Time for another ProBlogger poll - looking forward to hearing what you’ve got to say on this question:

If your answer is yes - tell us what the source is in comments below.

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I’ve been behind checking my email this week and it could have cost you a great deal….

Apparently the fantastic Thesis WordPress theme (see my first impressions of Thesis here) is running a special this weekend. They’ve just updated the theme with some great new features (see below) but if you buy it before the end of 31 August you get another theme from DIYthemes ‘Cosmo’ (a magazine style theme) for free.

The update of Thesis includes:

• A new ‘design options’ panel which gives you the ability to customize fonts and font sizes. This will help set your blog apart from others using this theme.
• Also in the design options it the ability to change the layout of your blog by selecting different number of columns and column width.

There’s more new stuff too - see it all at Thesis WordPress theme.

PS: sorry I didn’t post this earlier - I hope it doesn’t mean any of you miss out, it’s been one of those weeks in the Rowse house with sick little guys everywhere!

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Mitch from Technipages.com shot me an email this week asking me for advice on getting accepted into CPM banner ad networks like ValueClick, TribalFusion and others. He commented that while he has decent traffic (around 140,000 page views a month) he hadn’t had much luck with being accepted and asked for advice.

This is a question I’ve had numerous times so I thought I’d post my response (I have slightly edited from my original answer).

1. Design Matters - the more professional a site looks the better impression it will make and the increased likelihood of acceptance.
2. Content - some advertising networks will judge your suitability based upon both the topic and also the type of posts (including length, editorial style etc). Some will also check to see if the content is original and or appearing elsewhere online. Topic plays a big part for some ad networks as they will sometimes have specific focuses and be looking for content partners with relevant content to their advertisers. I also know of at least one ad network who looks at the ‘quality’ of content - particularly looking at how well it is written, whether it is up to date, looking at whether there is an active user base interacting with it etc. They do this because they have a premium advertising base who don’t just want to align themselves with any old blog but only those that they perceive as premium. Each network also has its own standards on adult content, use of language (swearing) and other topics that they may or may not cover.
3. Hosting and Personal sites - some ad networks don’t accept sites that they perceives to be ‘personal’ and don’t accept sites that are hosted on free services or on services where you don’t own your domain (for example blogspot blogs).
4. Type of Site - some networks don’t accept sites that are primarily forums as they tend not to perform as well with advertising due to the high amount of page views per visitor and the ad blindness that quickly happens.
5. Other advertising - if a site already has lots of ads on it this can be off putting for some ad networks.
6. Traffic sources - if you have lots of non US traffic some ad networks will mark you down for that as they only have ad networks for that market.
7. Language - many ad networks will not accept non English written sites. Again - this is about their advertisers (largely US based in many cases) not wanting to target ‘international’ audiences.
8. Traffic numbers - this is the killer, many will reject unless you’re doing big traffic - they will check sources like comscore, Alexa to double check whether the numbers you are giving them are accurate.

Most ad networks have fairly good pages for publishers outlining what they do and don’t accept. Here you can see requirements from ValueClick and TribalFushion (although I’ve heard a lot of people say that they feel they fit into TribalFushion and don’t get in).

Some of the above reasons are frustrating. As someone who has built blogs for non US audiences I know some of the pain of not being accepted. However the main advice I gave Mitch was to keep building traffic and making the site look as professional as possible. Traffic numbers speak very loudly so to keep traffic trending up will mean that he finds it is easier and easier to get accepted into these programs. Also - keep hunting around for options, experiment with different ways to make money from your blog and be patient.

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Ego blogging seems to be the big thing. If the egos aren’t blogging, they are telling other bloggers how bad their ego is. Trust me, I represent - both the ego, and the telling egos off.

So I’m offering a new Technosailor tee-shirt for sale that states very simply, “I am famous, therefore I blog”.

