Podcast: Advanced Blogging Tips For Authors With Blogging Teacher, Paul Cunningham

Hi everyone.  This is Joanna Penn for the Creative Penn podcast and today I’m interviewing Paul Cunningham.Paul is The Blogging Teacher and provides articles, tips and tutorials to help blogger overcome the many challenges they face in building a successful blog.  He is also an IT professional and a writer.  So, we’ve done a podcast on basic blogging before on the podcast series so this interview is more about some of the advanced techniques for people who already have a blog, but want to improve it or grow traffic.  So, welcome Paul.

PC:      Thanks Joanna, an absolute pleasure to be here.

JP:       It’s great to have you along.  So, we met last year when you came along to one of my seminars, which was fantastic.  So, maybe you can start by telling us a bit about you, a bit about your site and also about your own writing ambitions.

PC:      Sure.  So, I’m Paul Cunningham.  I live here in Brisbane Australia with my wife and two young kids, and I run two blogs.  I’ve got BloggingTeacher.com, which is where I talk about blogging and Internet marketing, web design and stuff like that, and ExchangeServerPro.com, which is about my day job and that’s an IT professional.  So, I’ve been blogging for a few years now so, and discovered a few years ago that I really enjoyed blogging.

I like writing.  I’ve probably written millions of words in my job over the last ten years and yeah, I also enjoy helping people.  So, for now I’ve got my two blogs where I write my blog posts and we’ve got some free stuff there, some guides, some short guides and a few of those topics and they seem to be really received by the readers.  So, I’m working on producing some more detailed books and guides to do from those and my goal this year is to self publish at least one book out of the couple of dozen ideas that are in hand.

JP:       Absolutely.  Okay, so I mean I’ve been having a look at your blog and obviously you’ve helped me with a couple of questions as well with your WordPress expertise.  So, we’re going to take the example of a writer or an author who has had a free blog for a while.

So, they’ve got a WordPress.com blog site and they’ve been blogging for maybe four or five months and now they’re going to take it to a new level.  I’ve been through before setting up their own hosted blog so we don’t need to go into that, but what are your three top tips for getting a more professional and effective going once you’ve got into the basics?

PC:      Obviously you’ve already talked about free services and getting onto an unbranded site, un-hosted site, that’s really important.  And then, the word professional –  I think probably those are two really good words there and when people hear professional they shouldn’t think of stiff, informal and boring.

It’s really more about taking a blog to the next level and treating it as seriously as you would expect people to take it when they come and visit.  So, you know, you’ve got to just look at just a few key things and I think probably the blog design is one of the first things that people fall down early on. You’ve got to look at the design and think what does it say about you.  Is it really cluttered, covered in ads and widgets and that sort of thing and after all, you know, we’re writers, we want those written words to stand out the most.  Why distract people from that with a cluttered design and, you know, that’s not really something that you need to spend a lot of money on.  You can do really well with free things or even some of the less expensive commercial things.  Just ones that are really clean and tidy I think are perfect for a writer’s blog and really everyone who is listening to this obviously is looking at your web site as well.

And they shouldn’t just read what you’re writing, they should have a look at what you’re actually doing with your design there because there is a lot of really good pointers that you can take, you know, from The Creative Penn.  It’s just nicely laid out, you’ve got a nice simple colour scheme, you’ve got a professional photo yourself, very few widgety ads and other distractions, but the ones you do they’re basically all for your own products.

So, you know, what are we trying to do as writers? We’re trying to create a product that we can sell so if you’re going to use that real estate on your blog, you know, in a nice effective way, it may as well be for your own products other than somebody else’s.

Yeah, take a look at your blog design and probably take it a bit more seriously with your writing as well.  Establish something that’s a bit more like a routine and writing – blogging and writing are basically the same thing.  They sort of both happen in fits and bursts and when inspiration strikes and when time allows, but you shouldn’t try to blog in that really erratic fashion.  You should try to blog in a more sort of structured routine that builds more momentum and gives the audience an expectation that on certain days of the week or at a certain frequency there will be new content there for them to read.  And, that establishes probably a lot more audience engagement, which is a lot better for your traffic because people will come back to a blog that’s, you know, delivering at a sort of reliable rate.

