Introducing The Forums On DragosRoua.com

I think I reached a certain level of interaction and activity which demands new tools. DragosRoua.com has an average of 100.000 unique visitors monthly and many of them are more than just visitors. Not only they leave comments on the blog, but they also send me emails or engage with me on social media.

At this point, I feel like the blog isn’t enough for this. So I started to wonder if launching a forum wouldn’t be a good addition to what is already here (more than 700 articles on self improvement, that is). And, to make a long story short, this is exactly what I did. I will leave the technical details out, and just tell you that the forums are up and ready, go check them out. There is also a new link on the site menu which will always point you in the right direction.

What I Expect From This?

More interaction, more stories, more experiences, many new people entering into my life. Since I embarked on this journey, exactly 3 years ago, I had no idea this blog will have such an enormous impact on my life. Don’t get me wrong, I do know how to set great expectations, but even these expectations proved to be really small compared with what happened.

I met real people all around the world, from New Zealand to Japan, from Las Vegas to Thailand. I am constantly engaged in new and exciting projects. I make a living as a digital nomad. And this is only the visible part .

But I know it can be even more than that. So this where the forum came in. Having and running a forum is a big thing, though. I know, because I had and ran forums before. As part of my network of websites I had two of the most visited forums in Romania, one about cars, with more than 100.000 members, and the other one about recipes, with more than 25.000 members (but more than 400.000 posts – I guess women are a bit more talkative than men ). So this thing will surely add more stuff to do on my agenda, but I’m ready to take it in.

How To Use The Forums

Well, like any other forum on the internet, this one has rules too. I won’t repeat myself here, because there is a pinned post on top of each forum, which will give you an idea about the rules and netiquette. If you want to promote your stuff, feel free to do it in your signature, but don’t overdo it. You don’t like flashlights in your face, so you know what I mean.

If you write, write things that are on topic. Respond, engage, but avoid trolling. I don’t like trolls. They’re boring.

Unless it’s really violent and rude, ranting, as a form of expressing personal concepts, is tolerated. But not much. If you overdo it, you will be kicked out.

Well, I think that’s it.

Let’s chat.

 

Brilliantly Better – The Ebook

Last Friday I launched – in soft mode – my latest ebook, Brilliantly Better. During the last 48 hours anyone interested in getting it had the chance to buy it at a discounted price, 9.99 USD. As of now, the price of the ebook is at the normal level, meaning 16.99 USD.

Also, a few other things have been completed, adding the final touches to the launch. First, I finished a promo movie. I’m really proud about how it came out, more about that in the next paragraphs. Second, a brand new website has been put in place, and that would be, obviously, Brilliantly Better.

The Brilliantly Better Movie

This is my first attempt ever at making a movie. I don’t know anything abut this so I asked a very good friend to help me out. He’s one of the best guys I know at this thing, with thousands of hours of work on the field, and dozens of commercials already aired. His name is Sega and you can find more about what he does by clicking on that link.

We spent the last Saturday shooting in my living room, experimenting with various lenses and gear and settings and props. I never thought that getting a few minutes of valuable filmed material can be that hard. But it was also incredibly fun. We both enjoyed our time and we did that not because we had to, but because we liked it. Huge difference. Meaning we had a blast

I should also mention that the music and the sound on the movie were also supervised by Sega (I’m the one talking, though, obviously). I should also note that we shoot it with my Canon 450D, with two types of lenses, and the music was made on my iPad, using Garage Band. The editing was completed on Sega’s laptop, on Adobe Premiere. The total number of hours spent on this was around 20.

One of the things that really helped us out was the fact that we have a lot of common beliefs. During the last 3 years Sega has been on his own quest too, traveling through India and Asia. Also, he started to write a novel about his spiritual adventures, the book (in Romanian) should be published soon. Also, we’re both fussy and expensive. But, as you can see, we deliver.

As for the movie, you can see it at the end of this post. If you like it, share it. Also, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

What Should You Expect From The Ebook

I’m sure you already clicked on the first link and you read everything on the Brilliantly Better website. I’m writing this for the 1.34% of you who didn’t.

You will get more 70 articles, 500 pages, each and every one of them carefully selected out of more than 700.000 words I’ve written on my blog since I started it, 3 years ago. It’s just the best of what I wrote so far.

And I won’t say a word more than that, because you should really be at the ebook site now. And because I deeply hate those ridiculously long and shallow sales pages, that way of promoting stuff I did just doesn’t click with me.

Enjoy Brilliantly Better – The Ebook!

 

Forget Products: Let’s Build Ecosystems Instead

You know, Google didn’t invent the internet search. They just made it better. Before Google there was a place called Altavista (many centuries ago, if you know what I mean ). People used to go on Altavista and search for various things. At some point, Google made that process better. And pretty much everybody who was using Altavista migrated to Google.

If you look at Facebook you’ll notice something absolutely obvious: they didn’t invent the social network. There was something called hi5 before them. And I think it’s still is. Somehow. People (or teens, to be more precise) used to hang out on hi5 all the time. Until Facebook came up with something better (some are saying Facebook created a place where you can stalk your wife, your friends, or your ex). I just say Facebook made the social interaction better, somehow .

Now let’s step outside the web for a moment. Let’s look at Apple. A dying company 10 years ago, it now has the largest capitalization in the world. And, surprise, they didn’t invent the laptop, the mp3 player or the tablet. Ok, I hear you Apple fanboys, they “redefined the category“, but let’s move outside the PR area for a moment. By the way, I’m a huge fan of Apple products, but this post is not about that.

Customers versus Citizens

Any economics teacher will explain the processes above in a sentence like this: people simply start to love a product and they start using it. I will have a different opinion, this time. I’ll say: people like that place and are moving over. We all moved to Google, to Facebook and to Apple.

And that “move” challenges our status as a customer. We’re not customers anymore. We’re citizens. We’re part of a new thing. In the absence of a better word, I will call this thing an “ecosystem”. Why is that fundamentally different than being just consumers? Because we have to obey that country rules. We have to play as Google sings, desperately looking at their page ranking algorithm, or we have to hide as much as we can from our privacy in Facebook. They created more than a product, they created a web of interactions. A complex system in which we are both consumers and creators.

Google would have nothing to search if there won’t be any internet content. And Facebook would have nobody to interact with if there won’t be anybody using it. We are at the same time consumers of something that we create. Doesn’t this sounds to you like being part of country? It surely does to me.

This process, this mix of continuous consuming of and building on those places, that makes us citizens of a new type of country. We’re Google citizens as much as we are United States, New Zealand or Romanian citizens.

We’re not part of a business anymore. We’re part of an ecosystem.

Countries versus Companies

Now let’s turn a little to the country rulers. To Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin. Who are those people? Or, to be more precise, what’s their role here?

Well, besides building the whole thing, they now have a very important part to play: they can allow other businesses in their ”country“ and live ”off of taxes“. That is a fundamental shift in the way we’re doing business. All we knew about markets and demand is kinda obsolete now. The direct interaction between consumer, market and product has been tampered by a new thing. We don’t pay for Google. But we do help Google make a lot of money just by… being. Same thing with Facebook.

Look at Facebook ads, AdSense or AppStore. Each time we’re using Facebook, we’re exposed to Facebook Ads. Sometimes we’re using those ads and paying for them. Almost any time we’re surfing the web we are exposed to AdSense and we’re helping this business grow on top of Google ecosystem. And, as much as you’d like to think that you’re using an ”improved user experience“ when you’re using your iPhone, you’re not. You’re playing Angry Birds. And that game didn’t even existed before iPhone. It’s something you bought from AppStore.

Facebook Ads, Adsense and the AppStore are businesses inside the countries Facebook, Google and Apple.

If you’re looking carefully at the whole structure of the ecosystem, at some point you’ll realize that the revenue is not generated by the initial business. But by “taxes” on layered businesses on top of each country.

How To Build A Digital Country

Well, maybe not a country. Maybe a small city. Or a village. Or at least a neighborhood

But let’s stop for a while and explain why would you like to build something like this. Well, because you could, potentially, at some point, to become the ruler of that country and, exactly, live off of taxes from the business you are allowing there. Many people are calling this ”passive income“ nowadays. I call it digital country rulership. And it has at least 3 ”must“ and ”need“ in it. Let’s dive.

First of all, be specific. Not unique, but specific. And by that I mean: if your country will be about, let’s say, ”personal development“, don’t try to reinvent it. Just be yourself. Chances are that pretty much everything on that niche has been invented way before you even thought to build that type of country. But, as Google didn’t invent the internet search, you can just make it better. Like adding your own touch, experience and skills. It’s about your vision, not about somebody else’s vision. Because, yes, you guessed, then it will be somebody else’s digital country, not yours.

Second, listen to your citizens (those would be your readers, if you still have difficulties identifying the metaphor). Follow their needs, their discussions, their suggestions. Look at their behavior patterns. Do they spend a lot of time in your country? In which places, exactly? And what are the places they hate? That’s pretty much what a regular country ruler does, if you think a little.

Third, be realistic. And by realistic I mean manageable. Do you really want to be the ruler of a digital China? The thrill of being on top of that mountain could be really appealing, but think for a while at the responsibility that comes with it. Believe me, you don’t want to be the ruler of China. Not today, not ever. But you can be the ruler of your own small tropical paradise. Or just a small town where people can live and have fun.

Welcome To My Digital Country

That would be the blog you’re reading right now, of course. This is the country I built in the last two years. It wasn’t easy, but I kinda managed to do it, if you know what I mean. I feel good around here and this is my place. There is enough content here (the first 500 articles are the most difficult, by the way) to keep my citizens entertained for weeks. And there are also a lot of comments. Over 8000, if you wonder. And that would be the traces of the people who are living here. A lot of traces, exactly.

Oh, yes, I’m forgetting something. Namely, what are the business you can participate in, as citizens of my country. Well, you can become an affiliate for my digital products (5 ebooks on sale from here). The first one was launched more than a year ago and the most recent one just a few months back.