The shirt is a high quality American Apparel tee-shirt (if you’ve never had one, they are super comfortable) and that should be enough to pay the premium price. I admit, these shirts cost more than some chinsey Cafépress tee shirt but it won’t fade, shrink or get stretched out like those ones do. Nor will it make you sweat unnaturally with some iron on crap.

No, this is high quality and comfortable and will last. You’ll be supporting me, plus staking your claim to internet fame. Now, people will know you’re famous. Because you have to make sure they know!

I will have a ladies tee available shortly as well and open to suggestions on other preferred colors. Enjoy!

What if I told you that there’s a way to make money as a result of your blog where you don’t need to have a single ad on your blog, where you don’t have to run any affiliate programs and where you don’t have to write any paid reviews?

Would you be interested?

Image by iDream_in_Infrared

Much is written about how bloggers make money through selling advertising space or running affiliate programs on their blogs. However there’s a second, somewhat hidden, group of bloggers who make a great living not directly from their blogs - but indirectly as a result of them.

Instead of using their traffic to sell advertising or promote products to earn commissions from - they leverage the traffic to their blog in another way - usually to sell themselves.

Today I want to highlight 10 ways of making money BECAUSE of your blog - as opposed to making money directly from it via advertising, paid reviews or affiliate programs.

1. Consulting

The blogger consultant model is simple. You give away information generously on your given topic and then sell your services to help people apply your teaching to their personal situation with some personal attention from you.

Bloggers who also act as consultants generally charge for their time by the hour, but I’ve also come across some who have landed ongoing consulting work in their field of expertise and have been signed up on retainer by companies.

Some might think that it’s just bloggers who blog about blogging who pick up consulting work (I’ve done my fair share) but it’s not the case. I’ve met dating bloggers, marketing bloggers, photography bloggers, craft bloggers and more who all offer their services in coaching, mentoring and training their readers one on one.

2. Book Authorship

It is becoming more and more common for bloggers to be approached by book publishers to write books. Chris and I were approached to write ProBlogger the Book by Wiley, Gina from Lifehacker landed a 2 book deal, Frank from Post Secret has done numerous books, Steve Pavlina has one coming out soon…. the list goes on and on. Sometimes book are heavily based upon the blog itself - other times the book is completely new.

3. Speaking

Bloggers spend day in and day out writing content for their blogs and so for many it is not too much of a stretch to translate the principles that they are writing about into verbal sessions at conferences or other public speaking opportunities.

Often these sorts of speaking engagements are not for any kind of payment but once you build your profile in a niche the paid opportunities do come along for many - particularly when you’re asked to speak in-house for companies or organizations.

4. Training

There’s some overlap here with ’speaking’ as in many instances speakers are engaged in a training capacity - but some bloggers also take the ‘training’ that they do in another direction and run their own training courses for readers. They leverage the traffic that they have do direct people to training either online (membership sites) or even offline into real life training events.

One blogger who I’ve seen do this really well is David Hobby from Strobist who has successfully run a variety of real life training events on his niche (photography lighting). He’s also done spin off DVDs of the training which he sells.

5. Freelance Writing

I’ve had many approaches for this myself and see quite a few other bloggers land this type of work. Their profile and expertise on a blog leads other websites, blogs, magazines, newspapers etc to ask them to contribute in a paid capacity.

This might be a newspaper column, a regular staff writer role or even a one off paid contribution.

6. Selling Services

Once you establish a readership on a topic other opportunities can arise to sell a variety of services from your blog. Here at ProBlogger I added a job board (something many blogs have done), Blogger Timothy Sykes makes tens of thousands a month with an ’stock market alerts’ service, Shoemoney is introducing ‘Shoemoney Tools‘ (a great resource for bloggers actually - I’ve been playing with it the last few days).

Another example is Kevin from Real Lawyers have blogs who offers lawyers and law firms a blogging solution.

7. Selling E-Resources

Again - there’s some cross over here with some of the above but it’s something that we’ve seen a lot of bloggers doing (or attempting to do) of late with the creation of ebooks, membership sites, tools and software that relate to their niche.

