Today Chrissy Scivicque from OfficeArrow.com shares her story of building up her blog, selling it and then being hired to keep developing it - many bloggers dream.

There’s no denying it: blogging is now considered a legitimate way to launch the career of your dreams. The opportunities for bloggers are numerous and they only continue to grow. Take it from me: that blog you’re building may lead you in directions you never would have imagined possible.

My story is pretty cool, actually. There I was, a 28 year old Executive Assistant, struggling to find my way in what many view as a thankless career. I started my blog, The Executive Assistant’s Toolbox, in August of 2007 as a way to meet other office professionals and share my experiences in a helpful way. It didn’t hurt that I loved to write and secretly always dreamed of doing it for a living.

Now, less than a year later, my blog has been purchased by a start-up company (at a price tag many would be shocked by) and I’ve been hired by them to manage their entire content strategy and yes, write full-time. Bye bye same old, same old. Hello, career of my dreams!

The Opportunities

My story could have gone in a couple of different directions. I always treated my blog as a business. I had high hopes from the beginning, though I wasn’t quite sure of my ultimate goal. As I saw it, bloggers had the following opportunities:

Become a ProBlogger

In this scenario, I imagined working from home and making a full-time income from my blog (perhaps a few different blogs). I quickly monetized my blog with Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliate marketing and I was making a nice side income within about 4 months. But this route was going to be a long and difficult road for a non-techie like me.

Use the Blog to Promote Services

Bloggers have a huge opportunity to use their platform to promote their personal services such as coaching, consulting or freelance writing. I was considering becoming a Virtual Assistant and Career Coach – services that would have been easily promotable to my audience.

Build Blog, Sell Blog, Repeat

This has been a popular option in the recent past. With sites being auctioned off each day (some for astronomical figures!), this became an interesting possibility for me. The only problem seemed to be the time involved. Building a popular blog isn’t easy – as most of you know. I couldn’t imagine doing it many times over again. And on top of that, I couldn’t bear the thought of selling my baby. I had poured my heart and soul into this thing. The price tag would have to be pretty high…

The option I never really considered is the one that happened: “The Package Deal”

So, yes, blog sales happen all the time these days. Occasionally, the founder stays on for a while through the transition. But typically, the blog becomes under the full control of the new owner within a few months. However, in some instances, the purchaser may have a long-term need for the founder’s expertise. In my case, I had experience as an actual “member” of the target market, credibility with the audience and I loved writing. But I had little technical know-how and close to zero dollars to invest in building the site myself.

It was a match made in heaven: OfficeArrow purchased my site, merged it with theirs, and brought me on to help guide the growing business. A win-win for all. And with a hefty sum of future stock units included in that deal, I don’t feel as if I’ve completely given up my ownership interest.

Of course, I still had a touch of emotional separation anxiety as I watched my baby become a part of another family. It was exciting and scary all at once. Now I’m watching my baby grow up, living the life she always deserved. And thankfully, since I’m a part of her new family, I still get a say in her upbringing! “The Package Deal” offers the best of all worlds.

These are just some of the opportunities available for bloggers. To take advantage of any of these however, your blog needs to be something special. There are several strategies you can employ to stand out from the crowd. Tomorrow, in Part 2 of this article, I’ll share some of the things I did and why they helped me achieve “The Package Deal”.

Chrissy Scivicque is the Senior Content Manager at OfficeArrow.com – the world’s first online community created for office professionals, by office professionals. She writes a wide variety of articles to help people do their jobs more effectively and with less frustration. You can follow her journey by joining the OfficeArrow Community today - membership is free!

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Over the last week I’ve run some Crazy Egg heat map tracking on two posts on Digital Photography School (both of which got to the front page of Digg and got a lot of traffic) that both highlight to me a very simple method of increasing the number of pages that people view when they visit your blog.

Let me illustrate with a screen capture of the heat map from my post - How to Avoid Camera Shake:

What you’re looking at above is the ‘hottest’ zone on the post. It is the most clicked upon part of the page. This section of the page was clicked on just under 2000 times over the duration of this test. The full page had just under 6000 clicks.

