ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Darren Rowse: Blogger, Speaker, Author and Online Entrepreneur

Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

  1. 03/24/2020

    281: Join our 7 Day Content Sprint

    UPDATE: Because our free March Content Sprint was so popular we are now running a series of paid 7-Day Content Sprints running Live: 13-19 July 2020 17-23 August 2020 14-20 September More information and sign-up here: https://problogger.com/contentsprint/ A Free 7-Day Course to Create New Content Does your blog need a momentum boost? We’ve decided to run a LIVE 7-day Content Sprint to help support you create a plan and 6 new pieces of content for your blog in just 7 days. Starting next week (Monday 23rd March at 5pm PDT/8pm EDT / Tuesday 24th March at 11AM AEDT) Darren will be teaching live daily on FB in our ProBlogger Community Facebook Group (join here). Each day for 7 days we’ll roll out supporting resources here in the course and add the video in case you can’t make it live. Join us here: https://problogger.com/freecontentsprint/ Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, friends. It’s Darren here from ProBlogger. Welcome to episode 281 of the ProBlogger Podcast. I’ve also got a live audience watching us today. They’ve been chiming in and saying good day. We’ve got people watching from Singapore, California, Adelaide, and all around Australia. It seems to be quite a few Aussies on due to the time of day that we’re going at the moment. I will explain to you I have my son playing trumpet in the background today and this is not to give you ambient music but because he’s got an online trumpet lesson today as part of his schooling. Today, I want to give you a fun little opportunity. We have been hearing from a lot of ProBlogger readers, podcast listeners about their current situation and how they’re feeling about the Coronavirus, what’s been going on in their world, and how that’s impacting their blogging. We talked a little bit about that in the last episode, episode 280. I gave some suggestions on moving through it and blogging through this crisis. We also wanted to do something for you, and this is something that we want to offer to you for free, which will hopefully keep some momentum going in on your blog, and I hope this will help you.  As I just said on the live video, we have created this on-the-fly, so it’s not polished by any means, but we think there’s some value in it. I’m going to share my screen for the live video viewers and I’ll pop this same graphic up in the show notes for those of you who will be listening to this on the ProBlogger Podcast. This all comes out of us observing one of the big problems that a lot of our listeners have at the moment. That problem is that many people are really struggling right now with motivation for their blog, particularly with content at the moment. They have this big problem, that they’re feeling a lack of motivation, they’re feeling distracted by all the information that’s coming out at the moment about Coronavirus, and many are feeling fear and uncertainty about their businesses.  Someone just in the live stream said that they’ve lost their job out of this and that has brought fear and uncertainty for many of our readers. We’re certainly hearing that increasingly, or at least people feeling like their work, their employment might be coming to an end. They’re looking to their blog for some income but not really knowing how to do that and feeling paralyzed by it.  One of the results of this is a lack of content on many of our reader’s blogs or at least some blockages when it comes to creating content. If that’s you, then you’re not alone. If you’re watching the live video, let us know if that’s something that you do feel. If you’ve got a reason for that, if it’s fear, uncertainty, or it’s just distraction, let us know about that. I have felt that myself even over the last week. A week ago, I remember sitting for almost a full day, just consuming the news about coronavirus, and I realized that I really wasn’t any more informed at the end of the day than I was at the start. The next I got up and I decided I was going to do something positive instead of just consuming uncertainty around us. What we want to do on ProBlogger is to help you through the challenge of creating content at this time. The solution that we’ve come up with—again, this is on the fly, it’s not overly polished—is we want to do a seven-day content sprint. A seven-day sprint where, as bloggers, podcasters, YouTube creators, and whatever content creator you are, together, we’re going to move through seven days of creating content together. We want to call it a sprint because we’re going to do it for a defined period of time. We want to invite you to participate in it and to participate to the level that you feel comfortable in doing that. We’re calling it ProBlogger seven-day content sprint, and it’s going to happen