8. Landing ‘Real’ Jobs

One of the great things about starting a blog that builds your profile and perceived expertise in an industry is that others in that industry begin to see you as an attractive addition to their staff.

I’ve seen a number of bloggers write about this over the years - Steve Rubel is one that comes to mind as someone who became very well known in the PR industry and was head hunted by a PR firm as a result of his blogging.

9. Finding Business Customers and Clients

Another indirect income earner that many bloggers tap into is leveraging their blog’s profile to send find new clients and send new business to their offline companies.

In a sense their blog becomes like an advertisement to their company’s products and services.

There are literally thousands of ‘business blogs’ who do this. The key is not to make the blog purely a sales pitch or marketing device but to make it a destination of value to readers and to let this sell you and your business.

What’s Number 10?

Every week I ‘meet’ (virtually) bloggers who are making money from their blogs in ways that I’d never considered before. There are certainly some creative people out there coming up with some innovative ways to build blogs into income streams.

So I’m leaving #10 in this list up to you. What other ‘indirect’ ways of making money from blogs do you do or see others doing? I’d love to see examples of any of the methods above or any other that I might have missed. Can’t wait to read your number 10s!

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What a week it has been here at ProBlogger with the Killer Titles Group Writing Project!

I’ve just updated our submissions page with the final batch of 77 submissions for the project. This brings us to a total of 343 entries.

Please head over and surf through some of the posts submitted - bookmark, comment, subscribe to and link up to those that you like the most.

The Winner Is…

This project has been generously sponsored by Logo Designer David Airey who has put up a $2000 logo design for one random participant. Thanks to David - I can’t wait to see the logo that you come up with for our winner.

I’ve just drawn the winner of this prize using a random number generator.

The prize goes to Mjuboy for their title Sacrificing Goats and Eating Brains - congratulations, I’ll email you with details of how to get your prize.

Thanks again to everyone for participating - I hope more than just Mjuboy feels a winner and benefited from this project.

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There are 3 days left of my personal coaching bonuses for the Blog Mastermind Blog Mentoring program.

To recap - Blog Mastermind is a fantastic blogger mentoring program with some great teaching from successful Blogger Yaro Starak and his team. BlogMastermind is a six month program which you can either sign up for month by month or for the full six months at once (at a discounted rate). I’ve written about my impressions of Blog Mastermind here and have also shared some student mini reviews here (I’m getting more positive emails about the course from readers every day or two).

For those who are still thinking about it - here’s what I’m offering for those who sign up here at ProBlogger:

1. For all those who sign up whether it be for one month or six I’m putting you in the draw to win one of 3 ProBlogger books which I think would make a great accompanying text book for the course. I’ll draw this on 1 September.
2. For each student who signs up for the full six month package I’m offering a free one on one hour long consultation with me to unpack what you’ve been learning in Blog Mastermind. You can use the hour in a variety of ways. Get full details of my personal hour coaching bonus offer here.

These offers run out at the end of August and I won’t be repeating them any time soon because I’m going to be very busy with the 1 hour coaching sessions that I already owe students who’ve signed up for the six month course (there are already 25 of these)!

To be eligible for these bonuses sign up through this Blog Mastermind link.

Whether you invest in BlogMastermind for a 1 month taster or the full 6 months to get my bonus coaching - I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. The feedback I continue to get from students is that they are finding the intentional training and personal interaction with other students an teachers refreshing, inspiring and an experience that is practically helping them to improve their blogs.

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There’s a bit of a meme going around that started with Mitch Joel. He is asking what the best social media practices are and why. Chris Brogan picked it up and it’s finally trickled to me via Micah.

Confidence is sexy. Confidence oozes through and greatness is often catapulted to new levels because of confidence. Of course, confidence is also a double edged sword. Although it will ensure that you will eventually be noticed (at a minimum), it is also the thing that will get you into trouble.