And if you wonder what other businesses I built on top of this cute little blog, well, I also build iPhone apps. If you’re into productivity (and I think you should be, because you just spent 6 minutes reading a blog post, do you realize that? ) you can get iAdd directly from the AppStore. It’s a universal app, which means it works both on your iPhone and iPad.

By the way, what’s your digital country? Don’t be shy, say hello, I like to travel. A lot.

Oh, you don’t have one yet? Well, you must make a choice: you can either be just a citizen of a country and obey all its rules, or start building your own and play the game from a much higher level.

What’s your choice?

The Utterly Incomplete Guide On Monetizing Your Blog

Half of my life I lived under a communist regime. Among other funny things under a communist regime, money, or, to be more precise, the lack of it, was something pretty common. So, I started to learn the value of money very early, mainly by the absence of it. Why am I telling you that? Well, because this particular context of my life created a very interesting situation. Namely, the ability to create money out of any imaginable situation. When you live under pressure, you learn how to breathe differently.

Years later, this very ability, which is more on the survival side, to be honest, than on the corporate, “let’s conquer the world” side, served me really well. Not only was I able to create and sustain for more than 10 years my own online publishing company and successfully sell it once I decided to start something new, but also helped me when I started this very blog. Which finally brings us to the point of today’s article.

Which is part of a brilliant series, ignited by my fellow blogger (and upcoming A-lister) Mars Dorian. The idea was to bring together a pack of internet rock-stars and squeeze the hell out of their knowledge and expertise. As you may see, we have even a visual identity for this series (which I think it’s a very cool idea).

The articles were sequential, meaning at the end of one article the author had to introduce the next blogger and topic. Well, since I’m the last one in this series, I can only have the honor of mentioning the previous articles, as follows.

The Guerrilla’s Guide To Attracting Your “Right” Audience – by Mars Dorian

“Less Followers” Is The New “More Followers” – by Francisco Rosales

The Art of (Online) Seduction (And Why You Need It To Make Money) – by Ashley Ambirge

How to Join Forces with Other Bloggers and Grow Your Audience Together – by Corbett Barr

Networking Awesomely, Kissing Digital Babies and The Lifeblood of the Blogosphere – by Srinivas Rao

Now, let’s get back to the topic. Which is, as you already know, monetization. I will skip the parts related to writing and traffic building, as I expect you to have a lot of know-how, after the first articles. I will also suppose that you have enough traffic to start monetizing. That specific threshold varies a lot depending on your niche, writing style and overall goals with the blog, but as a rule of thumb, I think that from the magical “1000 unique visitors / day” milestone you can start to apply some of the following strategies.

So let’s see what exactly can you sell from your blog in order to make some money.

Selling Real Estate – Advertising

The most affordable way to monetize your blog is advertising. It’s also the most inefficient one. You need huge traffic in order to make some decent money and you also need a LOT of real estate (or, in other terms, a pretty big, in terms of space) blog. Because you will have to have enough space to accommodate your advertiser’s exposure, without alienating your audience.

I used advertising extensively on my network of websites and tried a lot of approaches: automating it with very affordable, ready to buy online packages, selling it with my own sales force or delegating it to an agency. While I did have some positive results over the years, I have to say that this activity is both time and resources consuming.

It’s good if you want to get your feet wet in the monetization world, and learn some stuff, but in the long run it won’t pay for your jet. Unless you’re Mashable and you don’t know that yet, of course.

Selling Interactions – Affiliate Marketing

The next thing you can do after advertising is affiliate marketing. This is a very different technique and it’s also enormously diverse. You can start doing affiliate marketing on your blog with only one client, or you can sign up to dozens of affiliate programs. There are tons of affiliate marketing strategies and many of them are really working well. If you’re new to this world, I highly recommend this course Affiliate Marketing For Beginners (by Corbett Barr). And yes, that link is an affiliate link.

In my experience, no matter what strategy you choose, there are a few things which are always standing up. Those things are the cornerstone of any affiliate activity.

1. Be Honest

Clearly state the fact that you’re doing affiliate marketing. Let people know that by buying the products you’re recommending you will get some money. Many readers will choose to reward you this way, if they find the products appealing.

Also, try as much as possible to recommend only what you’re using. In fact, do recommend only what you’re using, otherwise your credibility will decline in time.

2. Be Consistent

If you started to do something in this area, continue. Affiliate marketing is not an instant business. Sure, you can have spikes and wake up one day to realize that you’ve done over 1000 USD in sales, but that won’t happen in the first day.

Also, be consistent in your niche and product choices. If you’re trying to associate yourself with too many products, or try to cover a way too broader niche, your own brand will weaken.

3. Be Useful

Think at your readers. Think at their needs. Just because you’re excited about some product or service which has an affiliate program, it doesn’t mean your readers will be too.

Selling Your Own Information Products

After you did some advertising and affiliate, it’s time to go to the real stuff: creating and selling your own information products. I consider this to be by far the most profitable and resource effective way of monetizing your blog. No matter your topic, your biggest slice of money may come from the thing you’re already doing on your blog: creating useful information.

There are many ways to create information products and I think a course on this will cover at least several hours. But let’s assume for the moment that you’re just creating ebooks. Ebooks are very appealing to your users, because they’re already consuming your content in the form of articles. They may find the whole buying process very natural. They’re already reading you for free, so if you create some premium content, they’ll be most likely willing to pay for it.

There are also a few things you may want to know about information products:

• their lifespan is relatively short. Unless you’re creating a huge hit, they’re last only a few months. After that, you can bet that all your audience already knows what the ebook is about. If they really want it, they buy it in the first few weeks.
• they must bring in something completely different from what your blog brings, but at the same time carry your own personal mark. So, packaging your blog in the form of an ebook may not create as much buzz as you think. People want something different.
• there are a few psychological levels related to pricing (and the way people are perceiving products, generally). A small but useful ebook will be priced between 10-20 USD. A relatively premium ebook will be priced between 20-40 USD. And from that mark up, you can start thinking at creating series or even more complex products, like webinars or online courses. These as well can go anywhere between 50 and 250 USD, depending on the value you put in and your niche.

Other Media Declinations

This is very similar to the one above, only it happens on other channels. It’s still selling your own products, only you take a lateral step and go into a somehow different way of packaging the information. The closest example is a podcast. It’s very similar with what you do in your blog, but it’s really different. There are a few significant examples of successful commercial podcasts on the internet, galadarling.com being one of them, for instance.

But you can also do something different than a podcast. Package your blog posts as audiobooks. This is what I did with one of my post (after this was suggested by a fellow blogger) and, believe it or not, I do sell that 2.99 USD audio file.

Imagination is the only limit here. I remember that a few years ago, when I had my car portal (the biggest in Romania at that time) I started a small radio show (3-5 minutes daily) and tried to sell advertising on that radio show. Go figure…

Real Life Interactions

This is a very interesting way to make money. In fact, many people who are already making money in the offline world are turning to the online world in order to support their offline business (that sounded a lot more complicated than I wanted to). To keep it simple, it’s about coaching, consulting, workshops or even webinars.

In this case, your blog will be a vehicle for your offline business. Although I think there is a scalability problem here (namely, how high can you go, how many workshops can you deliver, etc) there is something that attracts me a lot to this. I think it’s about the real energy exchange that takes place in these workshops. I went to Steve Pavlina workshop last year and I felt incredibly. Not because the concepts Steve taught us (many of them being around the common sense threshold) but because of the energy that emerged out of the group.

After I started to do my own workshops (on business and blogging) I got the same feedback from my attendees. “It was wonderful, but the most important thing was that we felt good together”.

So, if you reach a certain level of popularity, don’t be afraid to go out in the wild, and try some public speaking and some workshops. It may not work from the first time, it may not bring as much money as your ebook going viral may do, but boy, you’ll feel good.

iPhone / iPad / Android apps

This is a relatively new way to monetize your blog. Because this media is quite new. When I started blogging, iPhone wasn’t invented yet (I’m having a hard time to realize this, to be honest). Anyway, the fact that our content has become available and it’s consumed on an increasing number of devices creates a little bit of opportunity.

One thing you can do is to package your blog into a “hidden column” type of iPhone/iPad app. The “hidden column” is another name I give to the freemium model. You package your blog in that app along with something unique, that is meant to be available (and consumed) only through that app. That unique thing is your “hidden column”, something that people would be happy to pay for.

Or you can try to implement some of the concepts you have into an iPhone app. This is exactly what I did a few months ago. I created an ebook about my productivity framework “Assess – Decide – Do”, and I also created an iPhone app, iAdd, which implements this framework. The app is available in the AppStore and it does sell pretty well. And so does the ebook.

***

Well, that was it for now. I don’t know why, but I have a very distinct feeling that I only scratched the surface with it. Honestly, this is why I changed the title of the post too. There’s so much to be said on this topic, but I already have more than 1800 words written on this.

So, if you want to know more, just kick me up in the comments, I’d be happy to talk more.

Free Ebook – How To Build Reputation With Your Blog

As promised, here is the ebook based on my last series “How To Build Reputation With Your Blog“. I enjoyed writing this series and I thought putting them all together would be a nice thing to do. Not to mention the fact that some of you specifically asked to hurry up with the compilation of the ebook, which I gladly did. It contains all the articles in the series, plus a short bonus. Some of you may already know it, if you’re reading my blog constantly, some of you may not. So I’ll leave it open, if you’re curious, go ahead and download it, it’s completely FREE:

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog (1100)

Free as in free beer, if you know what I mean.

It’s my second free ebook released so far and I would like to tell you what you can do with it (since it’s marked as free). Basically, you can do whatever you want: put it as a free download on your site, send it by email to your friends, frame it and put it on your desktop, dip it into chocolate and eat it while pretending you’re dieting. So, pretty much everything. As long as you’re following these 3 simple rules:

1. don’t charge for it
2. don’t modify its content in any way
3. don’t take credit for it

Otherwise, feel free to spread it along.

At the end of the ebook, I also announced a course based on this series. It will start mid-October and if you’re interested, you should contact me as soon as possible. Most likely, there will be a limited number of spots. Contact details are at the end of the ebook also.

