1. It’s not about doing more – it’s about doing what matters.

Before I started college I used to dedicate around 12-15 hours just for a single blog. I tried to be a super-blogger. Trying to do everything that I’ve heard people say that would make me a successful blogger. Things include trying to be a top user of stumbleupon, researching hours and hours for quality posts, commenting on 30-50 other blogs per day and so on.

Needless to say, about 2-3 weeks later, I got fed up of the whole thing, and didn’t do anything related to blogging for around 2 months as I was disappointed with the results. When I started out again, I knew that I couldn’t be a super-blogger. It’s not about working harder. It’s about working smarter.

2. You must find your own rhythm.

There will be enough and more people who would tell you “how to manage your blog”. But that doesn’t mean that you should do it exactly as they say.

I have told many times through my posts that doing several posts at a time can really save your time. Well, it’s true. It saves time and I have tried it out. But I do not do that. Why? It’s just not aligning itself with my rhythm. I’m a person who gets bored really easily when doing repetitive tasks. So when I do something, I like to have the freedom of chopping down my work. So, when I blog, I tend to take my time, and not do a lot of blogging at once.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s recommended by 100 bloggers, you must do what feels right to you. You’re not them. So, it’s pretty hard for someone else to be so accurate about how you should do something.

3. No one will tell you where the treasure is – you must find your own

Just imagine., if someone had a treasure map, would that person be so stupid enough to share it with the rest of the world and lessen his cut from the tresure? He could have the tresure to himself.

Likewise, if you’re looking to strike gold by looking for secrets from other bloggers, there’s not that much of a chance for that. For an exmple, I have my own way of doing SEO, that I have learnt through experiences of 6-7 years. Some of them, I have and I will share with you guys from this blog. But, to be honest, the most effective ones that I’ve discovered by myself would not be shared even through a $97 e-book.

What people learn through experience and experimentation is pure gold because they learn it by themselves. And what they learn, give them the edge in the things that they do. If they give it away, if they share their gold with the world, they won’t be as rich. So, if you’re looking for gold, dont expect to people to be so charitable.

4. It’s not about running faster, it’s about running longer.

Ramzi Rashid, the Gold Medal winner in Beijing 2008 men’s 1500m wasn’t the fastest runner in the world. Usain bolt could have beaten him to a pulp in the men’s 100m. But the thing was Rashid had to run 1500m and finish it, being the fastest. If he tried to run like Usain Bolt in his race, he wouldn’t be standing after 600m.

True enough, you might not have much traffic when you’re starting out and you might be in desperate need of subscribers. But that doesn’t mean you must go ahead and do everything there is to get your blog going. You should have a plan in doing it. Much like Rashid plans his race for the first 500m, second 500m, third 400m and the last 100m. He doesn’t run as fast as he could in the first 1000m, because he must run longer.

Only time will tell a blog’s true success. If you know how it should be done, you’ll see stardom a bit faster than others. But, whether you know it or not, it’s important that you understand that doing 30 things in 30 days is more realistic and achivable than doing 30 things in 2 days and giving up after that. Persistence is key.

5. Magic beans exist where others fail to look.

I’m a firm believer in the statement “A blog has endless potential”. But I don’t belive that potential could be achieved by running a rat race. The rat race that so many rats are running, not realizing that they are just following the rats in front of them.

But, what if I don’t want to be a runing rat? What if I want to be like Stuart Little and fly in an aeroplane? Then I will have my own heading, and I will travel faster than the other mice.

Likewise, don’t just run the rat race. Think differently, and think out of the box. Look for answers where others won’t look, and you will find your magic beans, Jack. Performancing Ads came up offering $10 per referral for publishers who refer other to the network. Needless to say, every blogger on the block promoted them with free reviews asking their readers to sign-up through them. Certain a-listers wrote half a dozen of posts dedicated to Performancing Ads alone., trying to get their readers to sign-up.

But I saw things in a different light. A couple of e-mail exchanged with Ryan Caldwell of the Performancing team, 45 minutes later, I was running my own Peformancing Ads contest, sponsored by Performancing Ads.