Confidence is not cherished by everyone. In fact, inevitably a confident blogger will be called arrogant or egotistical. Others, who don’t understand the confidence, will try to turn it into something else. They will tell you to stop putting on a front and be yourself. They will try to convey their own best practices, which are successful for them, on you and criticize your approaches.

Confidence says you ignore naysayers. You’re not there for them anyway. You’re there for yourself. Unless you’re Brogan, then you’re there for everyone.

Regardless, when you’re confident, you’ll have complete faith in your position. Confidence does not mean you don’t listen to others or objectively weigh their opinions or feedback. That would be silly. Iron sharpens iron. But confidence knows when to listen and when to ignore.

At the end of the day, confidence is about knowing where you are going and maintaining that mission as your singular focus. Techniques can change and feedback can adjust the techniques and practices. But nothing takes your vision away from your goals and if an idea or topic does not enhance that vision, then throw it away.

Last night on Twitter, I came into the tail end of a conversation where someone was insulting right-wing conservatives. They were labeling conservatives as pitiful and shameful and that they would not debate with anyone who was a conservative.

Now, I’m a conservative in the pure sense of the word. I am not a conservative in the mold of the modern day Republican party, and in fact true conservatism is more reflective of modern day liberalism than modern day conservative. It values individuals above all else. It values individual dollars, individual choices, individual consequences, individual governance. These are mantras synonymous with modern day liberalism and not modern day conservatism which wants to nation build, empire build and take away individual opportunities and invade individual lives.

I don’t talk about politics much on this blog. Occasionally if it serves a larger point that is in the mission of “Technology, business and new media”. I was asked to blog about the definition of true conservatism, and I declined. It’s not in my genre. It doesn’t further my goals. I’m confident in my goals. Yes, I could get lots of traffic and a nice dialogue going on political issues, but I’m confident in my own focus that I won’t dedicate a post to a political discussion at this time.

There are various stripes of social media person. Some people do it for themselves. Micah is a good example of this. Some do it professionally. Darren is like this. Others use it to create positive energy for the brand they work for. Scott Monty does this for Ford, but doesn’t use his blog as much as he uses Twitter and other mediums. Still others do it for community. Liz Strauss is this way.

Whatever your goal, be confident in it and stay on course. It doesn’t really matter who does or says what. Just do it regardless. This confidence level could be the difference between a long-tail blogger and the proverbial “A lister”.

I’d love to hear this concept expounded on, or other social media techniques, by Scott Ellis, Mark Jaquith and Karoli - each notable in their own area of expertise and outside of the proverbial social media echo chamber.

The vast majority of visitors to your blog are paralyzed by passivity.

They never comment, they don’t vote in polls, they won’t subscribe to your feed or newsletters, they won’t buy the affiliate products that you recommend, they won’t email a friend about your blog, they won’t vote for you in social bookmarking sites and most of them will never come back.

Image by Aaron Jacobs

Depressed? You’re not alone.

Some days it gets me down that readers can be so passive too.

In this post (a part of our crafting blog posts series) I’m going to share how using Calls to Action can significantly increase the interactivity on your blog. I’d also love to hear what you have to say on the topic.

The Problem of Passivity on Blogs

I still remember early in my blogging expressing my frustration to another blogger. At the time my main concern was that while I was getting a lot of visitors, so few of them left a comment.

He responded to me with a question that was like a SMACK to the side of the head with a BRICK - it was so simple yet stupidly I’d never thought of it. He said:

“Do you ever ask for comments?”

He went on to explain to me a ’secret’ that copywriters have known for ages - ‘Call to Action‘ - if you don’t call your readers to action they are far less likely to take it:

• If you want people to comment, invite them to do it.
• If you want people to subscribe, don’t assume that they’ll think to do it themselves, ask them to. If
• If you want people to buy something - give them a way to do it.
• If you want people to come back tomorrow, give them some motivation to do so and show them how to remind themselves.
• If you want a vote on Digg or StumbleUpon - ask.