What stands out for me is that the section of the page you’re viewing above is a long way from the top of the post. While the general rule is that people click more on links at the tops of posts - this section of the page is only viewable once you’ve hit ‘page down’ 7 times!

The first two links in the section are links to my subscription page and a byline link to the author of the post - but the other five are all internal links to other articles on the blog. This means 1800 or so of the visitors to this page viewed at least one other page on the blog.

The ‘Further Reading on Camera Shake’ links were ones that I manually added to the post and the ‘Read more posts like ‘How to….’ links were automated links generated with a WP Plugin.

Lets look at another example

In this test (on a post on ‘Jowling‘) I’m showing you the same section of the page. This time I had to hit ‘page down’ 5 times to get to it. Again it’s low on the page and again I’ve got the automated links as well as two others in the ‘A Couple of other things….’ section.

Once again - this is the hottest part of the page in terms of clicks with around 1600 clicks (all internal) out of 6500 clicks on the full page.

Why do readers click links so far down the page?

It might seem a little odd that links so far down a page would be clicked on at such a high rate - but the reason that it happens is quite logical. These points on the page are what I call ‘pause points’. They are parts of a page where readers pause and make a decision on what to do next.

These sections are all at the end of articles - a point where readers end one activity and look to do another one. Many readers simply hit ‘back’ at this point or head to Google to search for something else - however when you give them something else to do or read you have a decent chance of convincing them to stay on your site.

Other Things to Do at Pause Points

There are of course other things that you can do in these ‘pause points’ on a blog including:

• Advertising - this is a ‘hot zone’ in terms of CPC ads
• Affiliate Programs - I don’t find they convert as well as CPC ads here but they can work
• Social Bookmarking - many bloggers run social bookmark buttons in this spot to encourage readers to vote for the post
• Subscription Invitations - this is a great place to get conversions from first time readers to subscribe to your blog

Really any key conversion goals that you want to achieve can work in a ‘Pause Point’ - although when you put too many options in that point for readers you probably dilute the conversion rate. What else do you put in ‘pause points’?

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Over the last two weeks I’ve been running a 10 part series here at ProBlogger on 10 ways that you can let your blog go and what you should do about them. The series is now complete with the following 10 methods to let your blog go.

1. Lack of Posting
2. Getting Off Topic
3. Becoming a Self Centered Blogger
4. Great Content… Bad Titles
5. Letting Comment Spam Take Over Your Blog
6. Excuse Posts
7. Becoming a Negative Blogger
8. Having a Lack of Original Content
9. Becoming Obsessed with Any One Aspect of Your Blog
10. Stretching Yourself Too Thinly

So now that the series is over I’d be interested in hear your feedback.

1. what else would you add to the list?
2. which ones don’t you agree with?
3. which ones do you struggle with the most? How do you overcome them?

PS: I’m now back from my paternity leave and am looking forward to getting back into some more blogging in the coming weeks. I am currently working on some posts on ‘finding readers for your blog’ for the coming week. Stay tuned.

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Normally, I would not do movie reviews on this site. I would generally use aaronbrazell.com which is much more of a personal site than this. However, there are quite a lot of lessons and hidden agenda items (good and bad) in Wall*E that I think are applicable.

If you’re afraid of spoilers, you might not want to read further, however I will do my best not to offer spoilers, per se and instead talk about the principles behind the messages because that is where I feel the importance is.

From the get go, it was apparent to me that Wall*E was an environmentally oriented flick. We’re introduced to a desolate earth that struck me as very much similar to the one we saw in I am Legend. Bonus points to the astute viewers that catch the I am Legend hat tip in the movie.

To me, it was apparent that the desolation of earth was a result of human irresponsibility and that Al Gore probably was lurking somewhere ready to hand out carbon credits. While that message certainly existed, it was the message of personal responsibility that struck me much more direct between the eyeballs.

In the movie, we get the sense that a pseudo-governmental organization has morphed humanity into a dependent culture that is given everything. It is pampered, fed, smothered and by and large turned into a welfare culture where the human race has lost the ability to care for itself or even see any problem with their state. They have been turned into automatons, beholden to the whims of the BnL Corporation.

