Blog Business

A Business Without a Plan is Like Driving Without a Map

2009-11-27T05:54:00.000-08:00

Let's say you decide to drive to the West Coast. Do you just get into the car and aim toward the setting sun? Of course not. Many people will mapquest their route, buy a roadmap, plug their destination into their GPS or something like that to get the directions they should follow.

Along the way, some drivers may get lost, or they may hit roadblocks, or experience other setbacks. Some drivers may just bounce back from those things, and continue their drive, or they may get discouraged, and turn around. Some drivers have limiting beliefs, or they sabotage themselves in their road trip, concluding for themselves what others may have told them many times: that driving isn't for them.

In our driving example, the road map is the equivalent of the business plan, which is a map to follow in your Entrepreneur journey. But while most drivers would get a map to help them reach the West Coast, surprisingly, most Entrepreneurs do not have a business plan to help them in their business. They know that they should have a plan, and they believe it's important, but they never get around to doing one.

But the whole point of this article isn't to convince you that you need a business plan (which of course I believe you do). It's to let you know that there is an entire critical thinking framework that you need to learn which will teach you perhaps the most important question to ask in the first place: Why Go West?

In the driving example, perhaps the better option would have been to drive South, or North, or to not go anywhere at all... In business, sometimes the best option is to do nothing, or to head in a completely different direction than the one being contemplated!

by: John Tree

How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog

2009-10-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Gary Vaynerchuk’s story started as the co-owner of a wine store in New Jersey. He gained fame as the host of Wine Library TV, a video blog on the subject of wine, built his wine store into a multi-million dollar business and established his personal brand with TV appearances and speaking engagements around the world.

Just last week he signed a seven-figure book deal and I wanted to use this blog post to look at things that made him as successful as he is in creating opportunities for himself via his video blog.

Blogging about your passion

Focus on what you love to do. Find your passion and start blogging about it. By doing what you love, you will be more dedicated, more genuine and you will have more enthusiasm. Your readers, your viewers will notice this.

Publishing great content will be easier. Sharing your knowledge and experience will be easier. Making the content unique, interesting and useful to your target group will be easier, as long as you do what you love.

Putting your face in front of people

“Answer every single email and every single comment on your blog for the rest of your freaking life”

Don’t be a faceless corporation. Show your face, show your personality. Make it easy for your audience to reach you. Have a Twitter account. Listen to what your readers say. Interact with your audience. Show your appreciation by answering comments / e-mails / tweets you get.

Spreading the word

“Content is king but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household”

Many bloggers just publish a post and wait for visitors and subscribers to be handed to them on a silver platter. That is too passive. You can’t sit around waiting for people to find your blog, you need to find them, help them out, show them the value you create and win them one by one.

Being different and eccentric

Do not be afraid to be seen as different, or even eccentric. Being different or eccentric in the crowded world of blogs is the strength. Gary Vaynerchuk is very hyperactive and has a very high energy level in his video blogs. He is very direct and doesn’t censor himself, which makes him very authentic and inspirational to follow.

Creating a dedicated tribe following

“With you and a little bit of me, we’re changing the wine world, whether they like it or not”

By being a part of the conversation and by connecting and listening to your audience, you are a part of the dialog and you are making your customers part of a greater community. You build fans one by one. You show that you care, you give your customers someone they can trust and you lead your tribe towards a better place.

Going where competitors don’t go

Vaynerchuk leveraged modern technology to reach young wine audience. His video blog caught the attention of a demographic new to wine, at the time when none of competitors cared about Internet, video blogging or social media.

To stand out and to differentiate yourself in a blogging world that is saturated with text, you can expand by using video and audio for content and message delivery.

Pumping out content consistently

“Pump out content – if you don’t produce something every day you’ll be out hustled”

Gary Vaynerchuk started his video blog and has remained dedicated and very consistent in producing content and recording multiple video blogs every week for several years now. Creating content regularly builds trust and dependability and gives readers a reason to subscribe and check back often.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk at SXSW

If you want more Gary Vaynerchuk watch his SXSW keynote below. It shows his passion, his dedication to what he is doing, and he explains, in more details, some of the points above.

Building your own empire

I hope these points can be inspirational and motivational, and help you come closer to reaching your goals and building your own empire from your blog.

From zero to hero, 8 blogging lessons learned in the first year

2009-10-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

Commenting on bigger blogs can bring you initial traffic

My first visitor other than myself was someone clicking over from a comment I had left at ProBlogger. In those first days all my visitors came from comments I left on ShoeMoney, DailyBlogtips, Mashable, Chris Brogan and other relevant blogs. For example on November 9th 2008 I left a comment on GetRichSlowly and that sent me 15 unique visitors first day, 20 the second day and 7 the third day which was huge back then!

Read more:

StumbleUpon is a nice place to get the first spikes in traffic

I started looking for targeted people on StumbleUpon fairly soon after launching the blog. First time someone stumbled my post was on November 8th 2008 and that sent me 19 unique visitors first day and 37 the second day and that was huge! Even to this day, Stumble is one of the top 4 sources of my blog traffic.

Read more:

Use Twitter to get an audience and spread your links

On November 30th 2008 I joined Twitter, immediately started looking for people in my audience and got 55 unique visitors from there on the first day. It never stopped really, so Twitter along with Google is the biggest source of my traffic.

