June, 2012

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You’re An Idiot (And You Should Embrace It)

Men With Pens

I’m really sorry to be the one to break it to you, but you’re an idiot. I say that in the nicest way possible, because at least one of these 3 things will be true: You’ve looked back on mistakes you made and opportunities you missed in your writing, business and in your life and thought, “ What was I thinking ?!” With your gift of hindsight, you’ve cast your memory back on life events you’ve experienced and thought, “ If only I knew then what I know now… ̶

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10 Popular Affiliate Programs for Small and Medium-sized Blogs

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Charles Dearing of WhoIsHostingThis.com. As we’ve already seen today , affiliate marketing is a relatively trouble-free way for bloggers and other website owners to earn money. In fact, these days, even social media sites can become lucrative platforms for affiliate marketing campaigns. Because affiliate marketing doesn’t require affiliates to offer their own products or services for purchase, but only to place promotions on their sites for other merchants’

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Blast Through Writer’s Block With These 3 Tools

Men With Pens

For many writers, getting stuck in a phase of writer’s block can seem like the worse experience imaginable. Here I am, a supposed writer, and I can’t come up with anything to write. How can I even call myself a writer if I am struggling like this? Maybe I have nothing to say, maybe I’ve run out of ideas, maybe… We’ve all been there. Every writer will go through writer’s block, and every writer should go through it.

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The Bastardization of Writing (and How I Learned to Live with It)

Men With Pens

The age of novel writing is over. The dawn of a new era has begun — the Age of Copywriting — and it’s marked by one indisputable fact: People don’t have much time to read anymore. Everywhere you look, distractions abound. Marketers clamor for your attention, and you cram your already-busy day with even more activity. So what’s the writer who has a message to share with the world to do?

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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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What Writing A Fiction Book Can Teach You About Freelancing

Men With Pens

That headline sounds backwards — I realize that. Usually you spend years in your industry, soaking up its knowledge for a decade before you write your own “how to” manual. You don’t start freelancing by writing a book. But I did, and I’m a better freelancer because of it. And I didn’t write just any old nonfiction “How to Run a Business” book – I wrote a fiction thriller novel.

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How to Paint Magical Words with Storytelling Impact

Men With Pens

For many people, writing is an art, a creative talent akin to music or sculpture or painting. For many more, writing is simply a communication tool. I lean more towards the practical side. I consider writing somewhat of a craft or trade – artistic, yet functional and practical, like plumbing or welding. Writing doesn’t need to be art. It needs to be effective.

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The Missing Link in Your Copywriting Business

Men With Pens

Is money something you’re after when it comes to your copywriting? Of course it is. We write in the hopes that we can increase profits for our business. You write, and write, and write, putting your thoughts together to draw the attention of others and then that random day comes. You get a contact who wants to invest in your business. Maybe they’re offering you a position.

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The Blogger’s Essential WordPress Guide: 13 Top Tutorials

ProBlogger

Over the last couple of months, we’ve taken a close look at WordPress here on ProBlogger. I know that many readers do use WordPress—either the free or paid version—and it’s the content management system of choice for many high-profile sites. I’ve been using it for years, and I’d have to say that it’s served me really well over that time.

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Set Up Social Media to Give You Great Post Ideas

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Douglas Lim of The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Marketing People. Finding articles and ideas for blog posts is an important skill for bloggers to master—and one that can now be leveraged through the power of social media. High-quality content is tweeted, liked, bookmarked, and shared around. That’s why social media is fantastic for sourcing great content: we know even before we look at it that it’s probably of high quality, since people are sharing it wi

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8 Killer Tactics to Grow Your Blog with LinkedIn

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Josh Turner of LinkedSelling. Is your blog a business, or do you hope that it someday will be? If you answered yes, then you should consider refocusing some of your social media activities toward the world’s largest social network for business. That’s right, LinkedIn isn’t just for big companies or finding a job.

