If you have a blog, you certainly like being able to feature guest posts, right? It is a situation where everyone wins. The guest blogger wins because he gets a chance to reach your audience. Your readers win because they get to read some good content and to see a different perspective on your blog. You win because you get a free piece of content and th opportunity to network with fellow bloggers.

The only problem is that receiving quality guest post submissions regularly is not that easy. If your blog is relatively new or small, in fact, it will be pretty hard to get people sending your their guest posts.

If you are in that situation, though, here is a trick you can use. When I started using it the amount of guest post submissions I was receiving on this blog doubled. Basically you need to write a post or page outlining the guidelines for guest posting on your blog. If you want to see an example of such a page check mine here.

Once you have that, simply write a message on top of every guest post that says:

This is a guest post by John Doe. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Obviously the “check out the guidelines here” part should be linked to your page.

It is a simple but very effective tactic to increase the number of submissions you’ll get. First of all because you make it explicit that you are accepting guest posts. Second because you already inform interested people about the process of submitting and getting their guest posts approved.

If you are having trouble to get the very first guest posts submitted, on the other hand, check the post How Do I Get Others to Guest Blog on My Blog? that I wrote a while ago. It gives you some tips to get started.

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This is a guest post by Edward Khoo. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

You check your traffic every day but all you find are tumbleweeds blowing across the landscape of your blog. Well, there’s a reason you’re not building readership. Your blog sucks.

Most do, and all for the same reasons. The same 10 reasons.

1. You use syndicated content. You can download badly-written articles on the topic of your website at ezine.com, helium.com, goarticles.com and other places on the web. You can cut and paste these pieces on your blog and all you have to do is provide a link back to the author’s site or blog. You can, but you shouldn’t. Without unique content your blog is nothing.

2. Your blog is boring. There I said it. Write about topics that interest me, your reader, not topics that interest you. I want you to keep me engaged, entertain me and teach me. Otherwise, you’re boring me.

3. Your blog revolves around your person. Stop talking about yourself already. I don’t know you personally, and I couldn’t care less about your ramblings. Tell me something I can use in my own life. Facts, stories, not boring personal stuff.

4. Oh no, not your favorite music on auto-play! So as soon as I access your blog, the ukulele string quartet starts playing? I’d rather hear an accordion band. Don’t add music to your site. Half the people won’t like it and the other half will find it’s a distraction.

5. You use clip art. I can spot it a mile away. The model smiling, the perfect family spending the day at the beach, the marathon runner – all license free clip art. And with free clip art, you get what you pay for.

6. I can’t find the post I want to read. So I have to scroll down through pages and pages to find the piece you posted two months ago. First, even the simplest blog platforms allow for categories and search boxes.

7. Your writing totally sucks. Oh, not the writing itself. You’ve got a good writing style. Easy to read. But your posts are loaded with typos, misspellings, lost punctuation and other mistakes that signal you don’t care enough about your readers.

8. You’re spinning articles. You might not be using software to actually spin the articles, but you are writing about the same stuff everyone else inside your niche is. This is not as bad as getting content from article directories, as you are actually using your own words here, but it won’t cut it all the same. Write something interesting or go home.

9. You post once a month. How often you think I’m coming back to see if there’s some new, pithy pearl of wisdom I can glean from your blog? If you can’t update your blog at least a couple of times a week, forget about it.

10. Your blog looks like 12023532989 other blogs. Wordpress offers hundreds of templates from which to choose. So, if you choose Minima Brown, your blog will look like all the other writers who build blogs using Minima Brown (or Blue).

Does your blog suck? Well, roll up your sleeves and do something about it. It is still time!

Edward Khoo writes about blogging tips and tech stuffs at his blog EdwardKhoo.com. You can also find him on his Twitter account @squall768.

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A quick summary:

• They’re putting it down to vulnerabilities in two third party software systems that they use.
• They’re saying that the hack was limited to areas where subscriber email addresses were stored.
• They believe that the attack was done but an ‘overseas organised group’.
• They state that no other information was taken including information about customers accounts or affiliates accounts.
• They say that Aweber’s system was not used in the spamming and as a result deliverability rates have not been impacted
• They’ve closed the vulnerabilities.

Of course the reality is that while Aweber customers own details and information have not been compromised (this is a relief) – our lists have. While there’s nothing that Aweber can do about this now – the reality is that we as their customers do have to live with the knowledge that our readers, those who trust us with their details, are now getting spammed and that this spam could continue indefinitely.