I really think this upcoming reputation building course will be a challenge. I’ve had live workshops and they all went extremely well, but this online course will be something completely new. I’m still pondering if it should spread for 3 months or more. And I’m pondering a lot of other stuff about it, as I feel I have only scratched the surface with this ebook. And keep in mind the ebook has no less than 74 pages.

So, if you’re serious about blogging, go ahead and download this free ebook. If you have any comments, It could be just the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Be Patient

This is the last article from the series “How To Build Reputation With Your Blog”. If you came here directly, you may want to read the first 6 articles.

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – The Series
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Write Constantly
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Audience
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Peers
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Differentiate
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Create Value

First of all, congratulations: you’ve read all the 6 articles from the series. That’s the good news. The bad news is that all you’ve learned or decided to apply so far will be completely useless if you don’t have patience. Exactly, no matter how good you are in your field, how often do you write, how active is your interaction with your audience or with your peers, if you’re not patient enough, it won’t count. Not a bit. The whole wonderful scaffold you built for your blogging ascension will crumble at your first step, if you don’t give it enough time to mellow.

But since you already had the patience to read the first 6 articles, there’s hope . Let’s try to find out together why you need time to create online reputation.

The 2 Main Reasons

Reputation, being it online or offline, is never built instantly. It’s a function of authority and authenticity, that’s fundamental, but it’s also a function of time.It needs authenticity and authority stretched over a significant amount of time.

And here’s the first reason for this: people don’t assign value to other people instantly. They need a certain amount of time to make the connection between their needs and your expertise. Just because you’re out there raising your flag, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to be followed. You still need to be evaluated. People live in their own circles and they have very strict rules for those who are accepted in those circles (even if those rules are not clearly expressed, they’re still there).

And people also need proof. They need to witness you constantly performing at a certain level. They will not invest their trust in you if you’re not getting over a certain threshold. Interesting enough, once you’re over that threshold, they won’t need proof anymore. You can goof around in circles, once you had your square centimeter in their brains, it will be very difficult to get out. The acceptance process is a very inertial one. It takes time to get in their heads, but it will also take time to get out of there.

The second reason for patience is that you need this time for yourself. This time is not about their heads, it’s about yours. Blogging is an interactive process. You can’t tell from the beginning what your audience will be. You don’t know it yet, you have to go out and try a few approaches. Only after you know your real audience, the one generated by your blogging, you can start capitalizing on it. It’s a fine tuning process between what you do and what others needs and you need to watch this carefully.

You also need time in order to understand how you can provide value. Many bloggers are collapsing exactly when they’re starting to gain some momentum. They’re becoming successful, but strangely enough, they can’t handle the extra work that comes with this success. It’s not that they’re not able to schedule their tasks, it’s a more subtle process. Somehow, they don’t understand what they are suppose to do: continue blogging? On what tone? Do workshops? What kind? Write books? How many?… This sense of orientation is built in time, by observing and understanding your specific market demands and your own unique skills.

The Hare And The Tortoise

Blogging is much like a tortoise race. You gotta be there constantly. Step by step, enjoying the pace and doing your job. And yet, many bloggers are taking the hare attitude: be spectacular, hunt that big hit that it will get you out of the crowd. Some of them succeed at this quite often: they get featured on delicious, or digg, or lifehacker. And? After the big traffic spike, nothing is left. The term “success” in blogging has nothing to do with big traffic. It’s all about meaningful relationships, sustainable value and, yes, conversions.

Early and fast success is spectacular but it won’t win the race. It will win a temporary surge of admiration, and, maybe money. But it won’t create a long term flow of opportunities and revenue. The tortoise wins the race because it’s patient. Because it stays there and it does its job. The hare will make detours, change its focus, shift to other areas of interest. And in the end, will come in the second place.

Your 2 Different Bubbles

One other thing that you have to be aware of in building online reputation is that you will live in two different time bubbles. One is your time bubble, and the other is your readers time bubble. Your time bubble is going really fast. The readers time bubble is much slower. If you really take the time to analyze your readers behavior, you’ll understand that many of them are reading your blog only once a month. Yes, only once a month.

There is of course a hard core of admirers and followers, but those are not your main audience. The real audience is made by real people who are interested in your message. And those people have their own lives. Their own universe. Already filled with other people. And they will make room for newcomers with extreme scarcity.

Many bloggers are exhausting their time bubble in the first 6 months. By the end of this period they said everything they had to say. They’re finished. And yet, in the time bubbles of the readers, they only made a few ripples. Nothing significant. Oh, that guy who used to write about personal development, I kinda remember him. But now he’s out of the game, right?

You have to synchronize those two time bubbles. Meaning there will be times when you will have to repeat yourself on the blog. Or to say the same thing in 50 different ways. Or to slow down, splitting your message in a few posts. You’re not cheating, you’re just synchronizing the two time bubbles. I once read something about how dolphins are communicating. A researcher had this idea of playing their sounds at a much lower speed. It came out that the dolphins were talking on fast forward. Once slowed down, their language could actually be deciphered. Ok, it was a science-fiction novel, but you got the idea.

Oh, and I remember that I started to remember Steve Pavlina’s name 2 years after I read his first article. Until that, it was just a curiosity or something that I accidentally stumbled upon. It took 2 years for Steve to buy the square centimeter in my head that says “personal development”. During that time, Steve wrote and wrote and wrote. He stayed in his time bubble, waiting for me to remember his name.

Ok, Now What?

I hope you enjoyed this series. I will compile an ebook and make it available on this blog as a free download in a couple of days. I also ponder the idea of starting an online course on this topic. From the stats it looks like this topic is really interesting for a lot of my readers. If I’m starting this course, it will be out mid-October.

I’m slowing down my time bubble, as you can see. I know you have other stuff to do.

But if you’re really interested in this, you’ll come in October. Just to see if there’s something new.

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Peers

This is the 4th article from the series: “How To Build Reputation With A Blog”. If you came here directly, you may want to read the first articles too:

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – The Series
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Write Constantly
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Audience

Who Are Your Peers?

In short, they are people who are doing exactly what you are doing. They are bloggers performing on the same field as you are. From a traditional (and also, completely dumb) point of view, they are your competition. From a smarter point of view, they are your peers.

Why do I think that perceiving them as “competition” is a dumb approach? Well, because blogging is a very specific business. Although it shares a good deal of common points with traditional businesses, blogging is completely different in some key areas. And one of them is branding.

In traditional business, if two companies are making shoes, they are competing against each other. They are building the same object, using more or less the same technologies. If two bloggers are writing about personal development, they are not competing against each other. They are completing each other and, in a larger sense, they’re feeding each other audience. Although they are building the same type of “product”, which in this case is “motivation”, they’re not using the same “technologies”. They’re creating their products using their personal experiences. Putting their own life on the line. And that brings diversity and originality to the mix. Although in the same market, the final products will be really different. And consuming each product will increase the demand for similar products.

That’s a fundamental difference. The more blogging products you’ll have on the market, the bigger the demand. Your audience will always want to consume some new, fresh perspectives on their topics of choice. So, two bloggers writing on the same topic will never be competitors. Unless they are dumb enough to copy each other posts sentence by sentence which will totally wipe out any trace of authenticity in their products.

Now that we eliminated one of the most common and handicapping confusions regarding competition in blogging, let’s see how you can really interact with your peers.

Guest Posting

The simplest way to interact with your peers is to guest post. Writing blog posts that will fit in other people’s blogging pants is a great exercise. There are some unquestionable benefits like: increased exposure, enlarging your circle of influence, refining your writing skills and so on and so forth. But the real, hidden benefit is the interaction with the host blogger. I know I built a long term relationship with all the bloggers who accepted guest posts from me. Some of them are way closer than the circle of influence. They are in the circle of friends.

Massive Guest Posting

This is a special case of guest posting. Basically, it combines a series of articles with guest posting. In a massive guest posting project, you publish a few related blog posts (preferably from the same series) on a few blogs, all at the same time. I did what I think it was the first massive guest posting ever on the internet last year and believe me, it was an incredible experience. The links and exposure were great, but the connection with some of the bloggers who participated in this challenge grew tremendously over the last year.

Hosting Guest Posts

This is the obvious counterpart of the one above. Open up your blog and give other people the opportunity to guest post. Again, the visible benefits will be in the line of: more content for your readers, a little bit of diversity and so on and so forth. But then again, the hidden part of this iceberg will be the connection you build with the people who are guest posting on your blog.

Collaborative Projects

Every once in a while a collaborative project surfaces my inbox. Every time I am asked to do some writing for a collaborative project I’m incredibly motivated. I’m not accepting every request, mostly by lack of time, but the requests I accept are quickly climbing to the top of my priority list. Here are few types of collaborative projects I’ve been a part of so far, or I admire from a distance.

1. Free / Paid Ebooks

I’ve been a part of some very interesting projects, with both paid and free ebooks. One of the most interesting ebooks was How To Network Awesomely by Colin Wright, a book which I totally recommend. There are tons of other bloggers sharing their insights on networking in that book, not to mention Colin’s own thoughts on this topic. As for the free ebooks, you can check out one of the latest, Small Ways To Make A Big Difference.

2. Memes

A meme is usually a challenge launched by a fellow blogger. I get far more requests than I can handle on this area, so I decided to go on only if the topic is really close to me. One of the memes I’ve been doing lately is Abubakar Jamil’s 3 Life Lessons. Check out the page because you will start to understand why interacting with your peers is never competition.

3. Blogazines Contributions

Every blogging niche has some blogazines around. They can be collective newsletters, like the very fine SharingLifeSkills, of which I’m proud to be a part, or they can be magazine style, like The Daily Brainstorm. Of which I’m also honored to be a part of, by the way.

4. Shared Content Products

Another way to interact with your peers is to create shared content products. Put together your expertise, your strengths and some time, ask around one of your peers, brainstorm a little and voila, you created a common product. For an example of such a product you can check out Charlie Gilkey’s and Johnny B. Truant Jam Sessions.