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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 to Use Metaphors to Engage and Encourage Readers

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Elizabeth Joss of Xcellent Media. “They nailed their stakes into the earth of my life, those farmers. They knew the place in me where the river stopped, and they marked it with a new name. Shantaram Kishan Kharre. I don’t know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow.

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Experience The Great Barrier Reef Queensland with 10 Bloggers from Around the World #QldBlog

ProBlogger

Greetings from Far North Tropical Queensland where I’m writing this post from as part of the ProBlogger Queensland Blogger Trip. You may remember a couple of months back we ran a competition here on ProBlogger to identify 10 bloggers from around the world to win an all expenses trip to the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland to experience all that the region has to offer and then to blog about it.

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What George Orwell Taught Me About Blogging

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Trevor Ginn of Hello Baby. Having written masterpieces such as Animal Farm and 1984 , George Orwell is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. . In 1941 he wrote the essay called Politics and the English Language in which he criticised the “ugly and inaccurate” contemporary use of English and offered six elementary rules for good writing.

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What’s the “Right” Kind of Blog Traffic?

ProBlogger

As I was reviewing my analytics this week, it struck me that the universal desire for basically all of us is to grow traffic. We’d all like more traffic, all of the time. Having that goal in mind drives more than a few bloggers to try black-hat techniques, or to bend the rules here and there. Those with a longer term focus are usually more interested in slower, more lasting traffic-building techniques.

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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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4 WordPress Alternatives: the What, Where, and Why

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Matt Setter of MatthewSetter.com. As bloggers, we’re all familiar with WordPress, whether as a self-hosted setup, or via WordPress.com. I think that, if you’re a blogger and you’ve not used it, then you’re likely in an odd minority. If you do a Google search for “ blogging software ,” WordPress will likely be among the first results you’ll see.

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How to Use Google+ to Update All Major Social Networks

ProBlogger

This is a guest post by Alan Cairns of bozboz.co.uk. We tend to use social networks as channels that feed into each other, with certain channels for posting content and others for re-publishing it. Widgets and apps can help pull a Twitter feed to a website, or a blog RSS feed to a LinkedIn profile or Facebook profile. The hub and spoke distribution model represents this system, with a structure that resembles wheels on a bike.

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Five Blog Business Models That’ll Make You Money

ProBlogger

One of the great things about the blogosphere is innovation, and the fact that there is an almost unlimited number of ways you can make money blogging. One glance around the web shows such variety in terms of the way bloggers approach their audiences and provide them with value. Image courtesy of stock.xchng user danzo08 The thing is, all that choice can be overwhelming.

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Fresh Ways to Handle Blog Criticism

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Harry French of BloggingTips.com. Sometimes being famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When a blogger writes a negative comment about you, or goes on an outright tirade, it can be hard to bite your tongue and move on. Sometimes, however, that’s the best course of action. Sometimes, you need to put on your boxing gloves and get ready to duke it out.

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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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7 Powerful Ways to Promote Your Blog Offline

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Jennifer Michelle of Jennifer Michelle Communications. Online marketing is a great way to grow your blog—but it’s not the only way. Traditional marketing methods can also be used to promote your blog and develop your readership. Here are seven ideas to get you started. 1. Get in the press. In the world of professional blogging, so much emphasis is placed on guest posting that it can be easy to overlook its predecessor—traditional media.

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So You’re Making Money Blogging … Now What?

ProBlogger

You’ve started a blog, written great content, engaged with readers … and now you’re making a little money at it. Congratulations! I started blogging seriously with the aim to make a living from it, but I know plenty of bloggers—probably the majority of those making money blogging—have less clear-cut ambitions to profit. Many money-making bloggers started simply by trying out some monetization method (an affiliate product, perhaps, or advertising) and were pleasantly surprised by the

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How I’m Using Google+ to Create Content and Collaborative Opportunities on my Blogs

ProBlogger

Google Plus has been a medium I’ve had a fascination with since Day 1, but it’s taken me a while to work out how to actually use it effectively in my blogging. I’ve tried a variety of things, including using it as a blog of sorts (making longer posts), for status updates (what I’m doing), as a pseudo-RSS feed (sharing links to posts I’ve written on my blog), looking for great content that others are sharing to reshare, and much more.

