

Jon: That might work, targeting gamblers, because gamblers are their audience, right? Unless I had a misunderstanding. And then a subset of those gamblers are hyperfocused on…

JT: Harness horse…

Jon: Yeah, betting on harness horseraces. So, yeah, I would probably target gamblers with the blog, or it’s probably gaming or something, I don’t know what they would call themselves. But whatever they would call themselves, yeah, I would target them that way. And then, don’t get really so, so wrapped up on harness horseracing either. That may be the first product that you release, or the first service, but you probably want to expand out to other things the audience is going to be interested in as well.

JT: Frank has a really interesting question. Yeah, okay, so Frank says, “What about if you have a good idea and everything else looks good but you’re a poor writer? Would it be worth hiring someone every time you write a post for a blog or should you not go into blogging?” Well, you can do video blogging or podcasting. Those are both sort of forms of periodic stuff. What would you tell Frank?

Jon: Yeah, both of those work. In my experience, they don’t work quite as well, but they do work. Now, neither of us are experts on video blogging or podcasting, at least not yet, so I don’t know if we would be the best person to ask that question to, but there are popular video—I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk, hugely popular video blogger on Wine Library, podcasting. There are some very successful podcasts. So you can go that way if you want to. The other alternative, yeah, is paying someone to do the writing. I actually know a few writers who do that, although they would die of embarrassment if I mention their names.

JT: They would die of embarrassment if you were going to potentially send them work?

Jon: No, I mean, I know a few actually fairly popular bloggers who have other people write their posts…

JT: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can’t reveal that.

Jon: I can’t reveal that. They would be so pissed at me. But there are a few actually popular bloggers who do that, and what they do is they record themselves into like a digital recorder and then they send it over to a freelance writer, and they pay them somewhere along the lines of 50 to 100 dollars a post. To get a ghostwriter, that's about what it costs, is about 50 to 100 bucks minimum. To get a really good writer, you’re looking at 100 to 200 bucks per blog post. So there are people that do it less than that, but in my experience they are kind of crappy.

JT: And in my opinion, that starts to fail the low overhead question.

Jon: Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. So rather than doing that, yeah, I would probably just do video blogging or podcasting. That would be fine.

JT: I have a few quick ones here. So Nancy says, “How can I find out how many hits each individual post gets to find out its popularity?” You can just install Google Analytics. I’m sure you can find a tutorial on YouTube or something. It’s not hard. Basically, you sign up for Google Analytics, they give you a little snippet of code and you paste it in the footer of your blog, but that process is different for every blog. I’m sure you can find a tutorial video on it.

Jon: And that's assuming that you’re talking about your own blog. If you’re talking about how many—by the way, nobody uses the word “hit” anymore. That's like saying “far out” or something.

JT: [Laughs]

Jon: It’s outdated language. Nothing wrong with it. It’s just outdated. People do visitors, page views, unique visitors, things like that. But to find out how many page views it’s getting, yeah, you could do Google Analytics on your own blog. If you’re talking about how do you see

how many it’s getting on someone else’s blog, you can’t. All you can look at is the number of comments, the number of tweets, the number of Facebook shares, and kind of guess how popular it is.

JT: And let me just clarify, too. I just said you’d have to paste code into the footer. That probably made some heads explode. There is a plug-in called, I think it’s just Google Analytics for WordPress, that just lets you paste it right in there so you don’t have to deal with code.

Bill says, “Should my blog be separate from my site? My blog is a link on my overall site, posts, however, on the homepage.” Sounds to me like, “my blog is a link on my overall site, however.” I think if your posts are showing up on your homepage, then that counts as your blog being your site. I think that we both advocate WordPress controlling your entire site, which means that even though some of it may look more site-like than blog-like, it’s still controlled by WordPress. WordPress, you can create static pages like your about page and so forth, but it’s still all WordPress. I don’t know if that answers the question.

Jon: Yeah. I think the question may be, “Does your blog have to be on your homepage?” No. It doesn’t have to be. Most blogs are, but it doesn’t have to be. Copyblogger doesn’t have it on its homepage anymore.

JT: And they just recently did that, too, so they moved from the other way to this way.

