August, 2010

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10 Freelancer Mistakes that Damage Your Success

Men With Pens

Today’s guest post comes to us from far, far away – at least, far away from where I live. This is one of the reasons I accepted Kwame’s post, by the way; he comes from Ghana. Isn’t that cool? What’s also cool are the 10 freelancer mistakes that follow – I bet most people are making at least one of them right now! Enjoy. Success, as defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learners dictionary, is “the achieving of the results wanted or hoped for&#.

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How to Make Your Blog Addictive Like World of Warcraft

ProBlogger

A Guest Post by The Blog Tyrant. photo credit: andronicusmax. World of Warcraft has over 11 million subscribers paying monthly fees. It is one of the most addictive video games of all time. In fact, there are several websites devoted to just helping people quit the game. There is even a “detox center&# in China that addicted kids are sent to. It is that bad.

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How I Got Published on Forbes.com – and How You Can Too

Men With Pens

Seeing your name on top sites and in big publications is a pretty hot feeling. I know that feeling personally. And many freelance writers want to know how they can get their work right in the spotlight. Well, Kelly Watson’s here to tell you just how easy it is – and exactly how to get your work published by some really big names. Go for it! To date, I’ve had my work published twice by Forbes.com.

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What To Do When Clients Haggle

Men With Pens

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, Know when to walk away and know when to run. You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table. There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.&#. - Kenny Rogers, The Gambler. Do you hate to haggle? Do you find it insulting when someone asks you to lower your rates?

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How to Leverage Behavioral Science Insights for Direct Mail Success

Speaker: Neal Boornazian, President and Nancy Harhut, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer - HBT Marketing

Direct mail has consistently remained a powerful tool in the marketer's arsenal, but in an age of digital dominance, its effectiveness hinges on the strategic integration of behavioral science. 💡 When you incorporate powerful behavioral science principles into your direct mail marketing strategies, you can prompt the hardwired decision-making shortcuts your audience relies on — and that automatically unlocks new avenues for engagement, conversion, and brand loyalty.

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Which Type of Entrepreneur Are You?

Men With Pens

I didn’t even know Jeremy’s name (let alone how to spell it, considering that the name usually ends in an “i&# where I live.). But when I saw his biz name, it all clicked into place – this was the nice guy who chatted with me on Twitter! Very cool. Also cool is the post he wrote about two types of business owners – and a pack of tips on how to avoid being the first type.

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Bloggers versus Copywriters: The Rhetoric Debate

Men With Pens

A few days ago, Glenn Murray wrote a post for ProBlogger called Bloggers Versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons Why Bloggers Do It Better. Sly fox that he is, Glenn warned me the post was controversial, knowing full well I’d rise to the challenge of debate. He was chuckling over my impending comments, and I hadn’t even made any yet! Of course, comment I did.

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Become a Playful Blogger and Inject Some Energy into Your Blogging

ProBlogger

Is your blogging getting a little dry? Perhaps it is time to become a bit more playful as a blogger. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that the more I ‘play’ and experiment with my blog the more I learn that helps me to make my blog better. Experimentation helps you not only learn what works in the blogging medium – but also what works with your audience.

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5 Ways to Build Your Blog’s Voice

ProBlogger

Voice can give a blogger a serious edge. Your unique voice can set you apart from the competition, form a foundation for your brand, engender audience loyalty, and more. If you find it difficult to retain readers, and you’re confident of the quality and accuracy of the content you provide, you may need to work on your voice. What is Voice? Voice is the tone in which you present content.

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Bloggers versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons why Bloggers do it Better

ProBlogger

A Guest Post by Glenn Murray from Divine Write. It’s true. Bloggers do it better. The good ones do anyway. See for yourself: Choose a handful of your favorite blogs and a handful of static websites, and compare the writing. (TIP: Try to choose sites that look professionally designed, as they’re more likely to have professionally written copy.). Which ones grab you?

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The Key to Successful Blogging: Do Something!

ProBlogger

Over the last month several hundred bloggers in the SitsGirls and TheBlogFrog communities have come together to tackle 31 Days to Build a Better Blog together. The 31 days are coming to an end this week and I’ve been so excited to see how working through the workbook as a large group has helped so many bloggers. Almost every day since the challenge started I’ve had participants tell me that their blogs have been growing as a result of participating.

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SME Relationships: Proven Solutions for Seamless Collaboration and Success

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

💢 Do you find yourself stuck in never-ending review cycles? Are you wondering if your Subject Matter Expert actually got that last review request? Are you having trouble trying to decipher impractical or conflicting feedback? 💢 If any of these scenarios sounds familiar, you may benefit from a crash course on managing SME relationships!

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How I Generated Over 6000 Ideas to Write About on My Blog in 15 Minutes

ProBlogger

Ever run out of things to write about on your blog? In this video screencast I want to show you how I came up with over 6000 ideas to write about on my blog using two tools – an Auto Responder (I use Aweber (aff)) and a Simple Survey. Setting this up took me all of 15 minutes work – after that it’s just been a matter of sitting back and watching the ideas roll in.