The heroics of the movie revolve around, among other things, the ability of the human race to take responsibilities for their own actions and rise above the societal norms inbred into them, challenging the status quo and ultimately their race.

Without getting too political, the metaphor I saw was comparative, in many ways, to current western culture that is increasingly liberalized, and increasingly fed the doctrine of government dependence. Rely on government-subsidized social security. We need to pass a law that does blah. The Constitution is a living document requiring federal judges to tell us what it means for us today. Get my riff?

Another strong metaphor I saw, is applicable for those of us in social media - and really any kind of new media, whether it’s politics, science or sports. Those that follow the dotted lines are doomed to exist in a narrow and unproductive world that never changes!

Throughout the movie, robots followed the dictates of lines painted on the ground. They never left those lines because those lines provided guidance. Those lines provides meaning. Those lines provided safety.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have more rambos that challenged the status quo, said what they meant and meant what they said? They didn’t follow the dictates of Techmeme or those perceived as A-listers? I mentioned yesterday that confidence is a sexy attribute and stepping outside the lines demonstrates confidence that will take you somewhere.

As a sidenote, yet related issue, this mommy blogger needs to quit worrying about a so-called A-list blogger and be confident in herself. Those that are considered A-list, including myself, often are not (also including myself). No one can do your job better than you. Own it and forget about the rest.

I highly encourage people to see this movie. Besides the fact that Pixar always makes great movies, it’s a wonderful movie for kids and adults alike and if you go with an open mind, you’re going to be challenged.

A couple of weeks ago I had an email from Terry Ng from Kineda (a great fashion site) telling me about how they’d been using WordPress and bbPress together to create an innovative site. I asked Terry if she’d tell us what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. Here is her guest post on using bbPress and WordPress together.

Kineda is a blog where young trendsetters come to read about the latest in fashion and lifestyle. It’s a very large and fast paced niche that is constantly changing, and keeping up with all the various trends is virtually impossible. Like many bloggers, I’d often receive letters from readers asking if I had seen such and such. The answer was usually no. After a flurry of such e-mails one afternoon, I figured why not harness the knowledge of my readership. After all, a million eyes are better than two right?

The idea of the Kineda Lookbook was born. The Lookbook would be a way for readers to share the trends they discovered and bought into without having to go through me to do so. The big question was how to make this as simple for a large group of non-tech savvy readers. My initial thought was, “Why not allow everyone contributer access to my WordPress install?” Readers could submit their ideas directly, and all I would need to do is hit the lovely approve and publish button. I gave this idea a trial run for a week, and soon discovered that my WordPress dashboard became an unmanageable nightmare. WordPress just wasn’t built with a half million contributers in mind.

Back to the drawing board I went. A few years ago, Kineda was run solely as a forum. It was a great community and an easy way for readers to share ideas, but lacked direction because of the range of topics anyone could create. It was because of this lack of direction, that I moved Kineda to it’s current blog format where I could provide the focus the site needed. Now if I could guide the forum topics created by readers, I’d be half way to finding a solution to power the Lookbook.

I set out to find compatible forums for WordPress that I could modify for this project. The three criteria were:

1. Lightweight but extensible
2. Built with CSS (I’m a stickler for web standards)
3. Seamless integration with WordPress

The two big forum guns, vBulletin and phpBB were definitely out of the question since they’re way too bloated and built primarily with tables. I then looked at open source solution Vanilla which seemed like a winner, but unfortunately failed on integration with WordPress. A completely different code base and database schema meant management would be difficult during version changes. Vanilla does offer a plugin to share logins between the two systems, but it’s very fickle with the which version of Wordpress it works with. The other drawback is the plugin only works with new users, forcing existing users to re-regiser. Unacceptable in my mind.

The logical choice was bbPress, made by the same great folks that bring us WordPress. bbPress is extremely lightweight with a focus on integration, speed, and web standards while keeping the package as small as possible. And although bbPress is lean and mean, it does offer an extensive plugin system like WordPress to extend it’s capabilities.