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Build Readership by Building Leadership

ProBlogger

We often hear the word “authority” mentioned in blogging circles, particularly in discussions around building a loyal following. At its most basic, authority is about knowing what you’re talking about, and who you’re talking to. If you think about it, this is a key to rich exchanges in the real world. Why wouldn’t it be the same online?

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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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Titles That Work on ProBlogger—And Why

ProBlogger

Darren recently highlit some of the posts that attract a lot of clicks at Digital Photography School. Many readers were interested to see the kinds of titles that do well here at ProBlogger, so today I thought I’d show you the posts that attracted a lot of traffic on the blog in April. The top titles. Here are the top seven, in order of their traffic levels: Win 1 of 10 Trips to the Great Barrier Reef in QLD, Australia #QLDBLOG. 19 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Blog. 9 Facebook Mark

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Say Bye-bye to Blogger Body, and Hello to Better Health

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Tania Dakka of TaniaDakka.com. Awesome! You just finished that killer project you’ve been working so hard on all day! Congratulations! But then you get up. Ouch. Your back’s killing you. Your body’s stiff. And you feel the pangs of a headache kicking in. That puffed chest is starting to deflate a little, isn’t it?

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Blog Business Model 2: Sell Your Print Book

ProBlogger

This is the second post in our series on Blog Business Models. Kevin Cullis, who runs MacStartup.com uses the blog to support his print book, How to Start a Business: Mac Version , and his upcoming release, How to Start a Business: Windows Version. Kevin's book, How to Start a Business: Mac Version. Kevin’s written about his business journey here at ProBlogger before, but here, he explains in detail how the blogging-and-print-books business model works for him.

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How to Land a Job as a “Resident Blogger”

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Jane of Runaway Jane. I recently secured the position of Resident Blogger at PLUS Hostels , a large hostel and camp site chain based in Europe. I’d spent more than two years blogging on my independent travel blog RunawayJane.com , and that experience undoubtedly led to me securing this position. But it wasn’t the only factor.

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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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How to Back Up and Move a WordPress Blog

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Caimin Jones of Genius Startup. Sometimes you’ll need to move your blog from one host to another. It’s a bit of a pain and might seem a daunting task if you’ve never done it before. But transferring a site is a fairly straightforward process that you can do yourself with an FTP program and this step-by-step guide.

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What to Do When Your Posts Aren’t as Good as they Seem in Your Mind

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Amit Sodha of Unlimited Choice. Have you ever had an idea, a thought, or a burst of inspiration that, while it was still in your mind, sounded amazing? But, when you tried to articulate it on screen or paper, or in speech, it didn’t sound nearly so good? I’ve found that effectively conveying my ideas is not only critical for my blog, but also for writing comedy and creating links on my radio show.

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Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions For Bloggers

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Anthony Wijaya of techexperience. Today, I’m going to share with you some of the Google Chrome extensions that have made my daily blogging tasks easier. These are my top five. 1. SEO For Chrome. SEO For Chrome allows you to check, well, pretty much everything about SEO in your site. All you need to do is type in your URL and tons of information about your site’s SEO will pop out, from your indexed pages in Google and Bing, to your Pagerank and traffic levels.

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How to Be a Guru: 6 Paths to Blogging Stardom

ProBlogger

This guest post is by Neil Patel of Quick Sprout. Do you want to leverage content marketing? I’m not just talking about guest posts or sharing content on social media sites here. Instead, I’m talking about the overall strategy that you can use to structure and develop your site’s content and offerings. And develop your authority as a guru in your blogging niche.

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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