I didn’t need to wite 5 reviews about Performancing Ads to get so many referrals. I only had a 5 minute braistorming session, a 45 minute e-mail exchange, a 40 minute promotion campaign. What took someone else 5 reviews, 5 days and 5 hours to accomplish was achieved within less than two hours, 1 post and 1 day.

Guess I found a few magic beans where others failed to look.

…

101. Head fake: Exaggeration only works if you do not compromise on quality.

Everyone exaggerates the potential of their product/service, in this case, the blog post. I was sure that most of the bloggers reading this post would gain something – even a little thing – and would find this a read worthwhile. I was not being overconfident – but ambitious. So, I had to exaggerate a little bit about the size of the whole thing.

But, despite of the head fake, I’m proud to say I never exaggerated nor compromised on the quality on this post. Quality always works. Quantity? not always. If you’re still reading this, then you’d know just why

Inspired by Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, and 20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life by Zenhabits.

Technorati Tags: randy pausch, stuart little, usain bolt, ramiz rashid, blogging tips
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Stereotypes aren’t always misconceptions. They are over-generalized ideas that form in peoples’ heads. So does the MMO niche have these stereotypes?

1. “MMO niche is trash…” – No it’s not! It’s a big bin for trash – and killer toys alike.
2. “People in the MMO field doesn’t actually make money” – A good number.. yes! But, you don’t have to listen to them since they do not have anything productive to give you.
3. “Most of the people in MMO niche are scamming others” – Some.. yes.. But most of them “scammers” are just taking advantage of what you don’t know.
4. “MMO bloggers are at the top of the blogosphere’s revenue pyramid” – Not true! For every 1000 bloggers, there is one corporation that they are willing to promote for little or no incentive.
5. “MMO niche is really competitive” – Judging by the number of people who don’t make any money, it’s not as competitive as people would picture it to be. And there’s plenty of room to grow.
6. “MMO niche is full of Jerks” – Not quite! MMO is the only niche where jerks proudly wear “I’m a jerk” shirt. In other niches, it’s a bit hard to find out who the jerks are.
7. “The whole thing lacks innovation” – It doesn’t lack innovation. Just that many bloggers aren’t willing to expose new innovative methods of getting on top of something.

So, there you go. Just having some fun this time on Friday:)

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You know, it was July last year when I thought of getting into the blogging business. I’ve done my fair share of web development since I was 14 and I knew a thing or two about web monetization and all. My initial response to starting up a blog and running it was – “Been there.. Done that!”.

In other words, I thought that just because I had the mind set of developing one of Sri Lanka’s first social media sites in ASP.NET and successfully promoting it when I was just 15, (e-palsrilanka.com – which I gave up after 1 year because I had no way of covering up the expenses since my audience was only at an infant stage), I knew blogging like the palm of my hand. I thought making money blogging was going to be really easy.

And that’s where I went horribly wrong.

See, I did code a full “Sri Lankan Facebook” – and even hand coded a Forum (like phpBB), but I couldn’t figure out the odds and ends of how blogosphere worked. I guess what I’m trying to say is that – blogs, are the most humane form of Web 2.0! It’s not just another web site and no matter how well you specialize in SEO or Web Design, it’s a total different art. And when I say this, I’m not talking about making money – I’m talking about blogging – I’m talking about connecting with the reader – I’m talking about what some bloggers tend to refer to as “a lot of work”.

If you want to make money from blogs, you don’t have to blog about making money. Nope! In 4 steps, I can let out the secret of ultimate money making from blogs. Ready?

1. Do a Keyword Search and find an relatively uncompetitive niche.
2. Start a blog and post some niche articles in it.
3. Monetize it – You know the drill… AdSense, Affiliate links, all that jazz.
4. Do you SEO and let the good times roll.

That’s easy right? If I want to do something like that, heck, I can pull off 5 blogs like that per month, from the time it takes me to pull this blog off. And I’m not saying that I’m not doing it already:) But, here’s my point. Those 5 blogs can bring me as 3 times as much money I make from this blog – or more! Which means, If I want to triple my online income, I just have to give up on this blog. So, if I’m really concentrated about making money blogging, why am I not doing it?

Well for one, the income from a master blog (like ROCKFUSE for me) is subjected to a great rate of growth over time, and the time consumed is subjected to subside.

