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What Advertisers Want: 6 steps to Attract Advertisers to Your Blog

Filed Under: Advertising, Blogging for Dollars 31 Comments Tweet

This is a guest contribution from Brianne Bauer.

How do advertisers determine whether a blog is worth their marketing dollars? Promising blogs start out with must-have elements

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5 Tips for Launching a Product On Your Blog Without Annoying Your Readers

“Darren, I have written an eBook but am struggling with how ‘pushy’ to be with my readers in my marketing of it. I want to sell some but don’t want to annoy my readers. Any tips?”

This question hit my inbox today and I thought I’d share some of my reply here.

Great question – I remember these feelings vividly when I launched the first eBooks on ProBlogger and dPS.

On one hand, you want to sell as many copies as possible to make the long writing process worthwhile. You know that to sell those copies you need to let your readers know you’ve got something to sell

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Optin Skin Plugin Review

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services, General 25 Comments Tweet

In June, Darren shared 3 Ways to Get More Subscribers for Your Blog. In that post, he identified the area under the blog post as being one of the ‘hot zones’ for calls to subscribe.

This area is a solid location to place a call to action, but it can require some effort to style a subscribe form that fits with your theme. In this post, I will be reviewing a plugin that helps you easily create appealing opt-in forms and social share boxes to your blog.

It’s called Optin Skin (aff) and it’s pretty swanky.

I bought this product in 2011 and definitely believe that it’s worth the money. It was really easy to figure out and use. I have no statistics about whether or not it increased the size of my list as I stopped blogging shortly after I installed it. This review is primarily based on ease of use.

The features

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How to Get Dreams Out of Your Head [And a Video of Me Wearing Tights]

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips, Video Posts 51 Comments Tweet

Watch it with your Tweeple: Tweet that you’re watching this video

Last month I had the honour of speaking at the World Domination Summit in Portland.

Conference founder, Chris Guillebeau, gave me the brief of sharing my story and to share some tips and ideas for helping people to lead remarkable lives in a conventional world. He also said he didn’t want me to just talk about blogging – a task I found very refreshing!

I spoke on the topic of ‘Getting Dreams out of Your Head‘ and covered quite a bit of ground. In this video you’ll see my full keynote and hear about:

How I started my first business at 9The words an ex-girlfriend said that changed my lifeThe 4 words that started me blogging and changed the trajectory of my lifeA close encounter I had with Russell Brand in a mens bathroomWhere to look for your ‘next big thing’The two questions I ask myself every day that have unlocked some amazing opportunities for me

Oh – and at the end of the video you’ll see me as you’ll never have seen me before (it involves wearing tights)! There’s also a special guest performance by the amazing Clare Bowditch which touched the hearts of many at WDS.

Grab yourself a cup of your favourite beverage, sit back and enjoy.

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6 Tips for Managing Multi-Author Blogs Without Losing Your Mind

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services 21 Comments Tweet This is a guest contribution from  Alexis Grant, an entrepreneurial writer and digital strategist.

Managing multi-author blogs can be a lot of work; you’re juggling contributors, an editing funnel, your calendar and maybe even promotion on social channels. But if you put certain systems in place, stay organized and know where to focus your efforts, you can decrease your time spent on the project while significantly increasing your blog traffic.

Because my company, Socialexis, manages several large blogs, we’ve discovered a few handy tips for being both efficient and effective. Here are six ideas for handling posts from a variety of contributors in a way that will help you grow your traffic and your community:

1. Create contributor guidelines.Putting some work into this up front will make your life much easier later. Rather than explain again and again what you’re looking for and how to submit, create guidelines and post them on your site, so you can refer potential contributors to that page.

But don’t stop there. Over time, make note of questions potential contributors ask, and add the answers to that web page. My team also likes to create bit.ly links for contributor guidelines, so we can easily remember and share the links.

For solid examples of contributor guidelines, check out guidelines for Muck Rack and Get Rich Slowly. If you can let your publication’s voice and personality shine in those guidelines, even better.

2. Take advantage of free tools.There’s a huge range of blog management tools out there, but you can usually get by with free tools, especially if you’re not running a high-volume site. We use Google Calendar as an editorial calendar and share it with anyone within the organization who needs to know when certain posts will run.

We also use WordPress’s Editorial Calendar plug-in, which lets you drag and drop drafts if you need to change your schedule. And Google Docs — also free — is a great tool for collaborative editing, so the author can see what changes we’ve made.

3. Use Canned Responses.This Gmail Lab is brilliant when it comes to emails you send again and again.

Keep receiving requests to write for your blog? Create a Canned Response that says you’d love to consider a post, with a link to your guidelines. Get a lot of pitches that aren’t a good fit? A Canned Response that says something along the lines of

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Jeremy Schoemaker’s Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages

Filed Under: Writing Content 11 Comments Tweet

This is a guest contribution from  Stephan Spencer.

Web entrepreneur and founder of hugely successful ShoeMoney Media Group and the Shoemoney blog, Jeremy Schoemaker has found incredible success in the use of long form sales pages. Although at an early point in his web-marketing career he questioned the effectiveness of such approaches, once he actually started using long form sales pages to market his online products, he was amazed by their success.

Surprisingly, they work.

People actually take the time to read the page and become familiar with the product you are offering. And if you’re still hesitant to believe this, consider that Jeremy uses these pages to generate well over a million dollars in annual infoproduct revenue.

The long form sales page alone won’t necessarily make you millions, but the use of Jeremy Schoemaker’s personal Ninja tricks to optimize your page will take you well on your way to online riches.

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