next week. We’re going to start it on Tuesday Australian time, which is Monday US time, so this is the 23rd of March. I’ve said April on the screenshot there, but it’s actually the 23rd of March. That’s US time and the 24th of March is Australian time, Tuesday the 24th. It’s going to start that day, run for a week. Now, I know some of you right up-front are going to say, “Well, that’s not a good week for me.” I still want to encourage you to sign up for it, and then you can do it at your own pace if you choose to do that as well. It’s the type of thing that you can have, you continue to have access to after because the sprint is over and you can run it at your own pace as well. You might want to take two weeks to do it, that’s totally fine. What do you need to know about this sprint? Firstly, the cost is free. This is something we want to give you as bloggers, as readers of ProBlogger. It’s going to take a little bit of time for us but it’s something that we want to give because it’s definitely a need that we see in our community at the moment, one of the needs. You can sign up to be a part of the sprint at problogger.com/contentsprint, and if you’re watching live, you can go there right now pop in your email address and your details. We will let you know when things are kicking off and how they’re kicking off. At the moment there’s not a lot there once you’ve signed up to look at, but you’ll see there a bit of the format for the time that we want to go through as well. “Who is it for and what is it?” is one of the questions, actually, I got on my screen here. “What is it?” is another question. Basically, over the seven days, I don’t want to overwhelm you with content. I don’t want to overwhelm you with things that you need to do, listen to, or watch. I want to provide you with a short video every day, five or ten minutes. In that video, we’ll deliver it to our Facebook group in the ProBlogger community area. We’ll give you a little bit of further viewing or further teaching on that particular topic if you want it, but the main thing each day is that we’re going to give you a challenge to create a piece of content on that day. The content may not be a big one. I’ve mixed up the types of content that I’m going to challenge you to create. Some of them are quite easy to do, some of them are a little bit more involved. As I said before, you may choose to do this over seven days, or you may want to spread it out a little bit more. On day one, I’m going to take you through a bit of a planning exercise, and by the end of day one, you should know what your next six pieces of content are going to be on your blog, and then over the next six days, I want you to create those pieces of content. It’s going to be as simple as possible. I’m going to give you a new type of content for each day. I’ve tried to choose types of content that I think you could do on a blog, a podcast. You could do these on Instagram, you could do these on YouTube, you could do them on live video. I think all of these types of content could be done in lots of different formats. You might choose to do this in any of those formats. Day one, we’ll be planning to come up with six pieces of content for the rest of the week, and then over the next six days, you’ll create that content. You will need a little bit of time every day or as much as you’ve got on your hands to create content. For some of you, that’s going to be easy because you’re in lockdown or you’re in self-isolation at the moment; you’ve got lots of extra time on your hands. For some of you, you might need to put aside a little extra time before or after the rest of your day. Again, you can sign up for the sprint at problogger.com/contentsprint, pop in your email addresses there. The last thing I already had a couple of people asking is who’s this for. It’s anyone who’s struggling to create content right now, either because of the Coronavirus and feeling fear, uncertainty, and paralysis, or for anyone whose blogs just been dormant for a while.  So, whether you are a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, Instagramer, live streamer, or influencer, you are welcome to join. We’re going to have a daily piece of content for you to watch just to give you some ideas, and then the challenge is for you to go away and create that content. Then we’re going to have an opportunity for you to come back and share that content with the rest of the group. We want to encourage each of you to also visit a few other participant’s contents as well, maybe even share that. My hope is that you’ll come out of this seven days with six new pieces of content, that you will have interacted with some other bloggers, had some fun along the way, and hopefully even has some extra traffic along with that. Again, you can go at problogger.com/contentsprint and hopefully, we’ll see you next Monday/Tuesday, depending on where you are in the world. If you’re watching the live vi