Social Media Interactions

The same rules that applies to audience interactions applies to peers interaction when it comes to social media. If you want to read them, go back and check out the audience interaction article in this series. One word though, when it comes to peer interaction, you are what you retweet. People who are on your stream are a measure of your own value. Pick them wisely and stick with them.

The Real Value Of Links

Now that we saw the practical side of interacting with your peers, let’s talk a little bit about links. And by that I understand at least 2 interpretations of the term “link”. The first one is “link as a human connection” and the second one is “link as a hyperlink in the internet”. As you will see, there is a big confusion between those two meanings, with a huge balance towards the second one. Many bloggers are valuing hyperlinks to their blogs over real life connections with other people. Which I think is totally wrong.

The focus of bloggers on Google ranking is understandable, to a certain degree. The problem is that the vast majority of bloggers are going way beyond this degree. Meaning they’re starting to obsess over it. I know I’ve been there and I’m not ashamed. It’s just a fact and now I’m over it. And I’m also able to explain it a little bit better, since it’s something that I experienced first hand.

In order to understand the importance of page ranking (and, subsequently, the real value of links as hyperlinks) I would like to give you an army example. You know the military ranks, right? A captain will always have a smaller rank than a colonel, and a colonel will always have a smaller rank than a general. This is how it works. And you identify their ranks by looking at their insignia.

The page ranks works exactly the same. You have a 3 PR page, which will always be smaller than a 5 PR page, which in turn will be always put to shame by a 7 PR page.

Many bloggers are trying to advance in this hierarchy by trying to acquire as many stars (read: page ranks) as possible. From a certain point of view, they think that a certain rank will give them access to a certain level of reputation. This is where the big mistake is taking place. A PR rank is just like a military rank, it will just say that you’re a captain, a colonel, or a general. Nothing more. It will never say something about your ability to influence other people. Nothing about your value as an individual. Nothing about the value of your products. It will just say you have a certain rank.

Of course you can guess a little bit of information about a military by his rank. A certain degree of experience or skills. But the real value of a military is never given by the rank. It’s given by what that person is doing on the field. By how that person is engaging in combat. By how he’s applying the strategy right there, in the trenches. There’s no rule that will say that, once in the trenches, a general will be spared by a bullet just because he’s a general.

Page ranks, just like military ranks, are just a way to categorize your blogs with an incredibly large tolerance. They will never say something about your reputation.

In the army, if you do your job constantly, in time, you’ll be promoted. You don’t have to do something especially for this. Just go to work every day and you’ll be promoted. In blogging is the same. If you keep your blog alive long enough, it will eventually receive a higher page rank. At some point, you’ll receive a rank of a general.

But, please pardon my French here, I don’t really give squat on that general.  I’ve been through a real war, and I saw how bureaucratic captains were acting on the field. A real life disaster. No, siree. Those generals are not for me.

On the other hand, there were some officers who were really inspiring those days. Courageous, generous, brilliant in terms of strategy and so on. Those officers were wearing the same insignia as the bureaucratic ones. From the outside, they looked the same. But they were fundamentally different.

The same goes in blogging. Two blogs with an equal number of links will get an equal page rank in Google, Alexa or whatever. But more often than not, the real audience of a successful blog is a few orders of magnitude higher than of other, equal blogs in terms of ranking. You start to get it now?

I’m not saying that using aggressive linking and social media automated strategies won’t give you a certain Google page rank or a certain Alexa rank. I’m saying that, form a certain level of performance, those rankings are useless. They’re not building reputation, they’re building empty numbers. It’s blowing in the wind.

On the other hand, when focusing on real life interaction, on building honest relationships with your peers, you won’t generate only links and empty numbers, You will generate a movement. You will generate support and you will ignite new ideas. You will create inspiration. I don’t know how to measure inspiration. I don’t think there’s such a thing like inspiration ranking. But in my experience inspiration is far more powerful than any Google page rank.

At the end of the day, a PR 7 blog which is there only by aggressive linking and social media automated techniques, will have the same PR 7 as a blog that reached there by creating genuine trends, by providing real value, by inspiring people to propagate its message and spontaneously create links for it. From the outside, or, to be more, clear, from the mathematical point of view of the rank, they will be the same. But on the inside, those blogs will be completely different. The second blog will generate far more in interaction (and, if you really want to know, yes, far more sales) than a blog which relies only on page ranking techniques.

You will get results on both cases. And the choice is entirely up to you. You can choose to be a bureaucratic general, and you’ll be wiped out by the first genuine revolution on the Internet.

Or you can be a general to lead that very Revolution.

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Audience

This is the third article from the How To Build Reputation With A Blog series. If you came here directly, you may want to check out the first posts in this series:

• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – The Series
• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise
• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Write Constantly

Today will talk about an important part of this process, namely the part in which you start to interact with your audience.

Listen To Them

The first and most important part of this process is to listen to them. Period. They are your audience, they are consuming your products and they know better than you what they want. Really listening to your audience is especially difficult in the first stages of a blog, when all you want to do is to get “out there”, make your message heard and be sure it’s heard by as many people as possible. In this stage, every negative comment will be taken personally. That shouldn’t be a problem. unless you respond in kind. Bitterness and irony are the most common reactions to negative blog comments, especially in the beginning. Well, don’t. Don’t answer in kind.

Taking it off of your chest will make you feel better, but I don’t think it will add to your reputation, on the contrary. As you advance in the blogging world you’re going to realize that negative comments and positive comments aren’t different at all. They’re just reactions. Some of them are signs of a positive reaction you ignited with your post, some of them are signs of a negative reaction. And it’s ok to be like that. You’re not the beholder of the absolute truth and you don’t know their personal circumstances. They have the right to say whatever they want. And you have the right to take from their comments whatever you want. I had my own share of negative comments in some (quite popular posts), you can find one of them here: 33 Ways To Start Your Day.

I started (a little abruptly, I admit) with negative comments because they are pivotal part in the blogging process. The moment you’ll start to generate negative comments is the undoubtable mark of popularity. You’re becoming important. Your words are counting enough to get on the people nerves. You’re bringing in a change and change is always received with rejection (people love their comfort zones, you know). I’m not saying you should hunt for negative comments, that would be equally easy and lame. I’m saying that if you do your job constantly, at some point you will create some opponents. It’s natural, don’t be upset. Don’t get nervous. Don’t panic. Go on and do your job as usual.

Comments Policy

A blog is about interaction more than it is about broadcasting. The huge success of this phenomenon is due exactly to this part. Traditional media is a one way communication process. Blogging (and social media) is a two way communication process. Your readers can openly state their opinions. And that’s a very good thing.

As a general rule, I think you should keep your blog open to comments. And to answer to as many comments as you can, if possibly, to all. There will be milestones when you could get rid of the comments, but only in some special contexts, I’ll talk about them in a second. In the beginning, you should keep your blog open. And pray for some comments, too. Answer to them carefully, even if the are just short sentences like: “nice post, I like it”. Just say “thank you”. Answer to them even if they are (or especially if they are) negative comments. Try to find out why they are negative. In other words, don’t get offensive or defensive. Try to start an interaction.

From a certain level, managing comments could become harder than maintaining the blog. Especially if you get 50-60 comments per post or more. From this level up, I think you could update your comment policy. You can gradually go to answer only to certain comments, and then you can leave your readers only share their opinions or discuss. Some of the most popular bloggers found an interesting way to keep the interaction going on, while getting rid of the chore of maintaining or answering to hundreds of comments for every post: they created special forums. On these forums people will still have a chance to make their opinion heard, but it will be a much more open discussion space. I think Steve Pavlina did that a couple of years ago, and also Leo Babauta did that recently.

Email Strategy

A good part of your interaction will be hidden from your blog. Namely, you will be contacted directly, most of the time by email. You should have a strategy for answering emails as well. Some people think that because of the private nature of this communication channel, it wouldn’t count as much as comments and tend to be a little lazy when it comes to email, or even ignore it completely. I think this is a mistake. Not only it will create a (maybe false) image of an isolated individual, but it will make people reluctant to get in touch with you in the future.

Almost my entire business communication related to my blog is done by email. I couldn’t imagine how I could create some revenue with my blog without creating a more personal approach with my audience. Some of my readers become my blog business partners and I become a blog business partner for some of the blogs I follow. Not having a proper email strategy in place will create a serious financial handicap in the long run. Seems hard to believe but it’s real.

I usually receive three types of emails: people are asking for advice, people are asking for business opportunities and people are just telling me that my blog helped them. Didn’t got any angry email so far, but there’s time. And I have patience . I had my share of online hatred and irony, mostly from Romanian bloggers, but no direct email so far. Anyway, my email strategy goes like this: if I can give advice, I give it within the time frame of a week. If I can’t, I refuse politely, usually in a day or two. If the business opportunity looks interesting, I follow up. A few of my most profitable affiliate deals were created as a result of some long email discussions.

Social Media Strategy

I said it before, I’ll say it again: your blog goes beyond your blog. You’re not having only a single outlet, you have access to a lot of streams which can carry and deliver your message pretty fast to a huge audience. And that’s social media. In my experience, as a blogger, there are only a few places which can be of interest: twitter, Facebook, StmbleUpon (since I already talked extensively about StumbleUpon before, and since SU is mainly a promotion outlet, I won’t talk about it in this post, feel free to check out this post: The First Six Months Of Blogging – Promotion) Some people may have had good results using digg or reddit or delicious. I had a few myself, but not enough to draw some clear conclusions or to create some  repetitive processes out of them.

From a reputation point of view, being at least on the most popular social media networks is a must. People are hanging out there. And they will expect to find interesting people there. It’s like everybody hang out in the big cities and if you chose to isolate yourself in the countryside, it will take a while to make those big city guys know that you’re around. You may still do it, but you’ll have to shout a little louder.

Twitter

It’s a “hit and run” network. It has a very good link generation potential, and it can also act like a reputation enhancer. Your followers can act like broadcaster for you, transporting your message to their followers and so on. A few people told me they discovered me not through Google or direct recommendation, but by Twitter. The structure of this network will make it very easy to propagate your message to a potentially very big audience, very fast.