Probably a third tip I’d say is try to make all of your blogging effort, your content and so on, the maximum effect and use you can get out of them by actually being very deliberate about what you’re doing.  So don’t just blog in a haphazard way and talk about any odd topic, throw out a podcast every now and then and maybe put a photo on there and that sort of thing.  Actually pay attention to what you’re doing yourself and what sort of reaction you’re getting from your audience.

So, if you try video one time and somewhere you discover that your videos work really well and get a lot of great, positive reactions out of your readers, that’s a sign that you should probably do more videos cause it’s more effective for your audience.  And if you find that your blog post is on Tuesday, you get more comments on your blog post on Saturday, well then you should probably make Tuesday one of your blogging days.  You don’t have to write it on Tuesday, you can write it in advance, but that should be the day that you publish it.

And when you’re getting that good, consistent traffic, make the most use of it. Don’t waste it by having visitors coming along, ‘yeah, that’s great, I’ve read your blog post, off I go again’, you know, give them a way to subscribe and stay up to date so that they don’t have to remember to come back to you, they get those constant reminders.  So, as long as you make the most use out of the little time that we all have to look after our blogs, I think you can really kick it up to the next level.

JP:       Well, lots of things there.  A couple of questions.  You mentioned there about a routine in blogging, which I like and I know some people will say, “oh well I have to wait for inspiration or whatever.  But I sort of do – I do a lot of them in advance and I do generally one podcast a week, but I don’t necessarily do things on a certain day, but I do make sure that I’m covering all my topics and only my topics, I guess.  So, I feel like that’s a definite I would recommend as well.

One question I have about momentum, obviously if you’re posting, like I try and do every two or three days maximum, generally every two days, does Google come back according to a schedule or do you train Google to come back regularly or doesn’t it matter?

PC:      It does matter.  Google will come to your site more often if they realise that you’re putting up knew content more often.  And so if you can – I guess train is probably a good word.  If Google thinks that you’re blogging every day, you’re probably going to get noticed, scraped by Google or called by Google every day and your new content will show up faster.  Whereas if you’re doing them in bursts, they don’t want to waste resources by coming to a site that hasn’t got fresh content.  There are really big blogs and these are blogs that post dozens of posts.  That they’ve got staff writers and they post dozens of times a day covering all the latest news, Google hits them up every couple of minutes sometimes just to make sure that the absolute latest content is in the index and can be ranked and that sort of thing.  Yeah, training Google that’s probably a good way of thinking of it.  If you can – you’re training not just your readers but also search engines and other things like that to know what to expect from your blog.

JP:       That’s fantastic.  And thank you for mentioning my site, that was very nice.  I have mentioned before that I bought the thesis theme, which I think is great but you said that there are sort of free things that people can use that are less cluttered.  What’s your most recommended web site for people to get good themes?

PC:      Well, I will say thesis, I love it, I use it myself and it’s perfect for writers because it’s so clean and simple and typography based.  It really emphasises the writing.  It costs a little bit of money, not a lot.

JP:       No, it’s actually seventy dollars or something isn’t it?

PC:      About seventy dollars, yes.  Absolutely worthwhile.  It’s a fantastic theme and you can even personalise it yourself quite easily using the sort of backend controls on it.  That’s a whole massive other topic that I guarantee that really hundreds of tutorials and things out there for free to help you do that including some great videos on the web site, the diythemes.com web site where they sell thesis.  So, anyone who’s got a few dollars to spend give that one some strong consideration, but if you’re looking for something for free, which is also fine, just do a couple of Google searches.

Just Google “best free premium themes for WordPress”, a search like that.  Those sort of lists are commonly used by odd blogs as link bait.  They try and attract traffic to these wonderful lists of great free resources and I almost guarantee you there will be a new one of these best free premium themes pop up every month somewhere on one of the big blogging or web design web sites.  And some of these free things are absolutely gorgeous, they look fantastic and they’re really great.  And they’re usually developed by really good developers who are just trying to get a foothold in the premium marketplace by giving away a few free runs at first.  So, a lot of the time you’ll find premium theme sites like woothemes.com.  They sell dozen of premium themes at a price but they also leave their original free ones that you can just go and download as well, and they’re fine, they’re great.