Jon: Yeah, and the reason why they did that is to better highlight the list in their products and services. So if that's what you want to do and you want to have your blog on /blog, that’s fine too. It’s a little bit more technically complicated to set it up that way, though. It’s not horrible, but it’s a little bit more involved to do it that way.

JT: Yeah, it’s just another couple of steps. Stephanie says, “I didn’t catch what the alternative to FeedBurner was.” The alternative is having your own email list through a provider like AWeber, which is what we suggest, and having people opt in, and then you can send them blog posts or you can send them an autoresponder series. You can send them whatever you want to send them.

As far as blog distribution, I like FeedBurner for knowing how many people have subscribed to your feed, but if I had to do it all over again, I don’t think I would have promoted it. I don’t think I would have put a big old thing right on the front saying, “Subscribe to blog post by email,” and have that be a FeedBurner link because doing it through AWeber and doing basically the same thing, subscribe to post by email but it’s an AWeber form, gives you more control. But as far as having your RSS feed managed, this is by the way a little out of the sweet spot of this course, I do like FeedBurner for a few reasons. But I think we’re suggesting another approach.

Jon: Yeah, so use your email list if at all possible on AWeber. That's the better way to go. If you look at the big blogs, they usually have—like Copyblogger now and on Boost Blog Traffic, this is what I’m doing too, is there's a big email subscription button and there's a tiny, tiny little RSS button to subscribe with FeedBurner. That's because email subscribers are dramatically more valuable than RSS subscribers.

JT: Here’s one for you, Jon. I know your answer but I’m going to let you answer it. Mitch says, “I’d like to find voice recognition software to make writing easier because I’m ill sometimes. Any recommendation?”

Jon: Yeah, Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use that every day. If you want a good guide on how to do that, google “Speech Recognition for Bloggers.” It’s a post that I did on ProBlogger. It’s actually a video. I did a video about speech recognition, and I walk you through everything you need to do to get set up with that.

JT: “What about an audience who are interested in a topic for a short time like weddings, pregnancy, etc.?” Hmm, that’s an interesting question because you would have a rotating audience but the audience for weddings and pregnancy are both huge, but you would have a limited window. I think that it fails a little bit in the criteria that we gave, which is people who are going to buy from you again and again if you have specific wedding or pregnancy stuff, but I suppose it would depend on what exactly you’re going after. But you do have a more limited window and you don’t build long-term raving customer fans. So I don’t know that I would do it, but it’s certainly a popular area.

Jon: Yeah, you’re going to have a big churn in that business. Yeah, unfortunately, real estate has the same problem, where people buy a house and then they’re set for a while. So, real estate agents are constantly looking for new clients. Personally, I find, and Johnny and I are both kind of in this situation, that doesn’t make for a very stable, secure business. It can be very profitable, but it means you’re always hunting for new clients, and personally I think in the long-term that's a really bad type of business to be in.

Now, if you’re set on that, then yeah, you’re just going to have a lot of churn on your email list, okay? So you can blog about weddings, for example, but just go ahead and accept that you’re probably going to have like 80% of unsubscribe rate over time, because people are going to have their wedding and then they’re not going to be interested anymore. That's not bad, it’s just what it is. So just be prepared for those kinds of numbers.

JT: About autoresponder series, “Can I simply link to the posts on my blog in the emails or do I have to provide unique content for the autoresponder emails?” I think that depends. If you are linking to posts, those would be broadcasts. You could have an autoresponder series built

around giving sort of the best of your posts, things that you’ve written in the past, but I think that both of us would recommend, if you’re going to use it to distribute your blog content, those would be broadcasts. You write the post, and then you say, “Here’s a post I wrote. Check it out.”

As far as autoresponders, I don’t know that I’d say that they need to be unique, but they probably need to be at least a little unique. Remember that you’re giving people multiple ways to reach the same thing and that it’s probably a mistake to assume that everybody who has ever visited your blog has read every post. So it’s okay to go back and say, “Here’s something that I wrote about X and here’s a little bit more, but you’re basically fleshing it out and giving more. You don’t need to write unique posts that go to that list or anything like that.