But that’s not the most important thing. The biggest reason why I do this is that “I enjoy doing this”. True, at first, I just wanted to tap into this niche and find out what the prospects are. But overtime, it’s been what I “enjoy about it”, rather than how much money I make off it. I know what most of you would think right now – “How the hell can he enjoy blogging in the “Make Money Online” niche?”

To answer that;

• Number one would be the extreme competitive nature. I like the competitive atmosphere. It’s always about who stands out from the crowd since there is a pretty large crowd.
• Number two would be; It’s a niche where you can test all your business/online marketing skills. I like getting to know people, building relationships and promoting my business while offering something genuinely helpful. And I like to sharpen up my SEO skills (that’s something I’ve been really into since I was 15) and establish myself as an authority in online marketing.  don’t think there are many other niches that offer that.
• Number three would be; Because I like helping out people. I may sound like those guys studying philosophy right now, (which I do actually ) but it’s great when you can be in one of those niches where the other 156,415,456 blogs can benefit from.

I can remember when I was just a new kid on the block – in this niche, my Superheroes (Steve Pavlina, Arianna Huffington, Darren Rowse, John Chow) telling me that the reason for their success in this niche was their passion for it. That the money that they get is actually a bonus – and not the objective. And this is one instance where they were absolutely right. I don’t care whether they believe in it themselves but I surely do.

So, what’s the irony of this all?

New bloggers get into the “Make Money Online” niche everyday. They have multiple “Make Money Online” blogs sometimes. When someone posts up his/her blog earnings, they get psyched up and tell themselves – “Wow! this is a really good laid back method to make a living”. But by doing that, they concentrate all their efforts into a very heated niche and most of the time fail miserably. For every one blogger making decent money from a blog, there’s another hundred barely getting back what they put into it.

Ironical isn’t it? The few keeping up with the competition are the ones who are extremely passionate about it, and have prioritized their passion, as much as their objective of making money online. It’s like playing Monopoly – only that the money is real.
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Do you experiment with your blog? Of course! Everyone does. But in this vast blogosphere, our success depends on how soon, how efficiently we evolve. Just think about it. If you tried mass blog commenting for one week, and you spent around 1-2 hours just to do it, and if your return was 10 hits per day and declining thereafter, what’s the point of keep doing it? There was a time that, when  you leave a good comment at Problogger, you got about 5 or 6 hits from it. But no more – too many people want a piece of the pie.

Are you spending hours and hours per week on Social Media promotion? If so, try to keep track of your time – and monitor the returns. Are you getting what you thought you would? If not, it’s time to move on. Someone who was way smarter than me once said, “You’d regret the things that you didn’t do, than the things that you did and achieved or failed”. And if you take a hard look at yourself right now, you’d probably know he’s right.

What works for someone else might not work for you. As I always say, you can not replicate other people’s success. Which means, only you can create your own success formula. To create your formula, you must experiment. It might be your approach of blog promotion – It might be your blog design that you stuck to for the past 6 months – It might be how you promoted yourself on Social Media. Just ask yourself – can I get more than what I asked for? so how?

Conclusively, the funny thing is that all the answers to the questions that you raise about building a killer blog, doesn’t lie in e-books, training courses, or other blogs. It lies within the discoveries that you make in the process of experimentation. E-books, training courses, or other blogs offering blogging tips are only your manuals for the experimentation test subjects.

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People will tell you to wait before you get a certain number of subscribers or a certain amount of stable traffic before you monetize a blog. But why? These are their claims:

One – You visitors will be reluctant to trust you as a reliable source if you put up ads.

Two – You will not make any money in the beginning.

But, this is what they don’t realize.

One – someday later, you will indeed put up ads on your blog. If a person doesn’t trust you as a reliable source if you put up ads on your blog then, what makes you think that, this person will trust you now? The point is that, there will always be people hardwired to their beliefs that blogs shouldn’t be monetized. You won’t make a dime out of them. It’s the other 99% of your online audience you should worry about. If you offer worthy content, you will not possibly put off a prospective subscriber with your ads.

Two – it isn’t true at all that you will not make any money when you’re starting up. However, it is possible that you will make somewhat less money. But, if you make $0.05 a day from AdSense, and if you wait for 2 months to monetize your blog, that’s $3 thrown away for no reason at all. As I said earlier, if you offer worthy content, you will not possibly put off a prospective subscriber with your ads.