JP:       No, that’s good.

PC:      If you want to spend a bit of money you can but, you know, do some search for free premium themes where you can find some really great looking ones.

JP:       Yes, that’s fantastic.  You also mentioned there that the only ads I have are for my own products and I really have an issue with people using Adwords on sites.

What’s your opinion of using Adwords and what are some of the ways that people can make revenue if they don’t use something like Adwords?

PC:      Adsense is one of those things that we all try at the start because it’s just really easy to sign up.  You get the little bits of code from Google and stick them on your site and like magic these ads appear. But there’s a nickname for Adsense, which is called “blogger welfare” and that’s with good reason.

You’re showing these ads from Google on your site.  Google is charging the advertiser.  Every time someone clicks on that ad on your web site Google charges that advertiser and then gives you a cut, but the cut that you get is trivial, it’s a couple of cents.  Only a very small percentage of your web site visitors are even likely to click on an ad in the first place and so you’re getting a small percentage of a small percentage of a small percentage.  That’s really just a few cents.  You might be lucky to make a hundred dollars a month when you really start to ramp up your traffic and really what you’re doing is working so hard to bring traffic and visitors to your own site and then sending them away to someone else’s products for just a tiny little sliver of that money.

I think that that works great if the whole point of your blog is to do that.  If you are a blog reviewing cameras or something like that people who are coming to your web site to read your reviews they’ve got that buying intent already.  They want to buy something, they want to read your reviews, or but there’s an ad I’ll click on it.  Hundreds of thousands of those and you might actually make a decent bit of money.   But for writers, why would you want to work so hard to sell someone else’s products. You’re trying to create a book, something to sell and when you strip away all of that creative passion and the joy that we feel when we’re doing these things, that’s what we’re doing.  We’re creating a product to sell and that’s a product of our own, not someone else’s product, not for two cents every time 5% of your visitors click on it.  I think it’s a technique – it’s a model that works for some web sites, but by and large it doesn’t work well for bloggers and particularly I think writers.

JP:       So, what are some other ways, what is more effective to make some income from a blog?

PC:      Well, obviously you’ve got to have something that you can sell and I don’t necessarily mean a physical thing because we are all trying to create books, but you talk a lot about the author platform and other ways that authors can make money and you’ve done that yourself.  I went to your day long seminar with a dozen or so other people, so things like seminars and training programs and speaking gigs, doors that you can open yourself by having your book there for sale and having your blog and having your name out there.  That’s the way to get revenue and that’s the way to get a lot better revenue that helps you out more in the long term in terms of reputation and things like that, then any Google banner ad or whatever will ever do for you.

JP:       Now, I think that’s great and I really think people need to be concerned about, as you said, their reputation and I think their online brand and as we said if you want a professional site and an effective blog, you have to create that professional brand.  Like you have the Blogging Teacher, which is a great name because it’s very obvious what you do and as you say I try and do that myself as well.

PC:      Yeah.  Look I made that mistake earlier myself.  I tried to use Adsense to fill spaces in my blog and make a bit of money and it was selling all kind of crap.  It was selling click this and fill out this survey and we’ll send you a free ten dollar sign card, I mean it was just rubbish, complete rubbish and I think you’re right.  I think it really damages – exactly what you said, it damages your brand.

JP:       I think so and it’s just not worth it and really I would recommend following the model of some of the bigger bloggers too, is create your own products. Not just a book because we all know it’s brilliant to write a book and if you’re selling a lot you’re not making that much money whereas if you make a couple of dollars per book or if you write a course that helps people they will pay more money for that.

And as you said my day seminar I obviously charge more people more money and again you can make a better income.  So, yeah, encourage people to think a bit outside the box as to what they can sell.  Okay, so obviously that’s selling things, but you obviously have some great free giveaways, I have some free giveaways.  So, can you explain the importance of having some sort of free giveaway on the blog?