Jon: Yeah. If you want to link back to your content in the past, especially if it’s really important core content—I link to my post on ProBlogger about How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World. I link to that a lot, for example, just because it’s a bonding post. It’s a good way to bond with the readers. And I put it in autoresponder sequences. But I would recommend having some unique content of some sort, whether it be a webinar or whether it be another article or whether it be a free report or something to offer those people. Or, it’s perfectly fine to just write out an email, I mean write out an article in the email too, if you want to do it that way. I mean, Naomi Dunford does that and does very well with it. Or you could put it on a WordPress page. It really doesn’t matter that much.

JT: Alright. Let's see. “When targeting a blog that's outside of your own area, e.g. gardening on a personal finance website, how do you avoid going down the research rabbit hole when writing for them because it’s an unfamiliar area to you?” Well, I think you need to have some—so it’s a 2-part answer.

Number one, I think that you’d be surprised how much ground you can cover without going down any research rabbit holes at all. I mean you’re not writing a thesis. Blog posts don’t tend to be hyperspecific in a lot of cases. It’s not like—so what’s the example here? Gardening on a personal finance website. It’s not like, “Let me show you how growing carrots is going to rebalance your assets to liabilities ratio,” or something. It’s really more about, the example of gardening to personal finances, how you can save money. That's something that everybody knows something about. You aren’t going down the very specific avenues of that particular site.

So the other example that I gave that was actually an example Jon gave is an accountant writing tax tips for bloggers on ProBlogger. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of WordPress and blogging and autoresponder series and so forth to write about tax tips for bloggers. You just need to have a general idea that these are self-employed people and what are the problems for self-employed people.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah, so if you’re having to do a ton of—well, on the one hand, you should be getting to know the blogs that you’re writing for, and I know you already do this, Michelle. I know you. But subscribe to the blog, read it for 30 days, get to know it. But yeah, that should be all of the research that you really need to make it work. If you’re doing more than like 1 or 2 hours of research for a post, that's probably too much.

JT: Clara says, “I’m not sure who my audience is. I write web content and blogs. The only people who have signed up for my list are other writers and freelancers. What am I doing wrong?”

Jon: So you’re business is, I guess you’re a copywriter where you sell writing services to businesses. You probably need to be writing for places where businesses congregate, so Duct Tape Marketing, Copyblogger, Life Is Like That, and then write posts that are going to resonate with businesses. So if you do 10 Ways to Write Really Great Content or whatever, well that's going to appeal more to writers than it will to businesses. But if you do 10 Ways to Get More Customers With Your Content, that's going to appeal to businesses. Or, 10 Things Your Freelancer Copywriter Will Never Tell You About Your Website Copy. You can even talk about the hiring process for hiring a copywriter too. That would be a really smart way to go because other freelancers and writers aren’t going to be interested in that.

JT: Cheryl says, “You reminded us today of the point you explained last week about the importance of our opt-in page and capturing subscribers in the first time they visit our site. Do you recommend that we link there in author’s bio on guest posts?” Yeah, absolutely. I would say that you use your guest post bio link to link to a landing page that is sort of optimized for people who—when I say optimized I don’t mean search engine. I just mean that you crafted it with the idea that it was going to be receiving people from that post or from a guest post.

Jon: Yeah, and so like if you want to create a simple landing page for them, you could do something along the lines of, “Welcome, Copyblogger readers. Grab your copy of my free report, Headline Hacks,” or something like that. That way they know it’s specifically for them. That kind of thing can boost conversion.

JT: Rodney says, “Most of the websites that appear near the top of the Alltop list for parenting are these huge traditional media houses and magazines that also carry an online blog with on-staff writers. Any tips for finding blogs with numbers in that niche besides people like the New York Times?” I don’t know Alltop, I’ve never used it, but my guess would be, I would think if you change the phrasing from parenting to mommy blogs or something like that, you might do better.

