You’ll Never Know Unless You Ask

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 40 comments

Growing up I was a very shy little guy. I was so shy that I rarely put myself out there in situations that I was unfamiliar with and never asked other people for favors unless I was either in desperate need or very familiar with the other person.

I remember my mum telling me on numerous occassions when I was too shy to ask people things - ‘you’ll never know unless you ask’.

It struck me today that while I’m still pretty shy that I wouldn’t be where I am today if I’d not overcome my inability to put myself ‘out there’ and had I not learned to ‘ask’ others for help.

The reason it struck me today is that I’d emailed a couple of well known photographers asking them if they’d be interested in writing a guest post for me at Digital Photography School. I’d never had any contact with them before and they had no knowledge of me or my site.

A couple of hours later I had two of the three replying back saying yes (the other said no).

My natural inclination when thinking about these photographers is to avoid contact them.

• I don’t want to put them out
• I don’t want to risk the feeling of rejection of them saying no
• I don’t want to look foolish in front of these people who are famous in their niche.

My list of reasons NOT to contact them could be long - I’m good at making excuses for myself - however over the last 5 years of blogging I’ve discovered that stepping outside of my comfort zone is something that more often than not pays off - both for me and the person that I step towards.

A few examples come to mind:

• Emailing my hero Seth Godin and asking for an interview (and another time suggesting a a post he might like to link to) - both times he responded in the affirmative
• Emailing national and international mainstream media outlets with ideas for stories that they could write that would feature me - this has paid off numerous times.
• Emailing blog designers and asking for help with my blog’s design (I did this in the early days of my blogging and Rachel from Cre8d did some wonderful work for me very reasonably).
• Sending countless links to countless bloggers (many of them so called ‘A-listers’) when I thought the links related to their content and having them link up

Again the list could go on.

Of course for every ’success’ I’ve had like these I could tell you stories of rejection. Seth said no to writing a foreword for my book (understandably), countless bloggers ignored my emails, media outlets did stories on the topics I suggested without featuring me…. the list could go on!

The key to what I’ve learned is the same thing that my mum taught me as a shy little guy - ‘you’ll never really know unless you ask.’

When you ask things of other people the chances are good that they’ll come back with a no - but you’ll never really know until you ask - and the thing is that when you do ask you are a step closer to them saying yes than if you’d not asked at all.

The Key to Asking is Win Win Interactions

This post might make it sound like I never do any work for myself and am constantly living off the generosity of others - but this isn’t the case. The key that I’ve found with ‘getting’ things off other bloggers is to ‘give’ them something in return. Win/Win interactions are key.

If you can find a way that doing you a favor helps the other person as much or more than it helps you then everyone comes away a winner.

So in asking the photographers if they’d be interested in guest posting for DPS today I made it clear that it’d be very helpful for me but that it’d also bring them exposure to their own projects as the site was being widely read.

While not everyone can offer lots of exposure - I guess the key is to find some way that you can help the person that you’re asking a favor from so that they benefit in some way.

For example - instead of sending someone a generic email asking if they’d link to you - why not send them a high quality guest post that they can’t resist posting?

When Should You Add a Newsletter to Your Blog?

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 44 comments

Over on Plurk HCI Blogger asked me - “How do you decide when to start publishing a newsletter?”

I’m sure other bloggers with newsletters will have different opinions to me on this one but if I were starting a new blog today I’d start a newsletter to go with it on the very same day.

I won’t rehash all of the reasons why a newsletter can improve your blog but will give a couple of reasons why starting one at the launch date of your blog can be a good idea.

3 Reasons Why You Should Consider Starting a Newsletter in the Early Days of Your Blog

1. ‘Capture’ Early Readers - while some would argue that when you don’t have many readers it can be more effort than it’s worth to start a newsletter I have found that it’s not the case. When I started Digital Photography School I started a newsletter very quickly after launch and found that it was a great way of convincing those first time readers to come back to the blog for a second look.