PC:      Well, there’s sort of three attacks that you can use that free giveaway technique.

One is you’re just attracting traffic by giving it away for free and hoping people will go, ‘that’s great,’ and link to it and share it around.  The second is you’re trying to build a mailing list and the third is you might be trying to use it as something that you can up sell the paid products onto to them afterwards.

So, I think probably the one that I like to use because I think it gives you an actual tangible sort of feasible result that you can build on is to use it to build a mailing list and that’s what I do.  I put a nice free resource, a free guide or something like that.  So what people do is they fill out a form with their email address and say yeah I will have that please and it sends an automatic email to them with a download link and they download it and hopefully they enjoy and then they’re on my mailing list.

[See this recent article from Writer’s Digest Jane Friedman– Authors should build their mailing lists now]

The mailing list is I would say absolutely critical, absolutely critical because it makes it really difficult without a mailing list to capture and keep an audience over the long term.  It’s kind of like insurance, like you’ve got to get it before you need it otherwise it’s too late.  So, what are you supposed to do when you’ve finished your book and you’ve got no mailing list to market it?  You’re not going to sell very many of them.  You’re going to have to work really hard to attract all that traffic and so it’s easy, like it’s just so easy to start one.  It takes only a few minutes so if you’ve already got a blog, you just sign up to one of those provider like Aweber, that is who I use.  MailChimp is another one that’s – I don’t use, but people I talk to say their grade is up and you just create your list.

So, once you’ve actually got that form up there, then you just got to start encouraging people to sign up and that free giveaway is one of the best incentives to do that.  It’s from one of those things that the big bloggers have been doing for years and some people resist because building mailing lists and marketing, they’re quite uncomfortable topics for some people.

They feel a little bit awkward, ‘I’m collecting email addresses.  Oh, I don’t want to be a spammer,” and all that stuff.  ‘Oh I don’t want to market, I don’t want to be pushy and push my content out to them,’ but you’ve got to sort of detach yourself from that mentality and think well yes I am a marketer, I’m creating a product that I’m trying to sell and people are free to sign up.   People are free to unsubscribe if they don’t like what you’ve got and the people who stay subscribe to the people who genuinely want to see emails from you.  And why wouldn’t you keep sending them out.

JP:       Absolutely and I think as long as people don’t spam their lists, you know I’m on quite a lot of lists and I unsubscribe if people keep sending me things, but I do communicate once a month with my ezine and send it out to my list and then like I’m doing a launch for my Blogging for Authors course (now available) and that will go out to my list.  But as you say you treat your list with respect and give them lots of value and then they’re happy to buy when you have something that they want.

PC:      And new writers have very good options because that’s something that people are expecting and people like getting newsletters, short, precise summaries of useful information, but you’re right.  You’ve got to use your list in the spirit in which you got people to sign up.  You don’t sign them up to email your little free guide on how to create your first e-book or something like that and then tell them, hey buy this other product.  You don’t spam them with other unrelated emails.  You stay on topic and only send them what you promised you would send them which is your regular newsletter or your blog posts and people are pretty happy with that. I was quite surprised.  I thought at first, oh people are going to sign and grab my freebie and then unsubscribe and I’ll never see them again, but very, very few people actually do that.  All those people who do stay subscribed, that’s people you would have missed out on if you didn’t start building your list.

JP:       Yes, and we all started with zero.  That’s the other thing.  I remember when I started my list and I literally had zero people and then of course you sign up for your own list so you can have one person and then you get your first unsubscribe and that kind of hurts.  I also made a mistake and started with one provider that was too expensive and then I went to Aweber which is very reasonable as well.

So, I kind of restarted my list, but as you say it stacks up very quickly and also once you have a book and if you’re looking for a publisher it becomes part of evidence about your platform. So, people can say, I have these many thousands of people ready to buy my book, which may or may not be true, but if you have a list you can actually do like a screen print of Aweber and show them, look I’ve got eleven thousand people on my list.