The pairing of the two softwares would create the basis for Kineda’s Blog and community powered Lookbook combo.

Other examples of highly customized bbPress and WordPress pairings are 9Rules Notes (now called Chawlk) and Technorati’s Support Forums. These unique communities are based on bbPress’s flexbility to be extended with almost any functionality imaginable. Think Wordpress plugins on roids!

The first and most important step to your new bbPress and WordPress community should be seamless integration. Users will be frustrated and discouraged if they have to login once to your blog and then again to your forum. An easy guide on how to integrate bbPress and WordPress can be found on Kineda.

Once you’ve integrated the two, you’ll need to theme your bbPress install to match your WordPress blog. Themes work exactly the same as they do in WordPress.

Next, you’ll need to customize your bbPress install. There are hundreds of plugins for bbPress, but I’ve highlighted an important few that will help you get started on building your new online community. Many are similar to the ones used to power Kineda’s lookbook.

• bb-avatars - Allows users to define their own Gravatar or avatar
• Private Messaging - Allows users to send messages to each other
• bbPRess Polls - Allows users to add polls to topics
• Private Forums - Show forums only to users with appropriate roles
• Memberlist - Display all active members
• Allow Images - Users may include images in their posts

I hope this has been helpful in looking beyond WordPress to enhance your blog and the community around it.

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Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. Jeremy Schoemaker is a rockstar in SEO. Darren Rowse is a rockstar in making money online. Erin is a rockstar among women bloggers. Thomas Hawk is a rockstar photographer. Brad Feld (a Lijit investor) is a rockstar VC. Chris Brogan is a rockstar people person. Alex Hillman is a rockstar community man. Jody is a rockstar musician.

I’m telling you, everyone is a rockstar in their own right and no one can take away their strength. As Micah puts it, no one can do your job better than you can.

The problem comes when you are not confident in what you do and you let a different kind of rockstar dictate your behavior.

We’ve all seen it. Someone of stature arrives on the scene and the person who knows the space and environment best gets star struck or intimidated by the presence of the rockstar and suddenly doesn’t know how to behave, act or represent themselves.

Confidence is so important. Confidence is sexy. Confidence displays your rockstarness and communicates that you own the place and people should stick by you. Confidence draws people in and causes them to get lost in YOU.

We all need someone else and no one can do it alone.

For myself, I know I have certain qualities and abilities that command the respect of others. I also know that I need people (such as all the people above, to name a few) to teach me something about their environments. Alex, in fact, was the one who gave me inspiration and motivation, not to mention pointers, on beginning the small co-working community we have here in Maryland.

Thomas taught me (via Scoble) a thing or two about lenses for my camera.

And so on.

Who are you learning from? Who inspires you? What are you teaching others?

(See, Chris Brogan taught me how to end posts with questions ;-) )

Today Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs Journey and the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program has written this post on Selling from your blog.

When I say the words “product launch” do you cringe and think of over-hyped Internet marketing product launches? Or maybe you have never been on the end of a barrage of emails sent out by countless affiliates during a big launch and to you a product launch is what it sounds like - creating and then selling a new product.

Whatever the case, more and more bloggers are realizing the potential of releasing a product from their blog as a way to make serious money. While a majority of bloggers continue to leverage advertising as the most significant source of revenue from their blog, there has definitely been a shift towards product creation as a sound blog monetization strategy.

Given successful blogging creates a fantastic platform for selling, it’s only natural as bloggers learn more about monetization that they consider releasing a product or series of products and use their blog as the launch pad.

Unfortunately many bloggers are not familiar with product launch principles - the marketing techniques you implement during a launch to increase sales - and as a result, experience less than stellar results.

Internet Marketing and Blogging

I’m a blogger immersed in the Internet marketing niche, which means I’m over exposed to the product launch process. I’ve been on the receiving end as a prospect for countless product launches, I’ve been an affiliate for big launches and conducted my own launches selling my own products.

Needless to say, I understand a lot about product launch and today I want to offer you two tips you can make use of on your blog when you release a product.

Why only two tips?