Your blog might only have 10 readers a day - but if you can send those 10 readers an email once a week that reminds them to check out a new post on your blog then over a year you’ve effectively created 500 new visits to your blog from just 10 readers. Recruit 10 new readers a week to subscribe to your blog and by the end of the year you’ve got 500 subscribers.

In short - it’s never too early to start creating loyal readers on your blog.

2. Use Subscribers to Sneeze Your Blog to Others - in the early days of my DPS blog I would give my subscribers regular updates on how many people subscribed and how the blog was developing. My motivation was to show them that they were a part of something that was growing. What I found in doing this was that it was my newsletter subscribers who promoted my blog and newsletter to their friends.

A newsletter is great at drawing people back to your site but it’s also great at creating momentum and giving readers a sense of ownership of your blog. Get them involved in promoting you and you could find that these first subscribers really take your blog to the next level for you.

3. Develop Routine - creating a newsletter each week takes time and effort (I spend 1-2 hours each week on creating each of my newsletters). While you could put off this effort until your blog has a regular readership, doing it in the early days helps you to create a weekly rhythm for your blog that helps you keep things going. It also helps you get used to the newsletter tool that you’ve chosen so that when your audience is bigger you’ve already got a great template and handle on how to use it effectively.

A Last Tip - Start Small

OK - I’ve probably just freaked a few of you out with the information that it takes me 1-2 hours a week to make a newsletter. Most people don’t have that kind of time!

Don’t stress - I would highly recommend that you start smaller than that in two ways:

• Less Regularity - there’s no need to start with a weekly email if your list is small. You might like to start with an email that goes out every 2nd week or even monthly in the early days.
• Simple Emails - the emails that I send are html emails that do take a little extra work. I insert pictures and get emails looking as good as possible. However you can always start out with a simple html template or even just with a text based email. Both of these will take less time (I find that I can put together a good text email in half an hour).

Having said this - newsletters do take time and effort to produce. They have many benefits but they don’t just happen by themselves.

What do you think?

Do you have a newsletter attached to your blog? Why or Why not?
Tip

The Beauty of Imperfection

Writing Content 27 comments

Today Chris Brogan shares with us one of the secrets of his blogging.

I’m not sure what it is about Darren’s blog that makes me confess my blogging secrets. I did it once before when I discussed how I promote my blog using Twitter, and here I am back to give away another of my secrets to what powers my blog: imperfection.

Image by quinn anya

I Can’t Add to That

One way people accidentally cut down on active commenting on their blogs is by writing a post so complete and thorough in its presentation that the audience doesn’t really know what to add, or how to contribute. Comments like, “Great post,” and “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” aren’t really what most of us want to leave, so instead, we’ll choose not to engage. It’s the old instant cake mix story.

The story goes that instant cake mix went from requiring the cook to add a few eggs, some milk, some water, and a little butter, to just adding water. Sales dropped immediately. But why? Wouldn’t it be even easier on the homemaker to just add water to make a cake? It turned out that our man or woman of the house wanted the sense that they were contributing to the act of making the cake. And thus, producers of such mix have backed it out to allow for adding in the eggs, and some of the other simpler ingredients.

Make Your Blog Posts Imperfect

It’s tricky, because you can’t exactly make them horrible and unreadable, but the point is that maybe you can write them in such a way as to allow your audience and community to add in their level of expertise. I do this all the time over at my site. I end posts with questions. I thread the blog post with the sense that YOU are the expert on several points, and that maybe you can help me better understand things in the comments section. Linking works this way, too. If someone else has said it better, cite it with a nice link.

The things you do to build a little bit of participation into your blog posts is what will bring more community experience together, and give people a sense that they matter. Helping that sentiment grow builds a robust commenting community, which in turn, gives you a great reason to pour more time and attention into the care and feeding of a community that you’re hoping will help sustain you in one way or another.

Did I Miss Anything?

Most of you in Darren’s community are experts at creating excellent content that drives passionate relationships. Some of you do this to become Six Figure Bloggers yourselves. Others just like learning how to make your blog more sticky as a destination site. What do you think I’m missing on this idea? Have you tried it already? Does it work for you?