One of the bloggers that I admire most is Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration. I watched an interview where he says that a new blogger should wait at least 1 year before monetizing his/her blog. If I took his advice, I would have been much much less financially stable now, which sucks:) Reminds me of my earlier article – Don’t do it just because A-listers tell you to do so!

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There’s no doubt that so called A-listers help hundreds of newbie bloggers to get started and so on. Take what they have to offer – not who they are. I’m just saying this because there are hundreds and hundreds of newbies that follow these A-listers, and imitate every trait of them, even worship them, trying to be them. You can not replicate their success, simply because, you’re not them!

Ever since I’ve started blogging, I’ve gone on to explore and employ new success formulae. And a good percentage of them are not the repetitive “Blogging about Blogging” tips that you hear 243 times per day in your feed reader. The day that I wanted to make a difference is the day that I realized I have to be different. Take an example.

If 5 bloggers who have 20,000 feed subscribers each exposed that posting on forums is a killer way of getting traffic to your blog, out of the 100,000 people, at least 10,000 will test it out? And if you’re one of them posting on forums, and think that the A-lister had exposed an absolute secret to you, you’re dead wrong! You’re just competing with 9,999 people, all wanting a piece of the pie. It’s not something wrong with the person who’s saying forum posting is a killer secret – it’s something wrong with the person who’s blindly buying it out even though it had hardly made a difference for him.

So, do you fully understand that you can’t be successful by replicating someone else’s success? I’m not asking you to disregard what successful people have to say. But rather, try to look at what they have to say in an open mind.

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Well, for starters, Trace didn’t win the show. Nope. Piers Morgan did. But Trace did make the finals. So, here’s the thing. I’ve been following “The Apprentice” for all of the 7 seasons and it’s the first time the guy who was liked lesser than the other came through in the finals. Undoubtedly, Trace Adkins was far more popular than Piers Morgan (in the show), but Piers won the show. And, I don’t blame Donald Trump for making that decision because according to the given criteria, Piers deserved to win the whole thing.

But, if Piers performed better, why was Trace Adkins the favorite celebrity out of the whole lot? Well, he is a nice guy and the most important thing – he only said something when it mattered and actually made sense about it. And that’s what I learnt from Trace.

See, in a show like “The Celebrity Apprentice”, every celebrity wants to become “The Celebrity”, and they end up talking a whole lot more than what’s needed. And in a show like that, people tend to think that the biggest talker stands out the most. It’s somewhat like what we bloggers are trying to do. We so badly want to be recognized as the pinnacle of our niches so we become “big talkers” and are so focused on creating content for our blogs. We are more concentrated on creating content rich blogs since we see it as the way to go.

But in a show like that, Trace did the complete opposite. He knew when to talk and knew when to shut up. And that’s what made him popular, and make him stand-out. When you talk more, people tend to divert their attention elsewhere since most of your words won’t concern them. The same with blogging. If you are creating a whole lot of content and not stopping to see whether your followers are actually fond of listening to you, you got a problem there.

You shouldn’t create content for the sake of keeping up your posting frequency or for the sake of giving people something to read. It should be because you have something valuable to offer and because you believe in what you say. So, when all the other bloggers are running this rat-race past you, just stop and think for a second whether you’re running with all of them or taking a different approach to stand out from the rest.

People won’t read everything you write. They will only read what they want to read. So, are you offering them what you want to write and what they want to read, or what you hardly want to write and what they hardly want to read?

[tags]Trace Adkins, Celebrity Apprentice, Donald Trump, Piers Morgan, Blogging[/tags]
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You know, running a blog is like running a TV station. It’s new media for one thing and secondly, it’s one of the most powerful means of new media. Everyone has an opinion and unlike a TV station, for a fraction of that cost (or no cost at all), you’ll be running a blog. And like all interactive media, you’ll have a list of followers – subscribers for your blog. And like all journalists, you’re free to be opinionated and offer your opinion through your blog. And this is where blog reviews come in.

