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 (1101)

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.

How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise

That’s the first article from the series on how to build reputation with a blog and will deal with openly stating your expertise.

Back To Basics

Openly stating your expertise on your blog it’s fundamental for building online reputation, yet too often overlooked. Many bloggers, especially in the beginning, are focusing on building traffic, creating blog posts, interacting, and they forget the main reason they’re blogging for: they’re really good at something. There is something that they do better than anyone else. In this rush for creating more and more content, their very own expertise is left behind.

Well, make it obvious. Put it out there. Otherwise nobody will know what’s the difference you can make. Suppose you will build a sizable audience. You will attract a fairly large number of subscribers. Your readers may like your posts, they may feel entertained, educated or motivated by reading your blog, but they won’t create a mental link between a certain niche and your online persona. Unless you make it obvious.

How obvious? Well, it starts with your blog header and goes up to your about page. Will talk in a minute about the hot zones of your blog where you can imprint your expertise. For now, let me give you an explanation of my own blog header: brilliantly better. Apart from sounding really good (I love alliterations) it really mirrors what I am good at.

My work here aims to create a state of brilliancy while getting better. That is what I do. And this is my intended reputation. I know from experience that I can make you become not only better, but also feel brilliant in the process. That’s my main area of expertise. I have of course other, much more focused areas of interest, like blogging or online business. I’m not writing very often about them, but every few posts I publish something on these topics too. And while I’m not a top expert in these areas, I can help you to get better results by using general tools like self-discipline, personal productivity and so on. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have a specific topic in which I can improve your activity, otherwise I would have openly state it in my blog header. It would have been something like Brilliantly Better Blogging, for instance. You can chose your own goal, your own improvement area, and then use my blog as a motivator and trigger of inspiration. This is what I do.

Now think at what YOU are doing. What exactly are you good at? What is your most important value that you are ready to expose it out there? That should be your reputation cornerstone. You should start building on that one.

Master Your Blog Header

I already talked about this briefly in the last paragraph. I will only add that this is the pivotal place for your online image. It’s the first thing the reader will see. It’s often the “title” tag that search engine are taking into account when indexing your blog. This is how you will be remembered. Don’t miss this spot by trying to throw in some fancy things, but with no relevance whatsoever in regard with your desired reputation. Be short, clear and honest. Save the fanciness for the blog posts.

Use Your Blog Posts With Caution

People are reading blog posts because they’re based on direct, human interaction. They’re not part of an elaborated publishing process, like in traditional media. Behind a blog is (usually) only one person. And people are reading that blog because of that person.

At this level, stating your expertise too often in your blog posts will be a little too much. Too obvious. Your blog posts are the place in which you are capturing your readers and make them feel good. You’re not selling anything on your blog posts. On the contrary, you’re giving away for free. And that keeps people coming again and again, because they have a repeated return for their attention investment.

So, use your blog posts with caution. What you can do, however, is to interlink some of your expertise pages from within your most visited posts. I think one of the masters in interlinking (this is how it’s called) is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. If you don’t read his blog, you should start now. Seriously.

About Your About Page

Blogs have an “about” page for a very important reason. It’s usually the place your readers reach after you got their attention. It’s your second opportunity to get a seat in their heads (the first one is your blog header, remember?). If you don’t have an about page, your blog is worth half of what it could worth. If you have a “shy” about page, you’d better not having it at all.

The about page should be the place where you should list all your credentials, testimonials and all the other references about you on the interwebs: interviews, collective projects, media appearances and so on. Afraid that you have only a few? Well, go out and mingle, contribute and generate more. Afraid that you have too many? I don’t think there is such a thing like “too many” when it comes to your own credentials or testimonials.

One of the most interesting “about” pages I know (although one of the simplest out there) is Brian Clark’s from Copyblogger.com. Go read it and you’ll understand why he’s a very successful online entrepreneur (not only a famous blogger).

Sidebars And Sales Pages

Blog gods gave you sidebars for a reason. There aren’t just placeholder for your widgets, you know? They are valuable blog real estate that should be used. They offer a parallel visual experience for your readers. As such, they’re much more available and ready to be clicked than the about page.