Call me ‘Captain Obvious’ - but so few of us bloggers have mastered the ‘Call to Action’ in their blogging that it is no wonder that so many of us struggle with passive audiences.

Why Calls to Action are Important

After my friend gave me the above advice I began to experiment with inviting readers to comment on my posts. Here’s what I found:

• Some People Respond to Invitations - When I invited comments and didn’t assume that people would leave them I noticed a marked increase in comments. While the majority of my readers still ‘lurked’ I’d estimate comments were up by between 50-100% on posts.
• Action grows Reader Engagement - I began to notice that when people commented once it would open a floodgate of comments from them over future days. When I questioned a few of these readers I found that some had been ‘lurking’ a while, too scared to comment but once they had they felt more ‘ownership’ and ‘confidence’ to do it again.
• Action brings loyalty - I noticed that first time readers would become loyal readers - they’d often come back to the blog in the days after their comment to see how other people responded to it.
• Action breeds Action - When you grow the interactivity on your blog it draws others to be interactive. When a first time visitor to your blog sees that you have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of comments they take notice and many will be drawn to do likewise (it is called social proof).

In time I saw similar things as I ‘asked’ readers to do other things (vote in polls, subscribing to feeds etc). I learned that as obvious as it might seem to us as bloggers to do these things - many readers don’t think to do these things unless asked to.

12 Tips for Calls to Action:

So how do you effectively use Calls to Action on your blog?

Let me say that the following Call to Action Tips come out of my own experience of experimenting with this type of thing. I’m by no means a copy writing expert (although am about to start some training in it) and would love to learn from your own experiences of Calls to Action so please do feel free to share you own experience in comments below.

1. Know what Action you want Readers to take

Sounds almost too basic to include in these tips but I think it’s really important to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve with your blog post. This really builds on the last post in this series which talked about making your posts matter and identifying purposes for posts. What’s the purpose of your post? What do you want readers to do as a result of reading the post? Answer these questions before writing your call to action and you’ll be in a great position to write an effective one.

2. One Call to Action Per Post

Early in my own experiments with Calls to Action I wrote a post that was linked to by the uber blog Slashdot. It sent more traffic to my blog than I’d ever seen before and so I decided to update the post with some calls to action. Problem was that I stuffed so many of them into the post that no one did any of them. I asked for comments, pointed to my RSS feed and newsletter, asked for people to link to the post… etc. I find that I have a lot more luck with just one call to action per post - it gives people a simple next step rather than overwhelming them with choices.

3. Make it a Win/Win Call to Action

There’s nothing wrong with benefiting from the actions that your readers take on your blog. Don’t be afraid to ask things of them - but do make sure that what you ask of them will have an upside not only for you but for them.

4. Make the Action Simple and Achievable

I was recently asked by a reader to look at a competition that they were running on their blog and to give my opinion on why no one had entered it. Upon looking at the competition it became clear that while the prize was great and the blog did have readers - that the requirements to entry were too complicated. The blogger was asking readers to leave a 500 word comment, write a post on their own blog linking to their competition AND subscribe to his RSS feed (and to prove it take a screen shot of the subscription confirmation page). Ask your readers to jump through too many hoops to do the thing you want them to do and you’ll get significantly less of them to take that action.

5. In Post Calls to Action Work Best

Positioning is everything in many aspects of your blog and calls to action are no exception. In the same way that click through on ads increase when you put ads near or in content - responses to calls to action will work significantly better for you within posts than if you slap them on your sidebar. This doesn’t mean you can’t have an invitation to action in your sidebar (almost every blog I know does this with RSS subscription invitations for example) however in post invitations will generally work best.