Jon: Yeah, check out mommy blogs, and also you can just scroll down in the list a little bit. And another good thing to do is a lot of blogs have blog rolls. You can look at who’s being mentioned in the blog rolls of the smaller blogs and that'll take you to some of the bigger blogs. So scroll down halfway on the list, look through some of the smaller blogs, see if they have a blog roll, and look for patterns on who they link to. And the other way is just google it. Google mommy blog or parenting blog or blog for stay-at-home moms or whatever, and you’ll probably—somebody has probably even put together the top 10 mommy blogs of 2010 or whatever, and it’ll just give you a list. So with a niche that big, you can find it all kinds of ways.

JT: Yeah, and two other things that I know or use in that niche are the acronyms SAHM, stay-at-home mom, and WAHM, work-at-home mom. So googling for those as well may help you. Penny asks, “What’s the protocol with the blogger for after a guest post is accepted, for instance, thank yous, tweets, etc.?” In other words, what do you expect from them, I believe.

Jon: Well, after a guest post is accepted and it’s published, after it’s accepted just say thank you and wait to get a date on when it’s going to get published. When it’s published, different blogs have different protocols. I would recommend doing everything possible you can to promote the blog. If you’re going to be the opening act for The Rolling Stones, you’re going to tell everyone that you possibly can. So do the same thing when you’re on a big blog. Tweet it to your audience, email your list about it, and even go to other big bloggers in the niche and make sure they know about the post. So I would be super-aggressive with promoting your guest posts on big blogs.

The other thing is you want to be answering comments. The rule of thumb unless anyone tells you otherwise, I usually tell people to respond to 1 out of 4 of the comments. So respond to about 25% of the comments, especially if they have a question, but don’t feel like you have to respond to people that say, “Hey, great post,” and thank them. But if they have a question, be sure to answer them. There are some blogs though, like I was just talking with James Chartrand at Men with Pens, she wants you to respond to every comment. Every single one.

JT: Really?

Jon: Every single one. She told me that yesterday, or Tuesday. But yeah, we were talking on the phone and that's what she told me.

JT: Oh wow, I would never do that otherwise. Now I know.

Jon: Yeah, so it’s a good thing to know some blogs are that way. I know Jennifer Rush at Everyday Bright wants you to respond to every comment. But that's kind of like the exception to the rule. Most of the time it’s just respond to the people that really need a response.

JT: How much further should we go here, Jon? The questions keep coming.

Jon: Yeah, I’m going to need to go. We’re at about 2-1/2 hours. We can do one or two more. It sounds like you’re just barely surviving, too, there on your end.

JT: Yeah, I keep muting myself to blow my nose or clear my throat something. I apparently have a cold. So yeah, so you want to do like two more?

Jon: Yeah, that's fine.

JT: Okay, so Cheryl says—by the way, do I sound that bad? Have I been muting ineffectively?

Jon: No, I don’t know if anyone—you’ve gotten worse as the conference call has gone on.

JT: Awesome.

Jon: I can hear it in your voice, but go ahead.

JT: Okay. So Cheryl says, “If you had a free report with 50 Ways to Do Whatever, would you send it all at once to wow your subscribers or break it up into a 7-session ecourse? My answer to that would be that it’s up to sort of personal preference, but I know that Sonia Simone from Copyblogger loves the autoresponder model and I think she would probably tell you to break it up into a 7-session ecourse, but it probably depends on how meaty. I don’t think wowing is necessary. If the question is, “Are you trying to wow them or spread it out?” then I wouldn’t worry about wowing them. To me I would answer that based on whether the content warrants it. Because if you have a 50 Ways and each one is a sentence or two, then I would not break it up, because then it just feels like unnecessary. But if it’s 50 Ways to Do Whatever and they’re substantial and it’s this big, long thing, then I would consider breaking it up.

Jon: Yeah, and also consider, how important is it that they consume the whole thing? You’ll get more people to consume the whole thing if you break it up in an autoresponder sequence than if you send them a whole huge report. So if you send people a 50-page report, a large percentage of the audience isn’t going to read it all, but if you break that 50-page report into ten 5-page emails, your consumption rate on that is going to be higher.

The reason why I broke up my guest blogging class, all of the videos in the multiple short little videos, is, number one, they are on separate subjects, but number two, I wanted to make sure people consumed all of the video…

[AUDIO CUT OFF because the teleconference ended our session. There was very little discussion afterward.]

[End of Audio]

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