I was thinking of some of the classic techniques that all product launches use, things like scarcity, reciprocity, social proof, bonuses, limited offers, etc - All techniques that work and concepts I’ve discussed on my blog previously.

Generally speaking, some people look at these techniques as ways to manipulate others into making a purchase they don’t need or to hype things up unnecessarily. I don’t exactly agree with that, but this is article it not meant to be a debate about the legitimacy of marketing techniques, rather I want to present something practical you can apply when launching a product from your blog.

I know how much some problogger readers hate the long sales page format for selling, so I’m going to stay as far away from that style of Internet marketing as possible and suggest two techniques that every blogger should appreciate and inherently understand how to use.

Note that you can use these techniques to conduct a product launch from your blog to sell your own product or to sell other people’s products. I’ve used the following ideas to sell my own course Blog Mastermind and also when conducting affiliate promotions.

If you want to make more affiliate sales from your blog, use product launch techniques to augment the marketing process. It does take more work, but if you do this right, some extra effort today can result in a significant increase to your sales and also prolong how long you continue to make sales (even after the blog posts are no longer on your front page - yes, you can even make sales from your blog archives!).

Technique 1: Tell Stories

All good bloggers understand that story telling is a cornerstone of compelling blog content. I’ve based an entire blog on my ability to tell my “entrepreneur’s journey”.

Story telling is not something everyone can naturally grasp, but with practice it comes to most bloggers. You just need to learn how to talk about your life or other people’s lives in a way that teaches or entertains.

When applying story telling to a product launch process, the idea is to use the technique to create a frame around the product that cuts through the “noise” bombarding your readers. The noise is everything else in the realm of perception of a person you are trying to communicate with using your blog.

You could tell a story about the product, how you created it or discovered the need for it, or perhaps about your life and how you came to use another product, in the case of affiliate marketing.

Using a story you can market a product without overtly “pitching” it. It’s when a person feels they are being sold to, that they (ironically) usually choose not to buy, because of how over-sold to we are in today’s society. Our tolerance for selling is low, but we still love a good story especially when it teaches us something relevant and valuable to our own lives.

Most bloggers when selling a product will stick up one blog post, talk about how great the product features are, maybe reproduce some copy from the sales letter, and then wonder why no one buys.

A product launch is a process - so to is crafting a story through blog posts. You need to explain what is good about the product by talking about how you used it… using a story. Describe what situation a person is in when the product is needed… using a story…and so on.

Story telling goes hand-in-hand with the second tip I have for you - content marketing.

Technique 2: Market With Content

Again, this is a concept bloggers understand. We are all content producers and we make money off the back of our ability to produce content people love.

When conducting a product launch you create content that has a very specific purpose - to provide value to the people who are likely to purchase the product - the prospects from your target market.

Prospects identify themselves by engaging with your content, which may be indicated by subscribing to your RSS feed, joining your email list or leaving a comment. The important thing is that they read your content, preferably from start to finish, which isn’t something you can ever be certain of unfortunately. Analyzing your server statistics for time spent on your blog is one way you can assess engagement, but it’s not an exact science.

Content marketing for a product launch is not that different from what you should do every day at your blog, however when utilized for a launch you narrow the focus to align tightly with the product you are selling.

Internet marketing experts use free videos, reports, web services and scripts, all designed to provide significant value. This process is often called “moving the free line” and you do this because it helps to sell more product. When the free stuff you give away is so amazing, people who are engaged with your work are eager to get a hold of the product you sell.

As an added benefit, even if people don’t purchase your product, the great content you deliver as part of the launch increases your blog’s growth. There’s no downside with content marketing, if you do it right.

Putting It Together

Using just these two techniques you can enjoy tremendous success when launching a product from your blog.

All you need to do is release lots of great content that is relevant and valuable to the same audience that desires your product AND use stories to deliver this content.

Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you blog about digital television technology and you have put together a guide on how to buy a digital television and set up a home theater, which you plan to sell via your blog. The guide includes installation tips, how to set up the theater, the questions to ask when speaking to the shop attendant when buying the tv and other equipment, common pitfalls to avoid and so on.