But it has a few downsides too. Being so fast, it means others are waiting for their messages to be delivered too. Your message will get out of focus almost instantly. If you’re not “floating”, meaning if you’re not generating enough retweeting activity, your links, after a 5-10 minutes spike, will become almost dead. The biggest interaction happens in the first 5-10 minutes on Twitter.

This “floating” can happen in a lot of ways and I don’t think this is the time and place in this post to cover all of them. The most common situations are: your tweet has been retweeted by an influencer (an influencer is a twitter person with at least a few tens of thousands of followers), you have a very big audience (hard to believe it will happen in the beginning) or you just got lucky, creating some very powerful viral content. I’ve experienced the first and the last of these situations quite often, especially the last one. There are few posts which are still retweeted daily even after a year: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life.

How do you create reputation on Twitter with your blog? Well, first of all, maintain a clear profile. Create and maintain a twitter landing page. Tweet your posts. Engage in conversations if people are asking you. Tweet other, non-blog related, stuff. People will know that you’re real and not a WordPress plugin. Create interactions.

Facebook

It’s a place for human interaction rather than link sharing. In this respect it’s more human than Twitter, but it’s also more picky. Building a strong presence on Facebook will ensure a constant (albeit small) flow of links. If you get links from Facebook, you can be sure that those who shared those links are really enjoying your content. There is no reciprocal “pay-off” for sharing, as it may be in Twitter, when reteweeting is often a currency for supporting each other.

I admit I didn’t do much of an effort to create a Facebook presence, other than placing a link to my Facebook profile on my blog sidebars. And yet, I get friendship requests on a daily basis. Many of these friendship requests are generated by my blog. In fact, almost all the requests are generated by my blog.

Being mostly centered around relationships, Facebook will be a nice place to hang out with like-minded people, chat, exchange ideas or just seeing other people lives unfolding in front of you. If you got an organic Facebook audience, I guess the most important thing is to be consistent. Sharing stuff on your wall which has little or no connection with your blog will dazzle your audience (I did it a few times and it does ).

Why Is This Important And What Are The Benefits

Direct interaction with your audience is a great gift. You have instant access to what people really like or dislike about you or your work. You know immediately if you did a blunder or if you hit it big. And you have a chance to meet a lot of people in real life. I personally met a few bloggers I respect while I was traveling last year and it was a fantastic experience.

Reputation is not something you carry on yourself, show it to somebody and they will recognize it. It doesn’t work like this. Reputation is in fact created and maintained by your audience. You may brag about how good and skilled you are as much as you want, if other people won’t agree with what you say, it will mean nothing.

So, if you really wanna know if you have built reputation don’t look in the mirror, don’t re-read your blog posts, don’t get out in the front of your house and shout out from the top of your lungs: “I’m the best guy in my field!”.

Just look at your audience.  Your readers will never lie to you.

Want To Make Money With Your Blog? Build Reputation!

Making money with a blog seems to be the Nirvana of self-publishing: everybody talks about it, a few claim to be there already, but fact is nobody really saw it.

I always was fascinated by this incredible opportunity offered by blogging. Just 6-7 years ago, self-publishing, although praised and awaited, was nothing but a science fiction topic. People were dreaming about a way to publish their thoughts, their experiences, their ideas, without the hassle of traditional mass-publishing. No fussy editor, no sales channels, no waiting in line, just you, your message and your (potentially huge) audience. It seemed like a dream, for many. And yet, right now, we have hundreds of millions of blogs.

But soon, the fresh self-published wannabee will face a real life problem: how to make some money from this blogging thing? How to be self-sustainable? Doing what you love is surely fulfilling at the emotional level, but at the bills level things are a little bit messy.

The Prehistory Of Blog Making Money

First, there was traffic. Lots of traffic. Page impressions and an inflation in pride. If you did your game well, you could climb in a few months to the top of the ladder. At that time (6-7 years ago), you could actually sell your traffic in chunks. Advertisers were fighting over good, visible web space. That was the prehistory of making money with a blog. It’s called display advertising.

Then, contextual advertising came. You will not sell pixels anymore, but interactions. AdSense entered the scene and changed the game completely. The ads on your page were linked to the content. A huge leap forward. Now you could target some niches, write your text in a certain way, and voila: all the important advertisers were magically on your page. Of course, the user had to click on those ads in order for you to make money.

And then the affiliate marketing came in. Your traffic wasn’t so important anymore. What started to count was your retentive audience: your subscribers. Your page views were suddenly obsolete. Your carefully crafted posts wouldn’t generate clicks anymore. The only chance was to concoct a “special offer”, package it nicely and send it over directly to your subscribers inbox. A lot of them felt so honored by that message, that they’re actually buying.

Well, those were good times. Unfortunately, they’re over.

Making Money With A Blog Now

The blogging game has changed completely. There are a lot of new factors influencing this activity, and I’m only thinking about the economic part of blogging. Social media is riding the wave now and your message is more and more difficult to be heard. Unless you take a big chunk of your message and package it specifically for social media. Which isn’t blogging anymore, right?

And yet. there’s still a way to make some serious money blogging. How? It’s called reputation. And it’s the core of you next generation business. What follows is a detailed description of my own money making strategy on this very blog. It may not be your cup of tea, if you’re used to traditional ways of making money, but then again, living prehistorically is not a viable choice anymore too, in my humble opinion.

What Is Reputation?

It’s a combination of Authority and Authenticity. Those are 2 of the 7 traits of the highly successful bloggers, by the way. Reputation is what makes you believed and respected. It’s also something that attracts your audience to your blog over and over again. As you will see by the end of this article, reputation is also the subtle glue which ties together your new money making mechanism.

We live in an information overloaded society. We do not have enough time to go deep into every detail. We do not want to know all the gimmicks in a new device, all we want to know is that we did a good choice. We do not want to know everything about sailing a boat, we need to know enough to get by. We need a reputable source. A truthful and authoritative answer.

If we want to change our lives, all we have to do is to follow the advice of someone else who did it. And did in a trustable way. We need somebody to rely on.

And that’s exactly what reputation does to you: it makes you believable.

Shifting Your Money Focus

Suppose you’re already there: you have a reputable blog, a little bit of traffic and a living ecosystem around your blogging realm. Now, when you think at monetizing it, you start all the process from the prehistory: you try some advertising, then some AdSense then some affiliate stuff. Being prehistoric, that approach will give you prehistoric results. If you’re lucky. Most of the time it will give you nothing.

That’s a pivotal point. Because, based on these results, you draw some incorrect conclusions. Since you don’t make money with a blog, you start assuming that you’re doing something wrong at the other level, in writing. You change your style aiming at a broader audience. You start to make some compromises just to attract more and more traffic. You start a numbers game. If I make 100 dollars / month using AdSense, then I will just have to multiply my audience 100 times.

Wrong. Deadly wrong. And you know why? Because when you’re starting to make some compromises, you’re affecting your authenticity. And authenticity is one of the 2 pillars of reputation. Basically, in search of money, you’re ruining your reputation. And, even if the traffic numbers are higher and higher, you’ll soon see that revenue is going lower and lower. Your loyal audience will be alienated and the new one will be too volatile.

So, what to do? Is there a way to escape this number race?

Yes, it is. Here’s the short version: shift your focus. Don’t use the same prehistoric tools to attract money. Go out of the box.

And now let’s talk about the long version.

The Reputation Ecosystem

First of all, stop thinking at your blog as a revenue source. That sounded a little bit counter-intuitive, right? How to make money with a blog… without a blog? Well, that’s a fundamental confusion. Your blog is your main tool for building reputation. Not your money making product. The money making thing is the reputation you build with it. Got it?

The blog is just a tool. Treat it like this.

Second, shift your focus toward other areas in which your reputation could be converted into money. Some of these areas may have common points with the blog (or with the online economy), some of them may not. Don’t reject the latest.

Use your blog as a common land for your activities in these new areas. Here are just 5 types of activities, personally tested, which will help you make money with your reputation. Which you previously built with your blog, of course.

1. Build Your Own Digital Products

The easiest way to extend your reputation into payable goods is to create your own digital products. These products will carry on the same authority you used to create your blog, with the small but fundamental difference that they will be available only after they’re paid for. These products will contain as much value as your blog, but they will be packaged differently.

The easiest example for these digital products is an ebook. It’s also familiar. If you are an experienced writer on your blog, you wouldn’t find it difficult to write an ebook. But digital products are not limited to ebooks. I did an experiment once with creating an audio version of one of my posts. Here’s the link (it’s only USD2.99):

33 Ways To Get And Maintain Motivation.

As for the ebooks, I already wrote 4 ebooks and all 4 are still selling. Here are the link for your curiosity:

1. 30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset
2. 100 Ways To Live A Better Life
3. 100 Ways To Screw Up Your Life
4. The 7 Ages Of An Online Business

One very important thing to remember about digital products is that they have a specific revenue time span. It decreases over time. Usually, the launch will generate 80% of the sales, with the rest of the 20% spread over 6-9 months. So, unless you become a New York Times best seller, your regular digital product won’t be a recurring revenue stream.

But you can always write more ebooks, of course.

2. Promote Other, Related Digital Products

Another way to extend your reputation is to recommend other people products. This looks a lot like affiliate marketing and it even shares some technical terms (you will become an affiliate for the seller) but it’s very different in nature. Because you will not actively seek buyers for these new products. You will endorse them in your articles. If your readers will find those products interesting, they will buy. There’s no obligation. And no incentive either. It’s just your reputation on the line.

And that’s a big difference. Usually, in the affiliate marketing business, you will identify the products first, and then start building some content around those products. In my approach, you will just endorse some products that are “clicking” with your blog vibe. Of course, that means that you’re not going to promote exotic cheese products if you’re a personal development blogger. That, again, will ruin your reputation.

Here are some of the products I recommended (and still recommend) in the last few months. Of course, all the links are affiliate links, so if you buy, I will get a percentage of the sale.