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How to Get More Done

ProBlogger

The most common question I’m asked lately seems to be: “How do you get so many things done?&#. To be perfectly honest – it’s a question I would never have anticipated anyone would ever ask of me – as I’ve mentioned here before, before I got into blogging I used to be quite… well… lazy. But since getting into blogging and starting my own business I have turned that around – at least on a work front (Mrs ProBlogger would still like me to do the

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3 Reasons that I Have My Video Posts Transcribed

ProBlogger

A couple of months back I decided to start getting my video posts transcribed. A number of readers have enquired as to why I am doing this – here are the 3 main reasons I have my videos transcribed: 1. Accessibility. Not everyone is in a position to be able to consume video content. For some it is a technical issue – not everyone has access to broadband.

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What They Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches

ProBlogger

Many times we see successful product launches being talked about and are so dazzled by the huge sales numbers and income generated but fail to see all the hard groundwork that has been done behind the scenes for months and years before the launch. Sometimes this is because those talking about their product launches don’t want those considering buying their ‘how to make money’ products to know its actually hard work and sometimes they do tell us but… well we only hear what

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The Resurgence of Direct Mail as a Growth Marketing Strategy

Speaker: Jeff Tarran, COO, Gunderson Direct & Margaret Pepe, Executive Director of Product Management, U.S. Postal Service

Learn the secrets to direct mail success for growth marketers! Industry veterans Jeff Tarran and Margaret Pepe are here to delve into how direct mail has completely evolved in recent years, and has rightfully earned a seat at the table alongside the email and digital marketing plans of SMBs, enterprise companies, and agencies as they look into strategy for 2024 and beyond.

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Why Link Exchanges Are Like Mosquitoes

ProBlogger

A Guest post by Akila from The Road Forks. Last week, I had a revelation when, after spending ten minutes fiddling around with a VPN in Podunkville, China, I opened my email and found four link exchange requests, including one asking to exchange links with “The Toad Forks” rather than our website, The Road Forks. As I slammed my laptop lid down, I realized that link exchanges are the mosquitoes of the blogging world.

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Free WordPress Plugins – What are Your Favourites?

ProBlogger

It has been a while since we had a survey on the topic of WordPress plugins so today I’d like to kick one off. What are your favourite FREE WordPress Plugins? Try to keep it to your top 5 so that things don’t get out of hand – but please share which free WordPress plugins are most useful to you in comments below. If you have some premium/paid ones that you want to suggest – please hold off on sharing those as I’ll run a post later in the week asking for your feedbac

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Crazy Stuff I’ve Done as a Blogger, and What I’ve Learned From It All

ProBlogger

Blogging is like life itself. . You get from it what you put into it. You can’t go it alone, success requires contact with, and some degree of acceptance and approval from, the outside world. Perserevence and maintainance are mandatory. Every day we are presented with lessons. Noticing and allowing them to chart the course going forward are part of the Success Equation. .

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How I Make Money Blogging: Income Split for July 2010

ProBlogger

Over the last few months I’ve been sharing a monthly breakdown of where my income comes from in the hope of illustrating some of the methods bloggers might like to look at when making money from blogging (see previous months linked to below). The month of July was the second month in a row where eBooks were the biggest money maker for me. Here’s a pie chart showing the percentage breakdowns.

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Lets Get Physical: How to Blend Direct Mail Marketing with Your Digital Strategy

Speaker: Akeel Jabber, B2B SaaS Investor and Growth Marketer at Horizen Capital

⭐ Are you ready to boost campaign success? Consider the untapped potential of integrating direct mail marketing seamlessly with digital marketing strategies. Combining the physical, tangible impact of direct mail with the dynamic reach of digital marketing can be a game-changer, significantly increasing your ROI when done right. Direct mail grabs attention, making it great for reaching your target audience 📩 Digital marketing keeps the momentum going, driving action 📲 So.

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Use Content Channels to Boost Your Readership

ProBlogger

The first five articles in this series have made the case for some important concepts: treating content as an asset, seeing your posts as tools for meeting your (and of course your readers’ goals), and so on. The natural corollary to all this is the notion that while your blog is a content product, it’s just one of a number of channels through which you can put your content tools into action to promote the product itself.

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How to Grow Your Blogs Readership Through Offline Events

ProBlogger

Over in Third Tribe this week there was a discussion in the forum about using speaking opportunities at offline events to help grow your email newsletter list. Leon shared how he used MailChimp’s Chimpadeedee application to collect email addresses after a presentation. I’ve not used that app but it reminded me of a time that I did something similar when I was starting out 6 years ago at an event I spoke it.