As a lead up to the release of your product you publish a series of posts explaining how you came to fall in love with digital television technology, why you love it and the mistakes you made when buying your first digital television and setting up your home theater. All of these posts are stories from your life, they educate your readers, and where appropriate, you mention a guide you are about to release that provides further details if people want to learn more.

You then release a free report listing the top 10 televisions, breaking them down by a set of criteria you came up with, explaining that the full guide includes a list of over 50 televisions assessed using the same criteria.

All of this content is valuable to your blog readers regardless of whether they purchase the guide. The free blog posts and report attract the type of audience who would buy your guide and they enjoy samples that demonstrate how good you are at what you do, therefore how good your product is likely to be.

This process is much more likely to stimulate purchases, it’s A LOT more effective at converting than a single blog post that forces a hard sales pitch, and you get ample fresh content for your blog too.

What I especially love about this process is that it explains the benefits and features of a product using language that isn’t blatant selling or full of hype. The content you give away inherently demonstrates how much value you present (and thus your products), who stands to benefit from your advice and the stories you tell create a frame that cuts through the noise and grabs attention.

Your Launch

As bloggers you should naturally understand story telling and content marketing because there’s nothing new there that you don’t already do to create great content for your blog.

In the case of a product launch, you take these ideas and apply them to a specific purpose - to sell your product. At its simplest, a sequence of blog posts leading up to the release of your product can produce a great result and yet, so few bloggers put in even this much concentrated effort.

I hope after reading this article, before you release a product, you consider putting in a little extra effort to build buzz about your launch using great content and story telling. Implement a launch strategy rather than just stick your product up and “see what happens”. Strategic marketing always works better than simply “hoping” your product will be a success.

Good luck!

Yaro Starak
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

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In this post Eric from Photography Bay examines the Long Tail as it applies to blogging.

Content is king. Yawn . . . right? You know this tired phrase is the gospel of blogging, but did you ever wonder why content is really king? You spend your time developing and massaging your posts to create the next bit of killer content. It’s the post that hits the front page of Digg, gets Stumbled to death or even Slashdotted. That’s why content is king, right? Wrong.

Content is King Because of the Long Tail of Blogging.

In 2004, Chris Anderson coined the term “The Long Tail” in a Wired Magazine article, which he followed up with a <a href="“The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” (Chris Anderson)“>book and a blog on the subject. If you’re not familiar with the phrase or its meaning, here’s a very brief summary from Chris himself:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

(Picture by Hay Kranen / PD - via Wikipedia)

Example - Amazon.com

One of the best examples is Amazon.com, which provides consumers with access to the latest and greatest hit products, books and more. Sales of the bestseller books, however, pale in comparison to sales of the many obscure books in Amazon’s catalog. Hence, the long tail of the book market is where the majority of sales are coming from - and it’s growing.

Hot Content vs. Archived Content

Apply these same principles to your blog. That killer super-dugg post is great . . . for a day or two. Granted, the super-dugg post is sometimes great for added readers, linkbacks and helping your blog grow. It’s the long tail, however, that keeps your blog alive and thriving. While that traffic spike is great, if you adhere to publishing solid content as ProBlogger encourages, then your old, quality content overshadows even that super-dugg masterpiece.

Eyes on Photography Bay Stats

For instance, have a gander at this recent Photography Bay post on a new patent from camera manufacturer Canon, which covers some crazy new iris scanner for a photographer’s eye. This post turned out to be extremely popular for a few days, producing 5,839 pageviews on Wednesday, Feb. 13 - thanks to being Slashdotted and coverage by several tech sites.

The total page views that day were 14,721. The lesson here is that even though the killer post for that day was miles above any other traffic, the rest of the content on Photography Bay bettered the killer post.

Some of these posts are several months old. If you look further down the list of traffic-generating posts (470 different pages this particular day), you would see that some posts are closer to a year in age. That’s pretty cool to me because Photography Bay is only about 15 months old now. Now, think about 2, 3, or 5 years down the road . . . the long tail gets much longer and becomes a lot more significant.