Usually, sidebars are very good for incentives. You can offer some assets in exchange to some loyalty: the classical free ebook in exchange of a newsletter subscription. But you can also use your sidebars to promote events, products or services you own or you are part of.

Another special case is what I call the “sales” pages. They are not products or services sales pages, but mostly “hire me” places. If you really are selling your presence, as a consultant or handy man, you should definitely use the hire pages as a way to clearly state your expertise. It’s also pretty common to put there your services and your rates.

How This Works And Benefits

Openly stating your expertise makes it easier for the reader to remember you. It will create a strong image in their heads. I name this process: “buying some brain real estate”, identifying a niche with your name. It may seem like you’re very “in your face” with this approach, but believe me, you’re not.

Your readers are floating on a huge information ocean and in order to grab their attention you gotta be determined. I’m not advocating more than 50% of a regular blog page content (including sidebars) to be filled with your expertise, because this will transform your blog into a huge selling page. But it should be there and it should be visible. Many bloggers believe they will be “picked up” because they’re good at what they do. While this may be true, until they don’t make their skills obvious, nobody will even know what they do.

Openly stating your expertise is fundamental for building reputation but is not even remotely the only thing you need for that. On the contrary, if you’re resuming only to openly stating your expertise you will most likely generate the opposite effect of reputation: people will start to avoid you.

This is why we still have 6 more articles to go.

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.

How To Play The Game Of Blogging

After I sold my company, 2 years ago, I knew there will be some inactive time for me. I mean, once you’re an important player and you sell your part of the territory, expect that you’ll be asked to take a break for a while. After all, it’s not ok to start to compete against your buyers the next day after the selling. I won’t go into the technical details of what a “non-compete” agreement should contain, because this is not the main point of the article. The main point of this article is to share what I’ve learned by playing the game of blogging.

The Beginning

The only thing I was able to grow and maintain on the online field, after I sold my business, was my personal blog. No more markets, contracts, niche strategies or online alliances. No more online business: just a personal blog. Although I did blog every now and then even before I sold the company, I never did “professionally”. All of a sudden, the selling of my company became a great opportunity to begin something completely new. With all the associated risks of starting something from scratch: not knowing the right tools, making mistakes, not being a native English speaker and so on.

The Lessons

This blog, as you know it now, was started in October 2008, under a Romanian domain dragosroua.com. In July 2009 I changed the domain to dragosroua.com. That was one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way: if you blog in English, keeping your blog under a localized domain name is not ok. You do need a .com, otherwise you’ll end up in a secondary index of Google.

A few months ago, the blog was moved to another hosting facility, outside Romania (in United States, I’m happily using the cloud hosting package of RackSpace). That was another lesson I had to learn the hard way: the physical location of your hosting company influences your ranking in search engines (at least Google).

As of January 2009 I started to actively promote the blog, becoming active (some say that I become even too active ) in social media outlets like Twitter, FaceBook and StumbleUpon. Until then I was under the firm impression that “if you write it, they will come”. Another huge mistake. You gotta promote your blog, otherwise you’ll never reach to your audience. Why? Because blogging is like any other publishing business, only it’s taking place in an incredibly crowded market. There are literally hundreds of millions of blogs out there. I can hardly imagine another business on this Earth where you have such an incredible number of competitors. So, if you want to really make your voice heard, you gotta work for it.

Many of these lessons, mistakes and other interesting things, like monetization and promotion, were described in two milestone series: The First 6 Months Of Blogging and The First Year Of Blogging. Feel free to read them at your leisure if you’re interested in some historical data about my blog. Now, let’s get to the meat: how to play the game of blogging?

Know Your Availability

If you’re into blogging, you gotta know beforehand how much time are you willing to allocate to it. All those stories about how a stay at home mom become instantly famous after she published a blog are bullshit. Pardon my French.

Don’t get me wrong, you can get lucky pretty early and get featured on some of the largest social media sites like Digg and Delicious, and get enormous amounts of traffic in a very short time. It can get up to several dozens of thousands unique users in a week interval.