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Essential Reading on Content for your Blog

ProBlogger

Over the last week or so we’ve featured a series of posts here on ProBlogger that explore questions surrounding the theme of ‘content’ As the posts were spread out over 10 days I wanted to sum it all up with links all in the one place – so if you missed one – here they are! Source Quality Content… Continuously. Blog Content Strategy 101.

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Blogosphere Trends + Interview Tips

ProBlogger

This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts) – Darren. Think interviews are best left to Barbara Walters, news reporters, or magazine journalists? Think again. Conducting interviews for your blog helps create unique content, increases your blog’s authority, and adds an additional voice of expertise.

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Is Training the Right Solution?

Speaker: Tim Buteyn

Let's set the scene: you’ve identified a critical performance gap in your organization and need to close that gap. A colleague suggests training, but you suspect there’s something going on that training can’t address. How can you determine if training is the right solution before you commit your budget and resources to a new training program? In this webinar, you will learn how to determine if training is the right solution using the Behavior Engineering Model.

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150 Bloggers Pack Melbourne Hotel for ProBlogger Training Day

ProBlogger

One week ago today in Melbourne the first ever ProBlogger training day took place. What started as a spur of the moment idea less than 4 weeks before ballooned into a very worthwhile experience. Originally I had thought it would just be a day for 10-15 bloggers gathering around a board room table talking about blogging – but it quickly turned into a sold out training day with 150 bloggers from around Australia (and one from New Zealand) packed into a hotel’s conference room to spend

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Repeat Visitors vs New Visitors – Which is Worth More to Your AdSense Earnings?

ProBlogger

A few days back I shared a little analysis of my AdSense earnings as it related to sources of traffic and looked at how – for me – traffic from newsletters was actually the most valuable traffic that I get on my photography site. This dispelled the myth that loyal readers to your site become blind to ads and are not likely to click them – but I wanted to dig down a little deeper to look at the difference between first time visitors and repeat visitors and how they interact with

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The Content Producer’s Copyright Checklist

ProBlogger

Copyright is the content producer’s constant companion. If you create content, you own it, and you want it to stay that way! At the same time, many bloggers link to, quote, and reference other peoples’ work. Understanding where the line of copyright falls is essential if you and your blog are to stay on the right side of the law. The Basics.

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Discover how to Dominate Your Niche with Video Blogging [and Win an iPad]

ProBlogger

You can’t ignore video. It’s everywhere online these days – but are you using it well? Youtube is one of the biggest search engines on the web, almost every product that is launched these days has accompanying videos from the product makers and bloggers are embracing it more and more as a way to communicate with their readers. The problem is that many bloggers don’t know where to start.

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Revitalizing Dry Content: A Lesson in Engagement

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

We’ve all been there. You’ve been given a pile of dry content and asked to create a compelling eLearning course. You’re determined to create something more engaging than the same old course that learners quickly click through, but how do you take this “boring” content and create something relevant and engaging? Many instructional designers will say, “Boring in means boring out.

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Premium WordPress Plugins – What are Your Favourites?

ProBlogger

Eearlier in the week I asked readers to suggest their favourite free WordPress plugins. The response was great and I’ll pull together a compilation of the most mentioned ones in the coming weeks. However I’d also love to get your suggestions on the most useful Premium WordPress Plugin s. Over the last few years we’ve seen more and more premium (or paid) WordPress plugins released.

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2 Products Worth Considering to Improve Your Blog Today

ProBlogger

Each week I see multiple products launched targeting bloggers wanting to improve their blogs. I’ve tested many of them in my time and the reality is that most don’t deliver what they promise and I don’t promote them. However from time to time – some hit the mark and present unique and helpful information that delivers real value.

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How Well Do Your Blog Posts Score Out of 100?

ProBlogger

You’re about to hit Publish on your next blog post – but is it up to scratch? Is it compelling? Is it easy to read? Is it grammatically correct? Is it optimised for search engines? Wouldn’t it be great to have an editor by your side to look over your next blog post before you hit Publish, to make sure it’s really ready? Today I’m excited to announce a brand new ProBlogger resource – The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers.

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Big Content Monetisation Ideas for the Little Guy

ProBlogger

Earlier in this series, we talked about treating content as an asset. In reality, content may represent an asset for a number of reasons: because it’s evergreen and can be repurposed into other forms; because it’s time-critical and extremely viral, sparking conversation and attracting new users; because it’s unique and can only be found on your blog … the list goes on.

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Brain Fog HQ: Memory Enhancement Techniques for Professional Development

Speaker: Chester Santos – Author, International Keynote Speaker, Executive Coach, Corporate Trainer, Memory Expert, U.S. Memory Champion

In October, scientists discovered that 75% of patients who experienced brain fog had a lower quality of life at work than those who did not. At best, brain fog makes you slower and less efficient. At worst, your performance and cognitive functions are impaired, resulting in memory, management, and task completion problems. In this entertaining and interactive presentation, Chester Santos, "The International Man of Memory," will assist you in developing life-changing skills that will greatly enha