• Unautomate Your Finances – by Adam Baker from ManVsDebt.com
• How To Network Awesomely – by Colin Wright from ExileLifestyle.com
• Upgrade Reality by Diggy from UpgradeReality.com
• The Personal Excellence Book – by Celestine Chua from CelestineChua.com

As you can see, all the products are coming from respected bloggers in the same field, self-improvement.

3. Promote Your Tools Of Choice

If you have a well respected blog, chances are that you are using some specific tools to maintain it. These tools can also be an extension for your reputation. For instance, I’m using WPSumo, an incredibly useful wordpress framework (and I’m not saying that because I’m a part of WPSumo, it really is a very good product). I’m also using Scribe SEO, a brand new tool which helps me with my SEO copywriting. As you can imagine, I am actively promoting those 2 tools.

But, there is a “but”. Just promoting them wouldn’t be enough. I took the time to dive in and bring out some extra value to those products. As I already told you I am a partner in my own wordpress framework, WPSumo, and that makes me work day in and day out for it. Also, I tooke the time to present Scribe SEO in details. You know why? Because my reputation is on the line.

Speaking of tools I endorse, I couldn’t end this paragraph without talking about MacJournal. I’m using this very powerful tool not only for writing my articles and keeping my blogging setup in order, but also for writing my ebooks or even creating habits. This time I signed a direct deal with the producer. Basically, each month you get a specific Mariner promo code, unique to my blog, which will give you a 25% discount.

4. Pick A Parallel Niche

And grow a related product there. This will require a little bit of a leap of faith, so to speak. Because you’re going really far away from blogging.

In my case, this parallel niche is about iPhone apps. I wrote a lot about productivity here and I also created a life management framework called Assess — Decide – Do. So, I went out of the box and created my own iPhone productivity app. It took me a little bit over 30 days, but it is well worth the effort. Now it has a life of its own and it’s doing pretty well on the App Store. It’s 2.99 USD and, from what I saw on my App Store reports, it’s not at all a big price. In other words, it sells.

I didn’t spent a dime on marketing for this product. All I used as marketing was my reputation. The blog is the only platform that keeps this product floating around. It’s still early to call this a success, but it is surely an incredibly important lesson to learn. The Apple ecosystem is by far one of the most interesting in terms of revenue these days.

5. Sell Your Reputation By The Hour

Consulting. Workshops. Coaching. Whatever you feel you can deliver outside your blog, in the real world, in a face to face interaction. I did this too, creating two real life products, a mentorship program fro young entrepreneurs and a three days blogging workshop. Both were what I can call a definite success. Extending your reputation over real life products is often the most ignored way of monetizing a blog.

It’s very important to note that this money making approach can be recurring. Instead of selling your physical presence, you could package it into an online course and make it available to your blog audience. Again, Brian Clark from CopyBlogger stand up with his Teaching Sells program.

***

As you can see, there is very little here related to display advertising, contextual advertising or other prehistoric tools to generate money. As a matter of fact, this money making approach looks like a rather scattered land. You actually generate revenue using a variety of sources, not all of them directly (or visibly) linked to each another.

And that’s the true mastery of making money with a blog. To build such a powerful glue that it will not only keep together this distributed mechanism, but it will also make it grow exponentially.

I call this glue reputation.

100 Tips On How To Write Huge List Posts

So far I wrote 4 “100 ways to” kind of list posts: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life, 100 Ways To Screw Up Your Life, 100 Ways To Improve Your Blog and 100 Things I Did In 2009. All of them got featured on delicious, stumbleupon, hackernews, reddit or other popular places on the internet. They still bring in tons of traffic. No, I lied. They bring in tens of tons of traffic. Crafting such a list post is not an easy task. So I thought to put together 100 tips on how to create a “100 ways to” kind of list. Expect some disguised humor along more serious tips and, generally speaking, do take this list with a little bit of salt…

1. Become Immune To Rejection

List posts are cool. but list posts are also way too common nowadays. If you truly want to write a successful “100 ways to” post then prepare to face some rejection. Primarily, from yourself. Unconsciously, if you’re an experienced blogger, you hate lists. So work out this fear and start working.

2. Split It Into Smaller Tasks

Fundamental: work your list post in smaller steps, by writing every day several items. You’ll hopefully avoid some blocking episodes and you could also assess progress over several days (or weeks). After all, even a million dollars is made by adding 10 chunks of 100.000…

3. Use Mind Mapping

Start with some general notions about your list and take it from there. From my experience, after the mind map gets bigger than 30-40 branches, you need to transfer it on a text editor. But it gives you a pretty good start.

4. Chose A Rich Topic

If you want to make a “100 ways of chopping potatoes” list post, chances are that you will never get to finish it. The topic is too narrow. It’s almost impossible to find 100 different ways to chop potatoes. Try to go for wider topics, like carrots (joking of course, now serious), blogging, motivation or inspiration.

5. Prepare To Read More

If you are going to write a “100 ways to” list post, you are also going to read it, adjust it, correct it and proof read it. Meaning you’re going to read much more than you’re used to. If you do try to write your list post without reading it after, the results may be totally unpredictable.

6. Write Short Explanations

Don’t go for a dry bullet list, take the time to write something for every item. But keep the explanation short. Like this one.

7. Flip A Coin

Whenever you hesitate to add another item to the list post, kill the suspense with a coin. Flip it fast, possibly while you’re smiling. If you win, add the item, if you lose, rephrase and still add the item. It’s a “100 ways to” list, goddamit, we need every frigging thing we can imagine, can’t afford playing stupid games with items and coins.

8. Link To Yourself

A “100 ways to” list post will surely bring in more traffic than a usual post. So, it’s a very good place to insert links to some of your most interesting articles. Just make sure the links actually have something in common with the main topic.

9. Be Patient

Don’t expect a “100 ways to” list to be baked in the same amount of time you spend for a regular blog post. It could take many days, or even weeks. The trick is to be patient here and don’t lose the magic final number (that would be the 100th tip) from your sight. It will pay off.

10. If You Write It, They Will Bookmark It

A “100 ways to” list post takes much longer to be read than a usual post. Initially, people will just bookmark it and never get back to it until the common fear of reading something for more than 15 seconds is gone. Some will never get back to read it (that fear is pretty nasty) but they will bookmark it for sure.

11. Start More Than One “100 ways to” List Post

Switching from one list post to another will be good for your focus. If the lists are on slightly different topics, it will be even better, because you will most likely avoid writer block totally by constantly challenging your creativity in different areas.

12. Make a Table Of Contents Out Of It

If at the current moment you have written more than 100 posts, have a good topic distribution and your list of “100 ways to” is close enough to what you’re usually writing, it will act also as a Table Of Contents of your blog, so link to yourself. The first links will get more visibility so think twice which items are you putting in the first third of your list post.

13. Brainstorm It

Let some of your friends or your colleagues in. Make it sound like fun and start writing down ideas. Brainstorming will not only give your more material but it will also have this decluttering effect on your mind. You’ll actually start to see more ideas and you’ll do that much faster. It’s like cleaning up your lenses.

14. Play With Words

Start playing with the words. If it’s a list post about motivation, start writing down motivation synonyms. If it’s about entrepreneurship, start writing down synonyms for entrepreneurship. Seeing the same thing from different perspective will reveal new ideas. This technique is especially useful in the late stage, when you already had a lot of the items nailed down.

15. Call A Random Phone Number And Ask For Advice

Not to be repeated more than once per list. Chances that you will actually bump into the same person you called last time are incredibly high. If you can hide after a fat fingering mistake for the first one, doing the same thing twice will put you in a very favorable position to receive a police inquiry for harassment.

16. Try To Insert A Random, Not Related Item

But do it only while you’re working on it. If you let it slip into the real list post, sooner or later they’ll catch you. But having a ghost in your draft will make things so much interesting. I guarantee that from a certain level you won’t know for sure which one is the ghost and which one is the real one. Annoying, but funny. Somehow.

17. Re-read Your Past 100 List Posts

Not only as a source of inspiration, but especially useful to avoid repetition. 100 pieces of a puzzle is a big number and it’s pretty easy to get caught in a writing routine. Keeping an eye on your older list posts will raise your awareness and hopefully will also boost your self-esteem to the point that you’re actually finishing your current list post.

18. Be Useful

If your list post will hugely benefit the green little men from Mars and no one on Earth will find any immediate use for it, don’t expect to become popular. Getting in touch first with the green little men and nicely asking if they really need such a list will surely help. More than once, the answer will be that you need to be really useful.

19. Chop It Off

Make it a list of 77 tips if you can’t find more items. Or a list of 33 ways. Or even 7 traits. At least you tried. Be proud. It’s your list post.

20. Read Other List Posts

Especially in completely different niches than yours. It will help remove your unconscious blocks and refresh your perspective. Ideas are everywhere, it’s your focus which is not trained enough to spot them.

21. Inhale. Exhale

I know you’re focused and you’re chasing that idea at full speed. That’s not a reason to forgot breathing.

22. Re-read Your 3rd Grade Diary

If you had one. Meeting a younger you is always enlightening, You have no idea how many things you forgot you know, how many dreams you had and how many skills you developed. If don’t had a journal in the 3rd grade maybe it’s time to start one now, isn’t it?

23. Knock On A Stranger’s Door

Risky. But fun. Try knocking at someone else’s door and ask for some advice. You may end up writing a list post about 100 ways to escape after knocking on a complete stranger’s door. That counts too, right?

24. Twitter Is Your Friend

Look for quotes, sayings, conversations or interesting links. Twitter has a fairly high noise to signal ratio, but with some patience you can still isolate a few ideas. Or, at least, you’ll procrastinate in a very trendy way.

25. Isolate From Distractions

Close the doors, the windows, the cell phone. Close the TV, the radio, close your eyes (just for a few seconds, to get in the mood) and your mouth. The only things still running should be your laptop and your brains. Now unleash your inspiration and start writing.

26. Let It Cook For A While

Don’t try to publish the list post immediately. Let it cook for a while. Re-read it in a few days. It’s not that you will make it better, that’s a pretty obvious effect. But you may get a few new ideas for some future “100 items” list posts too.