While I understand Aweber’s statement, feel sorry that they went through this, am happy that it’s not as bad as it could have been and know this stuff happens – I do have some mixed feelings on this:

• Firstly I’ve got over 333,000 subscribers who have potentially been receiving spam in the last few days. This makes me feel ill and embarrassed. I’ve fielded many many emails in the last few days from angry and confused readers. While not all will realize why they’re being spammed now some who have set up specific addresses for my newsletters have – and they’re now angry and have a damaged view of my brand (and some have unsubscribed*). If you’re one of these subscribers – I’m truly sorry – I wish there were something that I could do except suggest you mark the spam as spam and/or resubscribe with a new email address.
• Secondly I’ve been actively recommending Aweber for a year or two here on ProBlogger. I personally want to apologise to my readers who have acted on that recommendation who have been impacted by this. While by no means is it my fault that there was this flaw in Aweber’s system I acknowledge that my genuine recommendation has led to these implications.

I think Aweber has an amazing service. They’ve become an integral part of my own business, have always given me amazing service and I will continue to use them. However I guess I wanted to also acknowledge to others hurt by this that I’m sorry for my part in it (indirect or not).

While Aweber does not apologise in their statement (I guess the lawyers might have had a part in that) I certainly want to express my sorrow for this event to those of you impacted by it.

Update: Aweber have since updated their statement to express that they’re sorry.

There is no perfect system. Over the years my own sites have been hacked (as have many many successful businesses). It is just a pity that this particular instance has impacted so many people.

* as I’m about to hit publish on this I thought I’d check out how many of my subscribers have in fact unsubscribed over the last few days. What I found in the reports section was very odd – for the last 3 days Aweber is reporting that not a single person has unsubscribed from my lists. The blue part of the chart is the unsubscribers – you’ll see in the last three days it is not there at all).

This is bizarre – in the last month of the stats there has not been a single day that I’ve not had someone unsubscribe – in fact I can’t remember a day that there wasn’t at least 10 for much longer than that (it’s just a natural part of having a list of the size that I do) – to have 3 days in a row with no unsubscribers is very very odd. Hopefully it’s just a glitch!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Aweber Makes a Statement About Their Data Being Compromised

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At first I couldn’t think of why this might have been. In the last 7 days none of my posts have gone viral around the web – no big site has linked up – nothing much has changed.

I clicked through to Aweber to see if the chart there was any different. It similarly showed an upswing in traffic.

Perhaps it is just one of those Aweber ‘glitches’ that happens every now and again – so I checked my site metrics and the same upswing was reflected there. Traffic was up a bit over 30% on normal over the week.

I dug down further to see which post drew in all the traffic thinking that perhaps one went viral while I slept one night and then returned to normal – but there was nothing abnormal. All of the posts in the last week had normal kind of traffic – hmmmm.

As I continued to ponder I realised that the upswing wasn’t due to any one post – it was simply due to the fact that last week I posted 13 posts instead of my normal 7-8. The increased number of posts wasn’t a strategic move – it was just that there were more stories to cover during the week with a few breaking news stories.

I guess the take home lesson is that an increase in posting frequency can lead to an increase in traffic.

Of course it isn’t quite as simple as just doubling your posts and seeing an automatic increase in traffic. A few things to keep in mind are:

• This will be more the case for a site with existing subscribers than a new one – increased numbers of posts means your subscribers are being presented with more options for things to read – increasing their chance of finding something that fits their needs.
• Of course increasing your post frequency too much and too quickly can annoy some of your subscribers. Keep in mind that when I surveyed readers on why they unsubscribe to blogs that the #1 reason given was too many posts.
• The key is to keep your posts relevant, on topic and useful. If you do want to increase your post levels you probably should also do it a little gradually. I got away with 13 posts last week instead of 8 like the week before but if I’d posted much more than that in the week I’m sure I would have got some push back from readers. Don’t suddenly decide to be like some of the big tech blogs and push out 20 posts in a day unexpectedly!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Increase Traffic 30% in a Week

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I asked them how much they wanted to make from blogging.

They responded that they wanted to be a full time blogger.

I pushed them for a figure – what does ‘full time’ mean for you?

They thought for a moment and said that they could live off ,000 USD a year (note: they wouldn’t have minded earning more but would be able to quit their current job at this kind of rate).

,000 a year sounds like a lot to make from a blog – especially when you’re starting out and are yet to make a dollar. To this blogger it seemed so overwhelming that she had almost convinced herself that it was not possible.

Advice for Becoming a Full Time Blogger

My response was threefold:

1. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job…. Yet

It is possible to make ,000 a year blogging, but it’s unlikely to happen over night. Keep your feet on the ground and your expectations reasonable. IF it happens (and there are no guarantees) it is almost certainly going to take some time.