  2. 03/23/2020

    280: COVID19 – How to Approach Blogging Through This Crisis

    Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there friends, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 280 of the ProBlogger podcast.  It’s been a while since we chatted and I do apologize for that, I needed a little time to get my headspace right and work on a couple of other projects, but I’m glad to be back. I’m particularly glad to be back at this time that we find ourselves in. We currently find ourselves in a bit of a crazy time with COVID-19, CoronaVirus, and all that it is meaning for us in the world we’re living in. We’re seeing so many people impacted, the economy impacted, and we’re seeing lots of new things, or at least they’re new to some people. We’re seeing a lot of people now having to work at home, something that many of us, as bloggers, have been doing for a while. Today, what I want to talk a little bit about is how we navigate this time as bloggers. How do we, as bloggers, not only keep our businesses going, but how do we actually do something to serve our world where there’s so much need at the moment. I jumped on to Facebook Live earlier today and shared my thoughts on that.  What I want to share with you today is a recording of that Facebook Live. I did a bit of teaching in the middle of that. I talked a little bit about what the world doesn’t need right now, what the world does need right now, and why we, as bloggers, are actually ideally positioned to make a difference. I want to give you some practical thoughts on how to go about that. Some things to keep in mind, some things to avoid, also just tackling that tricky question of how do we actually make it a win-win for our audience and for us without seeming selfish in the midst of that as well, and actually about how not to be selfish in the midst of that as well. There are some of the things I cover in the recording I’m about to play for you. I just want to say though right up front, I hope you’re doing well. I’m doing well, I’ve had a bit of a scare and I’ll talk about that in the recording today, over the last week or so, but I hope you’re doing well. I really do want to emphasize the point that I make numerous times in this recording that I hope you look after yourself in this time.  We need you to look after yourself. If you are going to make a difference, if you’re going to use your blogging, your online profile to make the world a better place, right now we need you to look after yourself as well. I hope you’re doing well and I hope you do take seriously the question I pose of you in this recording: what can we do at ProBlogger to serve you better through this time? Is there something that you are facing right now in your blogging that you’d like some content to be produced to help you to navigate that challenge. If you would like to drop me a line, my team a line, you can send an email to help@problogger.com and that will go to our support team. We’ll put it in front of the person who is best able to help if we can, and hopefully that will inform some content going forward. If you do want to stay in touch with this, head over to our Facebook Page, facebook.com/problogger, and you will get any future Facebook Lives and updates from there. We’ve got our email newsletter which is still going out every week over in ProBlogger that you can sign up for. If you want the show notes today, head over to problogger.com/podcast/280. I’ll come back at the end of this recording and wrap things up. Thanks for listening! Hi there everyone, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to the ProBlogger Podcast, also welcome to those of you who are watching this live. I am going live onto Facebook today while I’m recording. Because I think it is an important topic and it’s one that I do want to get our communities input in as well. Our love viewers may have some thoughts to share that I will include in the podcast as well as if I think they’re relevant.  Obviously, we’re going through uncharted waters right now with this whole COVID-19, CoronaVirus, thing. As I was just saying on the live Facebook, this is something that most of us haven’t been through before. We have not really done pandemics, at least in my lifetime. There’s certainly been health crisis in different parts of the world and we can learn from people who’ve gone through those, but this is new for us all. We’re all finding our way. One of the things I do want to say right up front is that it is a chaotic time. Here in Australia we’re moving towards social isolation, we’re seeing different parts of the world people going into lockdowns. There’s chaos happening right now, but I tweeted the other day that in the midst of chaos always comes invention, always come innovation, always comes entrepreneurship. I mean entrepreneurship not just in terms of making money, but entrepreneurship really is about seeing a problem and solving that problem. Usually in a win-win kind of way for people who have that problem and also the people creating the solution. Once we’re going into a term of chaos, we’re also going to see some real innovation at the moment. Just yesterday, I saw one of my friends on Facebook saying that they were working on 3D printing of ventilators. Ventilators are going to be something that there’s shortage of in different parts of the world in hospitals and he wanted to come out with a way of 3D printing a ventilator. I don’t know how he’s going to go with that, but he said there are communities already getting together to 3D print medical supplies. This is innovation happening right before us as a response to the chaos and the need around us. Whilst it is an uncertain time, whilst there’s also a lot of fear, my hope is that we as humanity are going to respond with innovation, invention and it is my hope as bloggers that we can be a part of that. That’s one of the big themes of what I want to talk about today, is that whilst this is tough, there’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of sickness going on, hopefully we can meet that as a community and that’s my challenge to us today. Let me talk a little bit about what I think the world doesn’t need right now. I want us to keep this in the back of our mind as we think about what we can do, let’s start with what the world doesn’t need right now.  I don’t think we need bad information right now. There’s a lot of information flying around and I don’t think we, as bloggers, need to add to that, unless we have some expertise already. One of the things I’d encourage us all to do is to resist the temptation to just share whatever we see on Facebook, but to really fact check and to leave it to the experts to share that and to find credible sources of information that we can share. But certainly unless you’ve got the expertise, I really want to say up front, we need to be really careful about that.  I don’t think the world needs right now is more hype or more messaging about COVID-19. There’s so much going out there. We really want to be restrained in how much content we do share right now on this particular topic and we really want to avoid hype. The other thing the world doesn’t need right now is more fear. Fear is a healthy thing, fear is a signal to us that something important is happening, something that might hurt us, but at the same time what the world does need right now is some hope and we can be a part of that. I don’t think we need empty memes, I don’t think the world needs manipulation right now, to buy more stuff. What the world needs is some practical support. My hope is that we can be involved in that. What does the world need right now? Hope, practical solutions to problems that are emerging. I don’t just mean health solutions, I think there are all kinds of problems emerging right now. For example, I’ve seen problems in our community around shortages of food, I’ve seen problems in our community of people who are feeling isolated and lonely. These are problems that the world needs solutions for and we’re beginning to see that innovation happen. The world right now needs places where we can come together, and where community and belonging can happen, particularly in this time where physically people are becoming isolated, the world needs perhaps some virtual spaces and some safe spaces where they can find that belonging. The world needs people who are skilled at working online right now. I really want to emphasize this, even in the last two days I’ve had three different organizations contact me and say, “We need your help.” My church, they want to move all their stuff online and we’re seeing this all over the place. Schools are moving online. Some of them don’t have any infrastructure really set up. Our churches and places of worship are doing it, not for profits. I had a not for profit email me in the last 24 hours saying, “How do we move online? As a team to work online, but also how do we move our communications online as well.” Because they’re not able to do events. We’re seeing community groups move on. There’s a lot of stuff moving online. The world right now needs people who have experience and who have the skills and the tools to go online. As bloggers, many of us are ideally situated for that. Here is the thing, as bloggers, we are ideally situated to serve our world right now. Here are few other reasons why I think we are ideally placed to be a part of solutions right now. Firstly, we have technology already set up. Most of us already have our blogs, most of us already have the tools, the computers, the cameras, the microphones, the lights to create content. We’ve already got that stuff at our fingertips. We’re used to using it already. Even just the fact that we’ve got our smartphones, but

