"Four Figure Income from The First Month"
Blogging Secrets of Darren Rowse from ProBlogger.net
Darren is the probably the most well known professional Blogger on this planet. He’s a part-owner of the b5media Blog network and with over 20 blogs, he’s been in the industry longer than most of us.
Darren started as a personal blogger / hobbyist on a blog called Living Room, which is mostly about his church and culture, more than 4 years ago. He also started a blog on digital cameras and then later, the now famous ProBlogger.net
Darren is probably the first blogger to make a six-figure income from professional blogging or problogging (which means that you blog full time for a living).
Darren confessed that when he started revealing how much money he makes, the attention and traffic he got skyrocketed. This is not surprising - people like John Chow have a monthly report on his blog income. Shoe Money does it to. I do it with my Internet Home Business Timeline and that single post generate more comments than any other post on my blog.
The following is taken from the audio interview by Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse, and is available to paid Blog Mastermind students only. The reason I’m writing it down is because it helps me concentrate while listening to the audio (me got ADD) and also because I want to share some of it with you.
So sorry I can’t give you the actual MP3 here but I can let you read my notes.
Darren Rowse’s tips on writing good content:
- The way you write is important. Darren writes in a personal way that his readers can relate to.
- Personally I find his blog easier and more fun to read compared to CopyBlogger.com, another popular blog. Maybe it’s because my level of English is too low for his blog or whatever. I just prefer something easy to read without too many big words in them. Just give it to me please I’m lazy to think :-
- The way you write attracts different type of markets. If you write in a philosophical way you’ll attract like-minded personalities. That’s good, unless you’re faking the way you write.
- Passion is important - Darren confessed that he does much better writing for blogs that he has a deep passion about. Like most successful bloggers, he has a trail of dead blogs, simply because the amount of passion he had to write day in and day out for those topics eventually dies out.
Darren Rowse’s advice for new bloggers:
- Focus on something smaller (a niche market) with the room to expand to something bigger (general market)
- Write content to cover all the basic questions in that market first - this will create substantial bulk for your blog
- When starting a new blog, write at least the headlines for 30-40 posts before you start the blog. This will help you determine if you can sustain your blog in the future
- Have some good evergreen content on your blog which will be applicable and relevant for a long time - don’t just report the latest news
- Build relationships with blog / forum owners with a related topic and you’ll get some links back to your blog. Your potential readers are already on these sites so go get them
- Start a weekly newsletter, and summarize everything you’ve written the past week. This helps to build more traffic over time and highlights the posts people may have missed.
- Do interviews / work together with other blog owners to get them some popularity on your blog
- Don’t start too many blogs on unrelated topics - it’s virtually impossible for one person to maintain more than 3-4 blogs as the sole blogger. Even if you have more than one blog, make it on related topics so you can cross-link between the blogs for related content
- Get your own domain name - it gives the impression that you’re a serious blogger
Tips on getting / maintaining RSS subscribers:
- Building an RSS subscribers base depends a lot on the topic of your blog. In Darren’s case, his readers are.. well… other bloggers! If you’re blogging about a topic where you readers are not as tech savvy, you may want to offer them other means of subscribing to your blog. For example, you can use the Feedburner service and offer email subscription. If your blog readers don’t know how use email then you’re in trouble. (bad joke)
- Check to see if your RSS feeds are working and available. For example, if you’re using Feedburner you can still redirect the people who are subscribing to your blog’s original feeds using this Feedburner plugin - this makes sure everyone’s on one service, ie. Feedburner.
- Distribute your full RSS feed and not just the summary. Darren reported that when he did this his RSS bases went up10-20% and although there might be some people scraping your feeds, it will be worth it.
Darren Rowse’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips:
- For most of use, SEO is something you do once and hope that it works. It may take you up to 12 months to see if it works, and if it doesn’t then do something about it. Don’t get too obsessed about SEO in the beginning or you’ll get discouraged easily.
- If you content is good, people will link to it and these links are one of the most important aspects in SEO
- Use keywords in your post title, rename your images with the keywords, and use the keywords in your post content all the time
- Darren admits to writing some posts just to rank for the keyword, but according to him it’s easier to do it when you already have a high-ranking blog. Don’t go keyword hunting or creating keyword-stuffed pages.
How Darren Rowse makes money from blog advertising:
- Darren initially experimented with Google Adsense and did very badly with it, in terms of design and positioning. His goal in the early days was simply to cover his blog’s costs.
- Darren also uses the Amazon Associates affiliate program to make money by recommending products, and earning between 4-7% of the price.
- Another program he uses is Chitika, which is similar to Adsense but you get paid for recommending specific products
- Text Link Ads is also another good way, especially if your blog is small. TLA doesn’t really depend on the amount of traffic you’re getting so it’s different from Adsense in that aspect
Well, that’s all I managed to get from the interview before my attention span died tragically and I picked up my electric guitar to wander off into another world. I hope you’re learned something from what this blogging “icon” revealed in the interview.
Get the full Darren Rowse interview as well as other expert interviews at Blog Mastermind.
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Gobala Krisnan is a direct-response marketer turned blogger who makes over $10,000 a month from his blog empire. If you want to make money online from blogs, he is the only person who can reveal the secret of merging time-tested direct marketing strategies with web 2.0 traffic. Read more about him >>
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