2. Be Specific

Saying that you want to be full time as a blogger is a great goal – but it’s not really specific enough. This is why I wanted the blogger I was chatting with to name a figure. For her full time was ,000 – for others it could be more or less – the amount is not the point, the point is that you need something more concrete to work towards so that you’re able to measure where you’re at.

For me when I decided I want to go full time as a blogger I decided that I wanted to aim for ,000 (Aussie Dollars) in a year as the bench mark (at that time ,000 was around 36,000 USD). That’s around what I would have been earning in my current main job if I had been doing that full time (I was actually working a number of part time jobs at the time as well as studying part time).

Knowing what I was aiming for helped me in a number of ways when it came to getting to that goal.

3. Break it down into something more Achievable

,000 USD still sounds big when you’re a new blogger – and in some ways it is. However there are different ways of thinking about that figure. Lets break it down in the way that I used to look at my target.

• ,000 a year = 6.92 per week
• ,000 a year = .19 a day
• ,000 a year = .42 an hour

We could break it down on a monthly or on a minute by minute basis if we wanted to (in fact I did do it by minute from time to time for fun) – but the exercise is really about helping you to see that perhaps your big goal is a little more achievable if you are to break it down. Making .19 somehow seems a little bit easier to me than making ,000 (or is that just me?).

OK – the other way that I used to break down my goal that I found really helpful to me was to do it based upon what I need to achieve to meet that target. For me I would usually look at the daily figure – in this case .19.

What do I need to do to make .19 a day (,000 a year)?

Well there’s a number of ways that much. Lets look at a few:

• CPC Ads – lets say we’re running mainly AdSense on our blog and that the average click is paying 5 cents. That equates to 1643 clicks on AdSense ads (note: AdSense also runs CPM ads so it’s not quite as simple as saying you need 1643 clicks… but to keep this simple lets just go with that).
• CPM Ads – lets say that we’re running CPM ads on our blog and we’re being paid CPM per ad unit and we had 3 ads on each page (which is effectively CPM per page). This would mean we’d need 13,000 page impressions.
• Monthly Sponsorships – one way to sell ads directly to advertisers is to sell ads on a month by month basis as a sponsorship. To make k in a year you need to sell 00 a month in ads. You might have 6 ad spots on your blog so this is 6 advertisers at 6.66 per advertiser per month.
• Low Commission Affiliate Products – Lets say we were promoting affiliate products from a site like Amazon and your commissions were on average about 40 cents per sale. To earn .19 you’d need to sell 5 products.
• High Commission Affiliate Products – In this case you might be promoting ebooks and earning a copy (that’s what you’d earn selling my 31DBBB ebook per commission). The math is simple on this one – you’d had to sell around 10 e-books a day.
• Really Big Commission Affiliate Products – of course e-books are not the biggest product out there to promote – there are products like training courses where you can earn hundreds per sale. Lets take one that might pay out 0 for a yearly membership on a bigger product. In this case you need to sell 8 of these per month.
• Selling Your Own E-book – got your own product, perhaps an e-book, to sell from your blog? At .95 a sale you need to sell just over 4 of these a day. You can do the sums on cheaper or more expensive products.

Of course there are many many other ways to make money from blogs. Subscriptions, donations, paid reviews, selling yourself as a consultant….. etc. You can do the sums for yourself on your own model.

I know that some of the above figures still sound out of reach for bloggers – 1643 clicks on your AdSense ads sounds massive to a new blogger…. and it is – but do keep in mind that you can combine some of the above (in fact I’d recommend you diversify your income).

You might run 2 ad networks on your site, promote Amazon affiliates, sell your own e-book and promote someone’s membership course.

Looking back on my own figures for around the time when I hit my ,000 AUD (around 0 USD a day) goal and for me at that time my income mix looked a like this (going from memory here):

• AdSense:
• Chitika:
• Private Ad Sales:
• Amazon:
• Other Affiliate Commissions:

Note: I didn’t achieve this milestone until I’d been blogging for over 2 years (I blogged for the first year without trying to make money).

This didn’t happen over night but I really found that breaking things down into more bite sized pieces helped me to stay motivated but also helped me to identify what I needed to work on in order to reach my goals (and for me to quite my day job).

Again – don’t quit your day job yet (in fact you may not want to quit it even when you reach your goal – it can be good to have a back up plan) but do work hard at being specific about your blogging goals and attempt to break it down in a way that helps you move towards them.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make ,000 a year Blogging

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