But that’s not success. You may have 5 minutes of fame and then you’re out in the cloud. Nobody will know your name anymore. Being successful as a blogger means to control your exposure, to predict the impact of your work and to constantly measure and influence the results. And that requires time. It requires discipline and commitment.

Starting a blog “only to see how it works” will never work. You gotta commit to it at least one year – in my persona experience, at least – before jumping to conclusions. Blogging is not a part time job. Unless you want a part time job that will pay you nothing.

So, the most important thing about playing the game of blogging is to know your availability.

Know Your Expertise

The second thing that’s very important after your physical availability is your expertise. You gotta be good at something. Even if you’re a stay at home mom, you gotta be good at this: being a stay at home mom. If you’re a programmer, you gotta be good at programming. If you write about self-improvement, be honest about what it takes to be in the self-improvement field.

Why is that so important? Again, because of the competition. When you compete against dozens of millions of blogs, you can’t fake it. You can’t pretend you’re a guru in some field and then just copy and paste other people articles. It won’t take you far.

On the contrary, it will take you down pretty fast. One of the most subtle mechanisms of blogging is what I call “reputation”. It’s a very special mix of expertise, trust and persistence. If you’re good at what you do, if you’re honest and you’re writing on your blog for a reasonable amount of time, you’ll get reputation.

And, believe it or not, reputation is the cornerstone of a blogging business. Not traffic. Not AdSense. Not affiliate deals. All of these are just tools or metrics. The core of the business is reputation. That will make your audience buy the products you create or refer. Keep this word in mind: reputation.

And, without, expertise, reputation is literally impossible to be created.

Know Your Audience

The third important thing in the blogging game is your audience. The fundamental difference between the traditional publishing and blogging is the interactive part of it. Blogging is not unidirectional, like a printed magazine. It’s open and alive. You get in touch with your readers instantly, via comments. And they want to talk to you, the real person behind the blog. They don’t want a corporation, they want a regular guy who’s honestly sharing his life. That’s what gives them inspiration, motivation, hope.

At some point during your blogging activity you’ll make a great discovery: you’re not writing for yourself, you’re writing for your readers. As simple and stupid this discovery may seem, it’s an incredible attitude shifter. The moment you’ll realize you’re sharing for other people, you’ll change the way you blog.

You’ll become interested in their needs, rather than in yours. You’ll become interested in their reactions and their attitudes and those reactions and attitudes will become triggers for your next blog posts. You’ll create a multidirectional, alive and useful product. You’ll create a real, significant change in the world. And that’s the only thing that really counts at the end of the day, when all the traffic and revenue stories are told and forgot.

By knowing your audience, you can evaluate your real impact to the world.

Identify Partners, You Can’t Do It Without Them

The fourth most important thing at playing the blogging game is about partnerships. You won’t get far without partnerships. Why? Again, the main answer is competition.

The blogs ecosystem is an incredibly complex web of interactions, links, authority and trends. This web is changing constantly and the chances that you will survive as an isolated blogger are incredibly small. You need a solid team of partners who will support you. Partners that you will support too, enforcing the power of your links in the blogging ecosystem.

But there’s another reason besides competition for partnerships and that’s also about reputation. Many times you’re evaluated by the friends you have rather than by your own deeds. And in such a very complex web like the blogging web, when time is extremely precious, you simply take for granted some references without verifying them. And that’s where your partners are starting to matter big time. They will extend your authority and reputation onto you. And of course, you will extend your own authority and reputation onto them.

The way you’re choosing your partners is also a statement of your own values and sometimes tells more about yourself than what you’re actually doing.

Hydrate Yourself: It’s A Marathon, Not A Sprint

I can’t emphasize enough on this one. Although if you took the time to actually read all the first 4 principles of the blogging game, you should have understand this by now, I’ll say it again anyway: it’s a long, long journey. Whenever you get tired, demotivated, hopeless or just sad, remember you’re not at the end of the journey yet.

Just keep playing the game.