Chris Brogan advises businesses about emerging technologies and social media tools at ChrisBrogan.com. Make Some Money

Improving Adwords

Improving Adwords

SpeedPPC is both a system and a methodology. It is not a single program but a set of Window programs, website templates and PHP scripts.

Dynamic Creatives

SpeedPPC takes your list of keyphrases (Google calls them keywords) and enables you to multiply them into additional combinations, e.g. “dentist” can be combined with a list of suburbs, e.g. “dentist richmond”, “dentist kew” and so on. This known as the “dual core” method. You can specify different bids for Exact, Phrase and Broad Match. SpeedPPC also creates the creatives, which are the actual ads you see on the ad network and their partner sites.

You can upload the creatives and the keywords with their bids using the Google AdWords Editor. The SpeedPPC campaign builder will also build your Microsoft adCenter campaigns, but you’ll need to use their online interface to add them (via a bulk upload CSV file).

The next important feature is that you can create a unique landing page that uses each keyphrase prominently. This keeps the Google Quality Score as high as possible, which gives you the cheapest cost per click. This feature is not entirely in the SpeedPPC package as such, but in a separately downloadable PHP script and matching templates. You install the script and it gives you a custom page for each keyword.

A closely related feature is the Affiliate datafeed landing page creator. This enables you to have a unique keyword and landing page pair per product in the datafeed - affiliate heaven!

You upload the supplied script and make a MySQL database on your Linux server and follow the simple instructions to upload your datafeed file.

A fine set of narrated videos help you to understand the product very quickly. PDF manuals are also provided.

What’s New?

* The first thing you notice about SpeedPPC 3 is the completely changed interface.
* The next feature I noticed is that I could load a campaign of over 30,000 keywords, whereas the first release was limited to 1900. The next improvement is the speed! With the old version, processing 1900 keywords took more than 30 minutes and it was not advisable to load large campaigns. This version pumps out the 30,000 keywords in as little as three minutes! You should not normally need to run such large campaigns, but I was trying to test its limits.
* Yahoo! Search Marketing support is now included, which will please many advertisers who run campaigns on Yahoo. Microsoft adCenter support is still present, so all the three biggies have been covered.
* Advanced Ad Building enables you to mixmaster your headlines, description lines and display URLs. SpeedPPC will build text ads that represent every permutation of these.
* We all need to copy ads and modify them. Now you can copy them from one box to another with the click of a button.
* The Keyword Library enables you to reuse the same keyword lists for new campaigns. The benefits are obvious.
* You can clean up keywords, say, by removing invalid characters or extra spaces. For experienced users, there is an option to remove all spaces between keyphrases, which results in joined words. Why would you want this, you may well ask. Some people accidentally run two words together in a search query and if you target competitive niches such as debt consolidation, this little trick could get you a few cheap clicks.
* The My Campaigns panel displays all your SpeedPPC projects in one window even if they are stored in different directories on the PC. This is useful if you need to organise your PC to suit campaigns or different clients, instead of having to place all of them in one directory.
* Certain tasks such as Excel export can take a few minutes to complete, but you can open a fresh instance of SpeedPPC and build a new campaign simultaneously. No more coffee breaks for the staff!
* You can export your campaign in CSV format and now in Excel too.
* The status bar shows the total quantity of seed and expansion keywords

Conclusion

SpeedPPC 3 is a powerful tool for PPC advertisers, particularly those with thousands of keywords and who are targeting multiple locations for each keyword. Although there are many free tools to mix keywords with another variable, they don’t address the tricky issue of building unique landing pages for each unique keyword. Not only will this improve the Google Quality Score, it will be a better user experience and, therefore, it should lead to more conversions. If you are a regular PPC advertiser, you should grab a copy before Jay wakes up and raises the price.

Want to sell SpeedPPC? You can do that too, make $248.50 off of every sale. Join their FREE affiliate program and you can make 50% too.

http://doiop.com/adwords

Graham