6. Express Clearly what you Want People to do

This really builds upon the ’simple and achievable action’ point that I’ve made above but comes down to the way you communicate the desired action to readers. In the same way that I’ve suggested taking extra time to craft post titles and opening lines it is important to pause and consider the words that you use in your call to action. If your call to action isn’t a simple thing (and sometimes it is unavoidable) consider outlining what you want readers to do in ’steps’ or a list of points. This is what I do on my Group Writing Projects and I find it works quite well.

7. Multiple Calls to the Same Action Can Work

While it’s best if you keep the number of actions you call for to a minimum (preferably 1 per post) this doesn’t mean you can’t invite readers to take that action more than once in the post. The most logical place for a call to action is at the end of the post - after all it is where readers stop reading and start thinking about what to do next. However I find that adding a call to action earlier in the post can increase the likelihood that people will take the action. This works for two main reasons - firstly you are sowing the seed of the action in their mind early and secondly some people will never make it to the end of your post but may actually take the action early on. For example - in this post I’ve already invited comments twice - and I’ll do it once more at the end of the post.

8. Draw the Eye to Calls to Action

Why do we make titles bigger and more eye catching on blog posts but leave our invitations to action as plain text languishing at the bottom of our posts? As with any important part to a post it is important that your readers see calls to action. You can ensure this happens in a number of ways including putting a heading above them, using an image near them, making the call to action a striking image itself, using text formatting (bold, italics, capitals), using colored backgrounds and borders around the calls to action etc.

9. Lead your readers to the Action

Your post itself needs to lead people to the action. The call and the topic of the post should strongly relate to one another and you should give reasons why the action would benefit readers. One technique that is worth using with some calls to action (particularly bigger ones) is to paint a picture of what life would be like after the action is taken (or what it’d be like if it is not taken).

10. Give an Incentive

Some calls to action will have an incentive to the reader built into them - but at times you might want to add extra incentive. This can be especially effective if you’re promoting an affiliate product and want to give your readers extra value by offering a bonus.

11. Mix Up Calls to Action from Post to Post

Readers can become a little blind (or numb) to calls to action over time if your calls are always the same (either given in the same way or asking them to do the same thing). Mix things up from post to post. Also don’t feel you need to have a call to action in every post. If you’re constantly asking your readers to do things you could burn them out.

12. Don’t Hard Sell But Call with Confidence

Using Calls to Action can be a bit of a balancing act at times. In talking to bloggers I find that they usually struggle with them in one of two ways. Either they feel awkward asking readers to do anything OR they SELL SELL SELL and lack subtlety. Somewhere between these two extremes is the place you need to dwell. The place you position yourself along the spectrum will differ from blog to blog and probably based upon your personality. Some bloggers get away with the hard sell better than others - the key is to experiment, listen to your readership and how they respond and to try to strike a balance between the two extremes.

What Was Your Most Effective Call to Action?

What I’ve shared above is my experience of Calls to Action but as I’ve said above - I’m still on a learning journey on this topic and would love to hear what you have leaned on the topic? Feel free to give an example of what you’ve done with a link and share your lessons in comments below so we can all improve our call to action technique!

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A game I play with myself to pass the time on the subway or in a lame bar is “If I Had To…” where I pretend that the entire world has blown up and I am the only woman left on the planet and the only men left are those in the room with me and I have to choose one to help me save mankind. (Note, this is the opposite of the male version where the object is to pick one they couldn’t do it with).

Usually, it takes me the entire subway ride to decide which one. Not because there are so many to choose from, but because it’s hard to decide which one wouldn’t make me puke my brains out.

Last night, I discovered a new version of this. At the gym, I picked two guys standing in close proximity and decide of the two, If I Had To, which would it be. I was surprised with the results. Of the 30 pairs at the gym, I managed to cleanly pick 28 men who could be my partner in saving the world. 1 pair resulted in a tie, where I could either way, and 1 pair resulted in mankind being completely wiped out.

Helped to pass the time at the gym anyway, but I do hope the world doesn’t blow up unless I am at the photo shoot for the firefighter’s calendar.