PC:      You’re right, you’re actually right and I think you probably hit on two points there.  Obviously it really is a trickle, it’s a trickle at the start.  You get maybe one a day, two a day, three a day, but even just five or ten a day for that six months that you’re writing a book.  At the end of six months that really adds up to a decent list.  A lot of bloggers tend to agree that once you get over five hundred and start getting your thousand, you’ve actually got a really good list on your hands that you can market to.  Because 5% of a thousand people that’s a good number of sales straight off the bat for a first time product or something like that, but you do want to pick a good service to begin with because if you go with the wrong one or try a free one or something like that, it can be really painful to try and bring this data too.

JP:       Oh yeah, cause you lose a lot of people when you move over.

PC:      You do, yes.

JP:       I think I lost about 50% because Aweber has that double sign in.

PC:      That’s right because – see that’s to our advantage because it increases the trust.  It’s a little bit painful but…

JP:       Well worth doing, yes so we both recommend that.  It’s excellent.  I’ve just go another question and we’re running out of time.  There are so many things we could talk about!  Yes, so one thing that I’m really interested in personally, because I think that authors and writers and people who find my blog are not very techie people and don’t necessarily use RSS readers and it’s kind of niche where people don’t understand and therefore I don’t have as many subscribers as I have people on my list for example, which I find quite odd.  So what is your best tip for building subscribers to your RSS feed?

PC:      Forget about RSS.

JP:       Oh, really?

PC:      Yeah.  Look it’s great to have it there.  I think you should offer it because some people want it.  It’s built into WordPress and all that sort of thing.  I really wouldn’t emphasise it as a subscription option.  I’d just have it available.

I think your mailing list is really what you should be promoting as the way to subscribe to your blog for exactly the reason that how does anyone really use RSS?  Like it’s big in the techie world and the web world and everything.  It’s a great technology, it’s fantastic.  I can’t fault the technology, but your average person doesn’t – hasn’t even ever heard of it.  They haven’t heard of it and they haven’t got an RSS reader.  They don’t have a couple of hundred subscriptions that they religiously check everyday like I probably do.

Why go to all the trouble of trying to educate them on the merits of RSS and help them get set up with an RSS reader and hope that they remember to open their RSS reader everyday when they’re already an email user, they already read their email probably every day and they have that inbuilt sort of instinctive urge to, you know, an email’s come in I need to deal with it.  They will be reading your email.  They won’t be letting it stack up until there is a thousand emails in their inbox.  They’re going to be looking at your emails.

I follow a lot of blogs by RSS because I know how it works and it’s convenient but I’m days behind on my RSS feed sometimes.  I’m not reading what people wrote the day they wrote it, I’m reading it sometimes a week later.  It just takes me that long to catch up whereas my inbox, if there is a dozen unread items that bothers me and I go and sort it out.  So, yeah I think have it there, offer it, but I’d be trying to get people – add on people towards your mailing list.

JP:       There you go.  That helps, but then I really don’t mail my list that often versus the blog post come out every couple of days, but then of course you can subscribe by email as well to the blog.

PC:      Yes, you’re right.

JP:       Yeah, so maybe I emphasise that more.  No, that’s very helpful.  Well, then let’s skew that round to a different way then.  So, if people want to build traffic to try and get people to their mailing list, what would be your number one tip for traffic these days?

PC:      Yeah.  So we’ve already talked about those incentives, so once the traffic actually arrives, but it’s actually getting them to sign up with those incentives because you actually want to attract the traffic and you’ve basically got to go where your audience is.  So, you’ve got to go and find them.

You can’t just blog in isolation and hope people stumble across you in Google searches and things like that because search engine traffic is only a percentage of your – should only be a small percentage of your traffic, it shouldn’t be relying on it.  And it’s not as committed and as engaging as traffic that you can attract from other venues.