27. Establish A Reasonably High Daily Batch Of Items

Try to write at least 5 to 10 items per day. In my experience, if you write less than 5 per day you will actually kill the list post. The effort of re-reading your last days work will be higher than what you need for those 3 items. Establish a reasonably high batch and stick with it.

28. Sing A Song

Like in trying to remembering one, not just humming wordless. Your creative mind is highly associative, so every time you get it out of the comfort zone, it will bring up new connections. Now, what song was that? Humm, ta, ri, ra… yeah, I got it .

29. Be One Of Your Readers

Try to impersonate one of your readers. What exactly would somebody expect to read on your blog? What are his expectations? Wear his shoes for a few minutes. That will surely open a flow of new ideas. You write for them, in the end, not for you.

30. Watch The News

Use it for its reverse effect. I usually watch the news only to be completely turned off by all the violence, stupidity and shallowness that exudes from TV news nowadays. After a few minutes, I am so happy to return to my list post.

31. Play With Your Kids

If you have kids, of course. If not, observe some in the park. I am always amazed by how easily kids are creating new worlds around them. It seems that someway along the way we lost this ability.

32. Play Monopoly

Or any other game, as long as you’re playing it with your friends. When they lose, propose to exchange roles (as in you becoming the loser) if they can give you several ideas for your blog post. You’ll be surprised how many of your friends hate to lose at games.

33. Ride The Subway And Ask Everybody What Time Is It

The first 4-5 people will try to be honest with you and tell the exact time. But when the rest of them will see you asking the same question over and over, will want to know you why you’re doing it. That will force your mind to find some really, really creative answers.

34. Listen To A Completely Different Kind Of Music

If you’re into rock, go symphonic. If you’re into symphonic, go for country. If you’re country, go for pop. You got the idea, something completely out of your audible comfort zone. Don’t stop it until you find at least 10 new ideas. Which usually happens in the first 3 minutes.

35. Walk Barefoot Around Your House

Well, this may not bring you ideas about how to write a “100 ways to” list post, but it will cool you off for sure. Especially during winter.

36. Practice Your Lists

You can keep writing smaller lists just for keeping yourself pumped up. Small lists, but somehow related. For instance, I wrote a list of 7 Ways To Say No, followed by a list of 14 Ways To Say Yes. It’s much easier to start something bigger after that.

37. Try It In Different Languages

If you’re writing a list about cooking, look up the word “cooking” in a dictionary. In how many ways people are able to say “cooking” around the world? I bet in at least 120. Well, what stops you to find 100 ways to say it too?

38. Make A Plan

And what I mean by a plan is to establish a clear deadline and reachable milestones. Start with a target of 2 weeks, writing at least 5 new items each working day. In 20 days, you’ll have 100 items. That’s what I call a plan.

39. Set A Posting Frequency

In my experience, “100 ways to” lists are pretty time intensive. Not only for you, but for your readers too. So, I would never schedule more than 1 huge list each month. It’s not only taking a lot of energy, but it will also scare your readers away if you do it more often.

40. Chose A Topic You’re Comfortable With

Write about something you really know or heavily experienced lately. If you chose a spectacular topic, but you don’t have any idea what is all about in that niche, you won’t be able to deliver, even if you do all the research and planning in the world.

41. Brag About It

Talk to your friends about your intentions, tweet it or post it to your wall on Facebook. Up to the point you’re getting really uncomfortable with the potential feeling of rejection you’d get if you don’t put your arse to work and deliver that damn list.

42. Make A Challenge Out Of It

This is how I started, by being challenged by one of my blogger friends. First, it seemed impossible to write a 100 items list. The, it started to feel plausible. Then I started to work and it became real.

43. Improvise

Write whatever comes to your mind, even if it’s not related to your list. Put it into bullets, to make it look like a list. And once you’re on a roll, writing on topic, just delete the garbage.

44. Go From A To B In 5 Steps

That’s a great exercise to fuel your creativity. Open a dictionary and pick word, let’s say word “A”. Write it down. Then open it again and pick word “B”. Write it down. Then make up a story to go from word “A” to word “B” in 5 steps. Here is a detailed post describing the process.

45. Break The Main Topic In Subtopics

If the topic allows that, try to break the list into chapters. I did it with my 100 Ways To Improve Your Blog list, where I split it into content, promotion, layout areas. It will speed up things considerably.

46. Keep It In A Fixed Form

Try to write a fixed number of words for each explanation. Although it seems more difficult, it actually forces you to maintain a writing discipline. Break it only when it helps the item being more visible, like item number 6.

47. Go For The Smallest Denominator

With this pompous title I only mean that you should break processes in smaller parts and write an item for each part. If what you think is: “be creative”, break it into specific techniques, like item number 44 or 46 in this very list. A generalist “Be creative” has no value in a list, go into details.

48. Be Honest With Yourself

If you can’t make a list of 100 items, that’s ok. Better be happy you tried and failed than to concoct a fake list which will be spotted instantly and make you more harm than good. The opposite is also true: if you honestly feel you can deliver, go all the way to the top.

49. Count To 100 In Your Head

It will make the whole task easier to understand and it will give you a bird-view of what are you are trying to accomplish. Provided you’re able to reach to 100 and don’t fall asleep, as I usually do, somewhere between 77 and 85. Your mileage may vary.

50. Celebrate The First Half

That would be number 50, if you didn’t get it . Once you’re here, your job is half done. Praise this. Have a drink. Take a break. From now on, your number of finished items can only be greater than the number of items waiting to be finished. You’re almost there.

51. Don’t Lose Focus

it’s very easy to be distracted and move your focus on other tasks. Don’t do it. Force yourself into making this list happening. Put a post it on your computer screen. Glue a piece of paper on the ceiling, so it would be the first thing you’ll see in the morning. Stay there.

52. Enjoy The Process

If you don’t find a way to actually take pleasure in writing this list, it would be extremely difficult. Feel good about what you write, feel relaxed and at ease. Try to visualize yourself as an A-list blogger if this will make things easier. Do whatever it takes to enjoy the process.

53. Bribe Yourself

Put small incentives at the end of a writing task to mark the victory. Don’t get them until you finish what you planned to. If there’s little or no motivation, maybe a plain and consistent bribe would act as an incentive. Think at something you just couldn’t resist .

54. Bribe Others To Support You

Bring in some other people and promise you will do something for them if they’ll support you in any way you chose: from cheering up to forcing you. It’s surprising how many people you’ll find around, ready to help you for a small service from your part.

55. Start A Conversation About It

It may be on a forum, on other social media website or at the office. Don’t do a full brainstorming, just ask around other people about their opinion. That enough will bring you a lot of unexpected inspiration.

56. Write The Numbers First

Like empty placeholders for your items. It will help you visualize how many things you still have to write and give you a subtle sense of accomplishment. One by one, you’re getting there. Isn’t that wonderful? (Start this after you’re passed number 50, otherwise it can get pretty depressing).

57. Ask Your Boss For Advice

I don’t think you’ll get a meaningful answer, but it will make your adrenaline level go up for sure. Alternatively, if you don’t have a boss, you can try asking your spouse for the same advice. If you’re not married, well… why on Earth are you losing time writing stupid lists of “100 ways to”, when you should be out, partying?

58. Do It On The Road

Have a smartphone with you and stop whenever you seem to have an idea: write it down, email it to yourself, or just record it if your phone uses a voice recorder. On a side note, I do this on a regular basis to capture ideas for my blog posts.

59. Don’t Write Ideas On A Napkin

While you’re having a romantic dinner, for instance. Even if your brain is so excited that it seem to come up with a new idea every 10 seconds. It’s rude, totally disrespectful and extremely non-ecological. Use a phone instead.

60. Scrabble It

If you know scrabble, you know what I mean. If you don’t, go out and buy one, it’s pretty cheap and it will pay out well in the future. Even if you don’t come up with a decent list of items after you played some serious scrabble, at least you had a really good time.

61. Don’t Take It Too Serious

It will burn you out. A list of “100 ways to” is not an easy task (I have the feeling I said that before) but it’s not something impossible either. You’ll make till the end, so you’d better try to keep an open and light attitude. Even if the list won’t be spectacular, you still did it big time.

62. Journal While Writing It

Journaling in itself is a powerful self-discovery tool, so using it while you’re on a list of “100 ways to” seems pretty logical. What I noticed in my personal history is that the first 30-40 items are the most easy to write, while the last 10 are the most rewarding.

63. Start A Facebook Fan Page Before You Publish It

Just in case you hit big, you know. By the time you wake up from all that Digg or Delicious or StumbleUpon euphoria, somebody else may take your post name, start a group, do a few live workshops on the topic and even launch a book. You’ve been warned!

64. Make A Drawing Of It

This is not mind mapping, it’s drawing. One of the simplest creativity enhancement techniques: draw a representation of your object. In whatever form you want. Do it until your mental flow is unblocked and you can find at least 3-4 new ideas.

65. Don’t Fake It

Don’t mix various pieces of floating info from the internet hoping they will eventually glue together in a balanced product. Because they won’t. Write your list item by item, be inspired by others and creative, but don’t fake it. Generally speaking, faking is a huge waste of time.

66. Read Riddles

Two reasons: have fun and push your mind to think more and in unusual ways. I’m reading riddles every time I have a little bit of a block (fortunately, this is extremely rare) and every time works like a charm. What is black and white and read all over? Your “100 ways to” list, of course

67. Pick A Random Word, From A Random Page, From A Random Book

Close your eyes, pick a book, open it and put your finger on a random page. Ignore “and”, “or”, “to” and alike. See what you get. If you’re a normal, balanced and aware person, I bet you’re going to get just a… random word. Isn’t that wonderful? Now back to work on your list, you lazy player!

68. Make A Twitter List

And add random people to it up to 100. It shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes. Use the public timeline, not yours. Then read their tweets one by one, up to 100. If your list feels like what you just read, that means you still have work to do: just make another list.

69. Read The Comments On Your Blog

No, you’re not going to get some miraculous idea by reading your blog comments, but at least you’re going to realize that some people genuinely care about you. Even if their comments are angry, they do care about you. There’s still hope. Keep on writing.