Read more:

Write a guest post for biggest blogs in your field

On December 14th my guest post was published at ProBlogger and that sent me 97 unique visitors on the first day and again 97 on the second day. Writing guest posts not only sends you traffic, it gives you authority, spreads your name to a targeted audience and also gives you a great value link for your search engine optimization.

Read more:

Keywords are a must in the domain name

Looking at the traffic Google sends me, the 3 most popular keywords used to find my blog are very closely related to my blog domain name itself.

How to make a blog

Make a blog

How to make my blog

If I went with MarkoSaric.com I would have had a much harder time getting ranked for these three keyword phrases.

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Use big brands to attract attention to yourself

In some of my most popular posts I have used other brand names to attract attention to myself. It is a great strategy as these brands have many fans so it is much easier to attract them to click over to you, much easier to get them to comment and also much easier to get them to share the story with their friends. See these examples:

8 things every blogger can learn by studying Perez Hilton

How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog

13 blogging lessons learned from Stephen King’s On Writing

Write magnetic headlines

In RSS, on Twitter, in Google search results, we are bombarded with choices to click on wherever we are online. The only way to attract attention among tons of other blogs is to write remarkable article headlines. In my experience “how to” and “top list” headlines work the best, are very clickable and shareable.

Read more:

Hitting Digg or Delicious is worth it – spikes and links

The spikes in my traffic are from the days when my articles went “viral”. For example my Twitter plugins article hit the front page of Digg for few minutes and sent me 2799 unique visitors on that day, then my most downloaded WordPress plugins hit front page of Delicious and sent me 3602 unique visitors on that day. These events also bring you lots of links and that improves your SEO and increases your traffic in the long run.

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All these factors should contribute to your blog getting a momentum in social media and search engines, and this along with you writing great content regularly, would be able to achieve you similar or even better results in your first year in blogging.

3 Examples of How to Make a Blog

2009-10-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, you have decided that you must get a blog going on the Internet. First of all congratulations on your decision! Now the next choice you must make is how to make a blog of your own. Although there is no correct answer here are three examples of how you could do it.

1. Create a blog of your own in three easy steps at Blogger.com which is owned by Google. This is probably the easiest way to make a blog of your own and it is free. Besides, being easy to set up Blogger offers several other good benefits. For starters your blog can quickly begin getting traffic to it thanks to Google. You can get approved for the Google AdSense program quicker and place ads on your blog. This can turn into a very good income stream for you. Other websites or blogs you own can be linked to from your Blogger blog getting them spidered much quicker by Google. Anytime you have Google on your site that is a benefit to you.

2. Set up a WordPress blog and host it yourself. WordPress offers tutorials on how to do this. They also are a very feature rich blogging platform. Some of those include post dating of articles, readers can comment, easily ping blog directories, numerous plug-ins, and much more. The benefit to hosting your own blog is you control everything about it. If you were to do a free version of Word Press or Blogger you are not in charge of hosting your own blog. This means it can be canceled at any time for any reason. It simply isn't worth the risk if you plan on turning your blog into a profit center for your Internet business.

3. Hire someone to build a WordPress blog for you. You can hire a blog builder to set up a blog for you for as little as $30. The nice thing to doing this is your blog can be set up quicker and you don't have the frustration of trying to do it yourself. Plus, the chance of there being errors go way down when somebody who works on these everyday is doing it. One other benefit to Word Press is it is the number one blogging platform on the Internet today. This means it's easier to find people to work on it for you if you are having technical issues.

In summary this is three examples on how to make a blog. Whether you do it yourself or hire someone having a blog of your own is a worthwhile business venture.

How to Start a Blog and Make Money

2009-10-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

So you want to know how to start a blog and make money online? You may not even know it but you are thinking in the direction that is probably the fastest growing segment of money makers in the world today. There are so many approaches you can take when learning how to start a blog and make money on the internet.

There are many bloggers who build and market their blogs to attract millions of targeted readers and then sell ad space to companies selling blog related products. You can also place affiliate links and make a very nice living helping companies sell their products and services.

The key to blogging online for money is to know how to structure a blog around your chosen topic and find related search terms that have a good amount of daily searches internet wide. You then have to build and market your blog around that search term to begin driving visitors to your site.

The cool thing is that it does not matter what you want to blog about, once you learn how to start a blog and make money online the right way you can take any topic and use it to earn more money.

The key to writing on the internet is not what you want to write about but how you write about the topic to attract the highest volume of site visitors you possibly can reach.

Wanting to blog for money is a great start. now all you have to do is learn how to work with search engines and learn how to identify what search terms people use and you can begin to make a consistent income online.

Blog Business

A Business Without a Plan is Like Driving Without a Map

How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog

Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk at SXSW

Building your own empire

From zero to hero, 8 blogging lessons learned in the first year

Commenting on bigger blogs can bring you initial traffic

StumbleUpon is a nice place to get the first spikes in traffic

Use Twitter to get an audience and spread your links

Write a guest post for biggest blogs in your field

Keywords are a must in the domain name

Use big brands to attract attention to yourself

Write magnetic headlines

Hitting Digg or Delicious is worth it – spikes and links

3 Examples of How to Make a Blog

How to Start a Blog and Make Money