Offering your opinion through your blog can both play out for the better and the worse. There will always be people going against your opinion. But by starting a blog, what you’re indirectly trying to say is that “My opinion counts and therefore I want to express it”. Talking about blog reviews, that is exactly what you’re saying. Nowadays, there are blogs dedicated to offering reviews; And even blogs dedicated to specific niches.

And what all blog reviews do is that they convert a reader of that review to a user of that product or service. In a simple instance, if I’m doing a review of a product I find interesting, what I want to do is convert as much readers as possible to try out that service.

So how far can your review go?

A blog review can go a long way. But frankly said, everything depends on the impact that particular blog review makes inside a specific community of prospective users of the product or service reviewed. And creating this impact depends on a number of factors.

• How big your reader-base is
• How honestly you’ve reviewed the system: Sooner or later your readers are going to find out whether you’re a sell-out or not.
• Your content writing skills in highlighting “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”

Do you do blog reviews?

So what are the incentives that blog reviews offer? Of course, the foremost answer would be “money”. Alright, so you get paid to review stuff. What else? You know, what I learnt from my rather short existence in the MMO niche is that money is not everything.

Out of all the reviews I’ve done, only about 5%-6% are paid reviews. Others are done for the sole objective of letting my readers find out what’s worthy of their time. So most of the time, that’s the only incentive that I’m offered. And in return, I’m giving my readers an incentive to follow my blog, so that they will strengthen my reader-base so that my future will reviews will create a greater impact.

Occasionally, I tend to get the opportunity to network with top people from the products/services that I’m reviewing; Since at times they tend to check out who’s linking to their web site or contributing to the buzz.

And being transparent throughout the reviewing process, you can establish yourself as an unbiased blogger, not swayed by the incentives that the sponsor offer – in a sponsored review, that’d be money. The greatest return of being ethical would be the loyalty of your readers. Your opinion tends to be placed with more value. Like I said, “somethings are more important than money”.

Do people “buy it” when you’re doing paid reviews?

Well, that really depends on your style. I tend to reject offers when advertisers ask for a “100% positive” review. Why? I’d obviously find loopholes in any system and I’d offer constructive criticism. If you’re recommending something to my readers, you need to tell them things that they should look out for. Sure, by offering criticism you’d probably prevent a few of your readers from actually testing the service. But if you don’t tell them, chances are likely they will stop following you around because of you giving them hollow promises.

What I understand is that your blogs presence is not challenged as long as you maintain your code of ethics. And your code of ethics wont be challenge as long as you’re being honest.

If you want a more inside look at this, please refer to this post on “Is is ethical offering paid blog reviews?”.

So, what are the incentives of being honest? Well, for one, establishing yourself as an ethical authority will bring you a lot of incentives. By doing that, people will buy what you have to say, and more people buying stuff means more advertisers for you. And that means more money and more everything. So you see, if people don’t buy what you produce, the demand will drop, and so will your blog.

Adding your own twist

To the extent of my knowledge, you will not be able to experience all the wonders of the honest blog reviews unless you add your own twist to it.

Coal is black. Everyone knows it. There’s no point in doing a review about coal to say it’s black. Likewise, you should be more concerned about looking beyond the obvious facts of a product or a service. With so many people contributing to a popular service which is creating so much buzz in the blogosphere, everyone will write the same thing. And the only reason why people should read your review is because, well, you bring something different to the table. Because you added your own twist to it.

Try highlighting something that everyone doesn’t see. For an instance, I was recently featured on the Woopra blog because of my post about the “Woopra Sharing Access”. When everyone was telling how cool their interface is I added my own twist to it by showing the benefits of how private advertisers of a blog can benefit from WSA.

Conclusion

You know, I believe every blog review, sponsored or non-sponsored has some incentive to offer. The question is whether a blogger is ready, capable of understanding and open to receive all the benefits. Some say that paid reviews will drastically decrease the quality of a blog, but I disagree. I haven’t had negative feedbacks or any negative return by doing paid reviews.

Honestly, what keeps me going is the money I make, people I’ve met and all the readers I’ve helped from being truthful in my reviews. And yes, as you might have already suspected, it had done wonders for me.