70. Try To Do 100 Pushups

If you’re a normal, average person, you may stop around 30 or 35. That will show you what your brains endures while you’re stressing it so much with your list. But if you do all 100 pushups, it means  you don’t really need to write a “100 ways to” list. You’re ok, chicks are going to dig you anyway.

71. Wear Sunglasses In Your Room For Half An Hour

Also wear some soft but solid clothes, just in case you’re going to hit some furniture. I guarantee you won’t have any significant breakthrough during this half an hour, but the second you’ll remove the sunglasses, everything will be enlightening. Seriously.

72. Call Your Ex

Tell him/her this is a matter of life and death and if he/she will help you just this time, you’re going to finally respect that restriction order. If he/she didn’t have the time to change phone number since your last “100 ways to” list, I guarantee this will work.

73. Call A Pizza Delivery Service

And tell them you’re on the roof, ready to jump, if you don’t get a free large pepperoni pizza in the next 30 minutes. This is what I call a win-win situation: you either get tons of brilliant ideas to go on with your life (pizza delivery boys are really good at that), either a free pizza.

74. Write 100 Different Names

That’s one of the simplest creativity exercises ever. Hint: you can go alphabetically and write a few names for each letter. Finishing such a list will somehow boost your confidence or at least make you believe that there really are “100 things” lists out there.

75. Train By Solving A Puzzle First

A 50 pieces puzzle will be enough for starters, but once you get good at it, start on 100 or 200 pieces. Seriously, writing a huge list post is very similar with solving a 100 pieces puzzle: you have the picture in your head, but it will take like forever to match all the pieces together.

76. Prepare A List Of Excuses

Like real life excuses for all the social events you’re going to miss and all the meetings you’ll never attend to, because you’re busy writing. Alternatively, you could start writing a “100 ways to excuse yourself when you’re late because you’re writing a ’100 ways to’ list post” kind of list. Makes sense?

77. Think Lateral

If your list is going to have 100 items, you better make it THE list in that niche. So think outside of the box. Go lateral, go vertical or oblique if this is opening new perspectives on your topic. After all, you don’t want to make a silly list about how to write lists, right?

78. Solve A Problem With Your List

Your list must solve a real life problem, otherwise, no matter how well written is, how hilarious the description are or how good your SEO strategy is implemented, it will not live. It will not even take off. Solve a real problem. For instance, genuinely try to help people write huge lists.

79. Mix In Some Humor

Joking will always draw people in. Being funny and entertaining is a key element in making such a list popular. Even if your topic is serious, if you don’t mix some humor in, surprising your readers, the list will be dull and gloomy. Dull and gloomy does not sell. Humor sells.

80. Stop Asking Yourself: “Why 100?”

We don’t ask that. We take that for granted. For starters, 100 is a pretty cool number. Sounds round and unabridged. It exhales a sensation of purity and completeness. (See how I desperately try to concoct some reasons? That’s because there aren’t really any).

81. Meditate On It

If you practice meditation on a regular basis, this shouldn’t be difficult. If you don’t, try to empty your mind and focus only on the topic of the list. Don’t try to find answers or ideas, just focus on the topic. Breathe in, breathe out. And, by all means, try not to levitate, you have work to do!

82. Watch For Coincidences

This long writing process will span over a few days or weeks and I advise that during this time span you should be extremely aware of any coincidences occurring around. Follow them. You’ll be surprised to find out that there aren’t really any coincidences, there are only signs.

83. Think SEO

This is a very important step. Target your keywords and place them in the first third of your post. I don’t really know why the first third, but it seems to work. Now, can you count how many times I had “100 ways to” keywords in this post? Write the answer in the comments.

84. Get A New Haircut

You’re going to be a completely different person after you finish this list. Literally. So change your look too. Your friends will never buy it and secretly think you just broke up with your girlfriend. Make that the beginning of a wonderful new list: “100 secret thoughts generated by a new haircut”.

85. Drive Far Away From Home Until You Get Lost

When you’re sure you’re absolutely lost, get your GPS from the trunk and head back home. Now you know there are worse things out there than running out of ideas for your list. And don’t you dare starting a list about “100 ways to get lost”. Seriously, buddy, nobody wants to know that.

86. Fake A “100 Things” Shopping At The Supermarket

Go to the supermarket, pick 100 different things and put them in your trolley. You don’t have to really buy all 100 items, unless you really want to. This exercise is intended to make you understand you have virtually unlimited options, not to get you broke.

87. Try Guessing Names Of Totally Unknown People

Would that be a “Jane”? Hmm, nope, maybe “Angela”, looks more like an “Angela”. Never try to verify your assumptions, or prepare for this answer: “Get a life! I’m doing an exercise to write a “100 ways to” list?, that’s the worst pick up line I ever heard!”.

88. Clean Up Your Garage

Or, if you don’t have a garage, clean up your room. Or at least the shelves in your office. Shovel those receipts, old files, photos, notes, post-its and wrecked pens. Feels so much better than writing stupid items on a “100 ways to” list, isn’t it? Again, that’s another win-win: if not a huge list, at least a clean house.

89. Send An Email To Some Random Customer Service

Chose whatever business you like and then send an email to their customer service, asking for advice on how to write  a “100 ways to” list post. Most of the answers will be automated, but once you get pass this, you’ll have the time of your life. I’m telling you.

90. Don’t Stop At Number 90

In my experience, number 90 is the most dangerous number to reach when you’re writing such a list. It’s only 10 items away from finish and the mirage of actually getting this done can easily get you off the track. Write something fast at your number 90 and then move on.

91. Walk 100 Steps On A Crowded Street

And I mean count those 100 steps. If you made it without restarting the counting, be assured you’re going to make that list too. Now try it again on a large public square, making a perfect circle, step 100 overlapping step 1. Now you should stop walking in circles and start writing.

92. Send Yourself 100 Emails

Containing the same question: “did you finished item number x?”. After each finished item on your list, delete one of the emails. If you really send yourself 100 emails, I bet you won’t face any difficulty at all in writing your list. It’s hard to send 100 emails to yourself…

93. Name 100 Things You See From Your Window

Another unblocking exercise and a pretty effective one. No need to go up to 100 if you feel you’re pass the block. But it would be a pretty interesting task in any context. It will enlarge your perception and enhance your observation sense.

94. Blend Your Senses

Close your eyes, imagine a fruit and then try to feel its taste. Alternatively, put some music and imagine how each musical instrument will feel in your hand. It’s amazing how effective this is in fostering new ideas or perspectives.

95. Read Motivational/Inspirational Quotes

You have all this wisdom available, floating around, so why don’t just use it? If you don’t have your own quotes repository on file, do a Google search. Reading quotes is like having a sparring partner for your mind.

96. Work It Live

Like not in an offline editor, edit it in your wordpress dashboard and watch the preview every time you add a new item. I find it very motivating to watch the list growing and looking exactly as is going to be.

97. Be Proud Of It

The more you write, the closer you are to finish a great piece of work. Be proud of it. Even if it’s a simple “100 ways to” grow apples in your backyard, it will be useful for somebody. And you’re doing it right now. It’s not the regular blog post you do every day. It’s a huge list.

98. See The Items Like Chapters Of A Bigger Book

Be prepared to detail on all the items on your list. So make it consistent, ready to be developed into something bigger. I did it twice with my previous ones: 100 Ways To Improve Your Life and 100 Ways To Screw Up Your Life. Both lists grew into fully fledged books, available now on Amazon.com.

99. Anticipate The Celebration

The closer you get to the finish, the closer the final gala will be. Anticipate the reward. This time it’s not about the bribe, incentive or motivation. You’re almost done. You’re one tip away. You did it. Step back, take a deep breath and write the last one. And then go out to celebrate.

100. Don’t Give Up

Writing such a huge list is a very important challenge. It cannot be done in only one move, it takes persistence and dedication. But the benefits are huge. And I mean it. So, if you ever planned to start one, don’t stop until you actually publish it. In a few days, or in a few weeks. Just finish it.

Put Your Blog Into A Mind Map

There were several posts here at DragosRoua.com, related to mind mapping, over the last two years. In fact, there were so much posts about mind mapping that I had to create a separate category for them. From an introduction of how and why to blog with a mind map, up to a recap of my most downloaded mind maps, I wrote extensively about this. For the newcomer, mind mapping is a writing technique, which expand the linear thinking by letting you write in different “directions” or “nodes” of a mind map. This seems to be the brain’s most convenient way of representing reality, and it is often used as a creativity enhancement tool.

I found mind mapping very useful when it comes to speed up my management activities. Such as maintaining a blog. Like this one. You know, writing on your blog is a completely different beast than maintaining it. It requires a different set of skills, it takes a certain amount of time, and, like all other activities, can be optimized. If I can use mind mapping to streamline my blogging activity as a whole, why not do it?

My blogging process is the result of several different things: the software I use, the ideas that I want to write about, the posts, the categories, the plugins, the downloads, the revenue strategy… Quite a bit of stuff, right? And is not from the same league, as you already saw, it’s a mix of information, skill, activity and strategy. The challenge is to keep this in a manageable structure.

One very important management principle says: keep everything visible. If there are things on your business that are not visible to you, chances are that your customers won’t seem them either. Keep a broader perspective, try to always look at whole picture. And there is nothing more convenient for the “whole picture” than a mind map.

So, I put my entire blogging process on a mind map, and started to unfold it. Here’s the result:

As I already told you, blogging is a mix of different activities, information and tasks. Must be all visible in order to keep a consistent perspective, right? Must put together all items that create the blogging process and my whole blogging process look like this:

1. headline
2. categories
3. posts
4. revenue
5. promotion
6. plugins
7. downloads

As you may see, there is no specific order in which I added them, and no consistency, some of them are information, like posts and categories, some of them are activities that I have to perform, like promotion and monetization, and some of them are pieces of software, like plugins. Not all blogs may have all the items listed above, but my specific setup does, and I’ll take a wild guess that the vast majority of blogs are pretty much like this.

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