  3. 07/23/2019

    279: How Jeff Goins Evolved His Blogging Into a Million Dollar Business

    Today on the podcast, we have a special guest, Jeff Goins. I’ve been wanting to bring Jeff Goins to the podcast for a while now. Many of you know of Jeff, he has a fantastic blog that I do encourage you to check out. I wanted to get Jeff on the show today to talk a little bit about how his business or his blogging business has evolved over the years, because he started a number of years ago now. What he’s doing today is very different to the way he started. He really started in a personal record keeping kind of way with his blogging and he’s grown his brand, and his business around that.

  4. 06/26/2019

    278: Evolve Don’t Revolve Your Blogging

    Today, I've got a special treat, a keynote that I gave a couple of years ago at our ProBlogger event in Melbourne. It's titled Evolve Don't Revolve. It's all about how as bloggers and online entrepreneurs. It is really easy to revolve in our blogging, to just go around in circles. The call of this keynote is to look at seven different areas where you can evolve your blog and online business. I also want to tell you about a new event coming up in August of this year on the 10th and 11th of August, again, in Melbourne. There's two options for those of you who want to come to our event in Melbourne.

  5. 02/25/2019

    277: The Secret to Building a Better Blog

    In today’s episode we’re going to talk a little bit of our secret of growing your blog. I think it’s the number one way to grow a blog and this ties into a promotion that we’ve got on at the moment on our 31 Days To Build A Better Blog course. I know many of you have gone through our Start A Blog course over the last couple of months and to continue the good work that you’ve done, we’ve decided to make 31 Days To Build A Better Blog 50% off for the next week or so until the end of February.

  6. 02/18/2019

    276: How to Start a Successful Podcast

    Do you already have a blog and are thinking about expanding into another medium? Why not consider starting a podcast. Our Facegroup members have shared several questions about starting a podcast, especially about gear, content, engagement, hosting, launching, and monetization. I went to an expert for answers to all your questions. Today’s guest is Craig Hewitt, founder of Podcast Motor and Castos.

  7. 02/01/2019

    275: How One Blogger Quit Her Job and Started a Lifestyle Blog

    Today we’re finishing up our series of podcasts from stories who did our free Start A Blog course. We’re going to hear today from Jackie Baker from Pretty Things, Yummy Food. It’s a lifestyle blog and it’s only been going for six months. Jackie started her blog as a result of going through our course and you’re going to hear her talk a little bit about that in today’s story. She recommends a great tool for those of you who are starting out and want to create some cool social graphics and gives you a few good tips as well.

  8. 01/31/2019

    274: How Stefano Changed Blogging Platforms and Started Blogging with a Plan

    Today’s story comes from Stefano Caioni from stefanocaioni.com. He is a web developer, who is a photographer as well, and his blog is about photography. Stefano actually came to blogging with a bit of a tech background, which is different to many people. We’ve had others in this series who came with no technology kind of background whatsoever. Stefano has created a beautiful-looking blog with that background but he has some interesting reflections upon that journey.

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