The long tail matters because of Google, linkbacks, readers and other requisite traffic-generating resources. If it weren’t for that catalog of niche posts that we build everyday we blog, posts like the Canon iris patent post might never take off.

Caveat

Please note, however, that this theory may be more true for some blog niches than others. Tech blogs often need that fresh content coming in to keep reader interest, since new gadgets and technology are more interesting than older gadgets (e.g., Googling for HDMI cables versus S-VHS cables). On the other hand, a niche blog on the healthcare industry will still grab Google traffic for the search “medicare anti-kickback laws” regardless of the age of the post. The topic has been around for a couple of decades and isn’t going anywhere in the near future.

The Right Analogy for the Long Tail

Contrary to what Read Write Web may say, the long tail is where the money’s at. Rather than analyzing a given blog’s posts and income, Read Write Web applied the long tail analysis to the blogosphere as a whole. While the data conforms to the long tail, the analogy and, thus, the conclusion, are flawed. Applying the principals of the long tail in the same manner as the Amazon example above, the long tail analysis properly demonstrates that a blog requires a significant amount of niche content to fit the model. With the content in hand, the long tail will wag the blog.

Conclusion

Google regularly accounts for more than 50% of Photography Bay’s traffic, which is why I must strive to continue to make that long tail longer. Today’s killer post is part of next month’s long tail traffic - and I want a longer tail! Regular, quality posts ensure that there will be a long tail tomorrow and that, my friends, is why content is king.

What are your thoughts on the long tail of blogging? Have you seen the long tail wagging your blog? How can we leverage these principals to make our positions in our niches even stronger?

Eric is the author of Photography Bay, which covers digital photography news, techniques and gear reviews. You can subscribe to Photography Bay’s feed here.

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Today I want to share one last way to let your blog go to round off our 10 part series. It’s something that has at times almost brought my own blogging to a grinding halt - taking on too many projects and stretching myself too thinly.

There’s a fine line between:

1. diversifying your blogging interests so as to have a number of income streams to help ride out the downtimes that most blogs suffer from

and

2. having so many blogs on the go that they begin to suffer as a result of you not being able to dedicate your focus to them.

The Argument for Diversification

I’ve written on numerous occasions about how it is smart to diversify when it comes to blogging for money (for example here in my 18 Lessons I’ve Learned about Blogging post). Diversification makes sense on a number of levels including:

• Multiple Blogs (wise because most blogs go through highs and lows in terms of traffic, earnings, search engine ranking etc)
• Income Streams (not putting all your eggs in the AdSense basket)
• Non Blogging activities/income streams (looking outside of blogging to find other ways of supplementing your blogging income)

Diversifying your interests is a smart move - ask any financial advisor and you’ll find the advice will almost always be to hedge your bets and invest in multiple areas so that when one market goes down you don’t lose everything.

The Problem with Diversification

While I do believe that it’s smart to diversify - there are some risks with the strategy. The main problem is that you run the risk of spreading yourself too thinly across your blogs.

I learned this the hard way in my first couple of years of blogging for money. I saw what I could achieve with having a single blog and decided to multiply my efforts by blogging on up to 20 blogs at once. The result was poor quality content, stress and strain and eventually blogger burn out.

The more I gave myself to do the less time I was able to dedicate to any one activity - including the producing of engaging, useful, interesting and unique content. The flow on effect of this is that my earnings in this period didn’t raise anywhere near as much as I’d hoped.

What I ended up doing was to hire a blogger to take on one of the projects that I was running, to kill off the majority of the rest of my blogs and to focus upon two blogs (ProBlogger and DPS). In doing so I saw immediate results. The blogs I was able to focus all of my blogging energy upon literally exploded as a result of the improvement in content, the extra time I was able to dedicate to interacting with readers and my extra energy levels which renewed my passion for the topics I was writing about.

Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly?