So, if you think about discussion forums, Facebook groups, Twitter, social networks and things like that, that’s where your audience is.  You’ve just got to go out there and find them.  So, discussion forums that are related to your topic, you go out there and you set up an account and you start engaging with people and you’ve got your little forum signature that says my name, and here is my blog.  And you just go out there and you just be interesting and useful and be yourself and helpful and people will go, you’ve got a blog I’ll click on the blog.  They show up at your blog and they like what they see.  They see more content relating to the topics that they’re interested in from that discussion forum and they’ve already built that trust and connection with you from being in the same forum and engaging a few discussions with you already.  They see your freebie and they sign up to your mailing list and they become a loyal subscriber.  So, basically go where your audience is.  Find out where they hang out on the web and then go and get involved in those communities.

JP:       That is a good idea and…

PC:      Yeah, don’t spam though.  Don’t just get out there and go, ‘hey everyone check out my blog I think you’ll like it.’  Just go out there and be useful and friendly. It’s like showing up at a party.  You want to meet new friends in a new town, you show up at a party and you just don’t hang around in the corner and stare at everyone.  You go and introduce yourself and talk about things and people will come and check you out basically.

JP:       That’s excellent. This is a kind of a different thing I have just been thinking about, is doing more on amazon.com which I haven’t been focusing on too much.  You can go on Amazon and you can create as an author, I’m not sure as a just a commenter, but you can create a whole page about yourself with a link to your blog actually on amazon.com.  So, for authors it’s a great idea to go and leave a review on a book that you’ve read that is similar to yours and then you can put a link to your site on your own page. I’ve started getting traffic that way which is quite random, which is something that – obviously you’re more in the traditional Internet marketing field but I’m just trying to think a bit more about things that authors can do where readers are.

PC:      There’s a place on the Internet for basically every topic and hobby out there.  You just got to go and find it and start with Facebook and look for other discussion forums.  Do Google searches, but I guarantee you’ll find your little corner of the Internet where people who like what you like are talking about the things you like. That’s where you can sort of stick your toe in and start to get engaged.  If that means going on Amazon and leaving reviews for all the other books in your topic, genuine ones, don’t just throw any odd sentence out there and hope people will click a link, but that’s one way to do it because people live all over those Amazon reviews having all kinds of discussions and arguments and almost like a competition to see who can review the most books and all those sort of things.  So, if that’s where your folk are hanging out…

JP:       Yeah, hang out there too.  No, that’s great.  So, go find your audience and I primarily do that on Twitter.  That’s my fishing place, which works well for me, but I guess everyone has to find the place where they want to do that.

PC:      Yeah, that’s right.  I’ve got a lot of IT people that I talk to on Twitter and a lot of bloggers and things like that as well and you’ve got writers that I know it’s – you’d be surprised.  I think even sometimes the hobbies that people don’t really bring to the surface, sometimes they keep hidden amongst their Twitter friends will suddenly come out as soon as they see you appear on Twitter as the greatest barbeque chef in the world or something like that.  All of a sudden all these people interested in barbeque that you had never predicted are following you and talking to you and checking out your blog.  Sometimes it’s surprising I think where you find people that are interested in the same thing.

JP:       Yeah, absolutely.  That’s fantastic.  Wow, there’s been some brilliant information there Paul.  It’s been so good.  So, we have to wrap now, we’re out of time.  Where can people find you online?

PC:      Yes.  So, probably for the things we talked about tonight, probably BloggingTeacher.com is the best place to go and have a look. You can also find me on Twitter as Paul Cunningham, all one word, but you’ll find that link on bloggingteacher.com as well.  And yeah absolutely love to hear from any of your listeners if they’ve got follow up questions or anything that.  I’ve got a contact form there on my web site.  Always happy to get questions by email, because that’s instantly a blog post that I can write with things like that as well, so I’m more than happy for people to follow up with me if they’ve got any further questions.

JP:       Brilliant.  Well I’m sure people will because there are so many questions about these topics these days.  So, thank you ever so much for your time, that was great.

PC:      My pleasure Joanna.

Joanna:            Thanks for listening today.  I hope you found it helpful.  You can get more information on writing, publishing options, sales and promotion for your book at www.TheCreativePenn.com.