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The comments attached to a blog post are there for a reason. Some see it as a way of developing a discussion on the direction where the blog post is headed and some see it as a way of clarifying the content of the blog post by asking questions and so on. But, here’s the deal. It’s alright if you want to appreciate the blogger for his/her efforts. But, you should do it in a way that it is beneficial for you and the blogger.

For an instance, leaving a comments in a do-follow blog with just two words is very beneficial for you since you can develop backlinks to a blog of your choice without any extra effort or cost. But it’s not the same thing for the author. Chances are that there are many others who are doing the same thing (leaving two word comments) and 20 comments saying “Nice article” is not going to help the author at all. Though you do it deliberately or not, it might be evident to the author that you just left a comment to gain a backlink. And therefore, the author may in fact blacklist you from the blog and that’s not something you can blame that blogger for.

When I find an interesting blog post, I always read it. But, that doesn’t mean that I always comment on it. I will only comment on it if I feel there’s something I want to add and something I am not unclear about. And if I come across a niche that I am not familiar with or interested in, I will hold back my comments since I will totally be classified as a no-good pole cat for leaving irrelevant comments. Some of my friends who are niche bloggers, complain all the time that these kind of things happen and I know what it feels when someone manipulates your blog to get some Google juice.

Comments should be a way of interacting with a blogger and that blog’s community. People tend to read the follow-up comments at times when the blog post is interesting. So, if I leave a two word comment on a blog post, that just means that I’m being major selfish and making that blog post’s quality drain out as a result of my personal agenda. And, with that, I can’t blame that blogger if he/she chooses to label me as a spammer, since there’s no difference between the prime objective of spam bots and me.

I tend to follow a code of ethics – maybe that’s a big weakness in an ever competitive niche. Over to you…

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Recently, an article was published on Newsweek that said about “Badges of Secrecy“. The article profiled some badges used in the US military that were totally out-of-the-box and bizarre. Some of them had images of aliens on them, some of them had mythic characters. And in the article, the author, defined the meaning of almost all the badges. Some of them, according to him, were used for operations concerning extra-terrestrial beings (aliens). Some of them were used for Top Secret super-weapon experiments. Some of them were used by computer hackers – all in the US defense.

Some people call this a hoax and some conspiracy theorists like me, we aren’t too surprised with his findings. People argue, but the bottom line is, because of this article, Newsweek had a humongous online exposure and in turn, the author, sold his book. The book and the article was two of my most controversial finds in the recent past.

Controversial bloggers

A blogger being controversial – does it work? Well, according to my experiences, it does. As long as your posts have controversy in them, people will actually care. Like the Newsweek article, people do not actually care whether it’s wrong or right., as long as the headline says “Scientists fear, the apocalypse is near”.

Some controversial bloggers in my niche, like The University Kid and John Cow have done very well for themselves in a very short time with their controversial nature. True enough, they get a mass beating once in a while from their readers for being too controversial. But I guess it’s all in the game. As long as it gets you going in the direction that you want to, controversial bloggers are happy with what they get.

Preventing the backfire

Even when you have all the proof you need, unless you’re very sure, just do not bother to offend another party. If the offended party is strong enough, they can do you a lot of harm. And I’m just not talking about the negative comments. On the other hand, if you have facts to back it up, it might be worth a try.

I can remember imod’s attack on lushable for his 30-day 1000 subscribers. imod pointed out that there’s no way lushable can get 1000 subscibers in 30 days considering his traffic and so on. But lushable disagreed. And finally, it got too hot for lushable, so he actually gave in. Now if you visit his blog, you can see actually 88 subscribers are there in comparison to the 1000; 30 days ago.

Always know whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Because most of the time, in the blogosphere, it isn’t.

Controversy creates cash

Yes it does. That was from the former WWE RAW Chairman Eric Bischoff. He had a NY Times Bestseller in the name of “Controversy creates cash”. According to him and many others, the multi-billion wrestling empire of WWE was built on controversial reality TV. And in his book, he explains how a business can actually profit from controversy. And, he is right.

In a blog niche where so many bloggers are doing the same thing, being controversial is the high-road to the top of the food chain to eliminate some competition. But the downside is someone always gets hurt. Is it ethical? It depends. If you’re willing to go the distance of actually offending someone, make sure that person being offended very well deserves it. You won’t do much good off hollow controversy. Don’t you think?

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