There are a number of areas that I see bloggers (including myself) spreading themselves too thinly including:

• Multiple Blogs - I find two blogs is enough for me - at b5media we have a few bloggers who handle more than that, but there comes a point where their blogs suffer if they add more.
• Social Media - it seems that every day a new social networking site starts. If you were to accept every invitation and engage fully on every one of them you could easily spend your whole life on these sites.
• Reader Interaction - you can never do enough interacting with readers right? Well actually you can. There comes a point where even the very worthwhile task of interacting with your readers can distract you from your core task - the producing of good content.
• Multiple Income Streams - there comes a point where if you add too many different ad networks, affiliate programs and other income streams to your blog where you can be spending too much time administering them. Optimizing ads, tracking results, chasing up payments etc - it all takes time. Sometimes focussing on just a handful of income streams makes more sense than experimenting with too many at once.

Now before I go any further let me stress that the above activities are all good - but they CAN be responsible for you spreading yourself too thinly. I do think it’s wise to have more than one blog, engage with social media, interact with readers and experiment with new income streams…. but not at the expense of your core blogging activities - particularly the writing of content.

Tips for Overstretched Bloggers

If you are like I have been at different times in my blogging ‘career’ I have a few questions to ask and tips for you:

What is Important to You? - I think it’s crucial to constantly be asking yourself this question. Identify your goals in blogging. What are you trying to achieve? Once you’ve asked this take a look at how you spend your time and identify which things that you’re doing take you closer to your goals and which are not.

Where is the Energy? - Identify where the energy is within your different activities. What is working and what isn’t? What is producing fruit and what is greedily sucking your time and energy without any benefits? I’m a big believer looking for points of ‘energy’ in my life and putting more focus upon them. For example when I realized how I’d spread myself too thinly with 20+ blogs I picked the two or three that worked and killed the rest.

Set Yourself Deadlines - When I start new projects I generally have a deadline in mind when I would want to see results by. If i don’t see at least some signs of life in the project at this point I either kill off the project or work out how to approach it differently so that I’ll see the results I need.

Streamline your Processes - what things do you have to do that you’re inefficient at? I always knew how much time email was sucking out of my day but did nothing about it for years. The extra pressure that my inefficiency in this area of my business cost me was stupid and meant I was stretching myself further than I needed. Reinventing my email processing system gave me extra time.

What other processes suck your time? Perhaps it’s email, perhaps its reading RSS feeds, perhaps its social media, perhaps it is an activity like moderating comments? How can you streamline these important but time consuming processes?

Outsource - There has been a big focus upon outsourcing lately (Tim’s The 4-Hour Workweek might have had something to do with it). I don’t outsource much of my blogging activities but do see the sense in it. I currently have help with comment moderation and have taken on a few writers at DPS which has helped me tremendously. Do keep in mind however that outsourcing means managing others which can take even more time away from you in the short term while you get people set up.

Be Ruthless - My last tip is to echoe the thoughts that I shared in my post on how to be a Ruthless blogger. While it can be hard to let go of blogs that don’t work or to cut out activities that suck our time the fact is that for many bloggers it is these things that stand between success and mediocrity.

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I started playing flag football this summer, and from my first day I wanted to write a post about it. The reason that never happened was because I found out that “flag” football is a wuss sport, and not cool at all; any chick who plays any kind of football is automatically deemed as not-sexy; the game is actually pretty boring; there is no sort of “fitness” associated with it- all we do is talk about what we are going to do.

Then today, at my last game (coincidentally, the only game in which I caught the ball), I find out that the other chick on my team got asked out by an opposing team member last week. This chick works as a hostess at a restaurant, and apparently, the guy asked around and found out where she worked and “happened” to be in the area.

We just happened to be playing his team again today for the finals (our team came out 5th in a 6 team league), and from what I can tell, and I am a really great judge of character, the guy seems really nice. So not only does some stranger find out all he can about her to get her number, but he’s also not the stalker type. This never happens to me. If anyone were to ask around about me they wouldn’t say “Hey, you see that girl over there? Know anything about her? She seems really cool and I love to call her.” The guys I attract ask “Hey, you think that chick’s easy?”

I think the difference is that when the ball comes towards her she stretches out her hands in front of her to catch it, whereas, I put my hands over my head and yell ”I DON’T have it”