Chris Garrett on New Media

Joanna Penn describes The Creative Penn as a site …

aimed at people who are interested in writing, self-publishing/print-on-demand and internet marketing for their books (in print/ebook or audio format).

That is a great niche, there are thousands of people struggling to get their book written, published and sold. I know the pull of books very well myself.

Joanna has self-published her print book using print on demand, and also e-books, along with marketing via clickbank, so she has practical hands on knowledge of what she writes about. She also has created an online course called Author2Zero which teaches people “how to use Web 2.0 tools to write, publish, sell and promote your book”.

You know already what I am going to say … yes, Joanna is an Authority Blogger

The content of the blog is great, and Joanna has a great personality that comes across very well in text (as you would expect!), audio and video. While the video is not “slick”, and on occasion lighting and audio suffer a little, I actually think the character of them is an asset and warms you to get more engaged rather than putting you off.

In terms of promotion, the site is currently No 6 on Australia’s top writing blogs. This score is based on Google PageRank, Alexa and Technorati scores. Essentially, if Joanna gets a bunch more links then she will be able to top that list.

First Impressions

Colours are fighting for attention

My first impression was that the red dominates. Spend too long reading and you might get a migraine I guess this pushes people to subscribe to the feed, heh.

"Noisy" layout

The layout is also very busy. There are literally hundreds of links per page - far too many choices without giving clear demarcation and some sense of content hierarchy.

Choose what you want the visitor to do next, then work your layout to support that focus.

As it stands the visitor might well get so confused they do not hang around, I imagine this is reflected in the bounce rate statistics.

You will want to guide visitors to

1. Read
2. Subscribe
3. Buy

At the moment the clutter will cause the first goal to be hindered - prioritize the content, and put everything else to the background apart from your subscription box (providing a clear call to action) and also give your Author2zero product banners space to breathe.

Recommendations

I have three big recommendations for this blog, and combined they underscore a key lesson in any kind of market.

Packaging is as important as content.

1. Change the colour scheme so red is used only to draw attention to specific focus areas rather than as a block colour. Right now the background dominates, and the colour combinations used in the content cause confusion rather than attract. If you look at my blog, I use spot red for very important locations, and orange as a general “look at me” colour. The rest of the scheme is very much in a supporting role. Make the content come to the fore, the background should, well, be in the background.
2. Simplify layout and use graphics and HTML boxes to differentiate, clarify and segment the content to add more legibility and context. Right now the layout is “noisy”. When the visitor is given too many choices they make no choice at all. At the moment rather than being helpful the layout is inhibiting the visitor. You need clear sign posts, and remove the clutter. Reduce the categories down to seven as a maximum, lose the Tweets and the tag cloud.
3. Build links by offering viral blog content resources and networking with other bloggers and writers. You already do a good job of networking, and offer some great free content. What you need to do is turn those around to your link advantage. Repackage some of your already written content and put those to work as series or big resource potsts, then promote promote promote in social media. Also create a writing competition where folks can win copies of your books. Anything to bring the links in to boost your link count and traffic, and in turn grow your PR, Alexa and Technorati scores.

As it stands the vast majority of your links go to the homepage, which is not going to help with your search traffic as you want topical, keyword focused deep links as well as general domain linking for good long term growth.

I would also grab the variation of your domain without “the” (”creativepenn” versus “thecreativepenn”) as some people will instinctively write it without as well as with.

You do not need to throw away your branding. In fact I would suggest the DIYThemes Thesis Theme for WordPress as your base theme, with your existing header would be an excellent evolution rather than a radical departure. This will also give you the advantage of an excellent framework that will make full advantage of the links you grow.

Summary

Right now the content is great but being let down by usability issues. These are easy to resolve, either with the help of a great designer or simply by moving over to a customised Thesis Theme install.

Any wannabe book writers should definitely check out the site!

What do you think? Please share your feedback for Joanna in the comments …

Every year I get questions from people asking how they can fight the “summer slump” where traffic droops over the summer months. Also, who does not want more traffic any time of year, right?

So this year I came up with a plan.

Starting 1st July until the end of Summer, I will be posting tips, tutorials and exercises over at the Authority Blogger Forum. For your part I will want you to share your traffic generation questions, experiences, results and thoughts so we can all make the techniques and tactics even better.

Here is the best bit for you. Anyone who participates will get all the resulting content compiled into an ebook that you will be able to download absolutely free. To qualify for the ebook you just have to take part. This could be:

• Asking questions
• Trying out techniques on your blog
• Helping answer questions
• Adding ideas
• Bug fixing and typo killing
• Answering polls
• Taking part in experiments
• Tweeting and voting
• Or anything else that adds to the over all experience

If you think this might be something fun and worth a try, head over to the forum now - more details will be added there as we get started.

Comments are closed on this post, let’s take all the discussion to the Forum to keep it all together

Everyday Guide First Impressions

Wow these blog critiques have been popular lately - I hope you are getting as much out of them as I have fun writing them

This critique is for Althaf Ahmed who runs a site called Everyday Guide which he described in his email to me as “an online repository of mini guides”. He also has the .net version of the domain which is due to be merged with the dotcom.

What are these “mini guides” you might ask? Good question, I am glad you raised it. Here are some examples:

• How to start a home business
• What is a blog
• How to start an internet business

Essentially this site aims to be an “everything for everyone”. A particularly tough nut to crack!

This means

• Not being anything in particular
• Not having any specific target audience
• Not providing a deep experience

and it also means going up against the big hub sites, wikipedia, Squidoo …

Now this approach can work. You can get social media traffic by creating DiggBait, and you can get links and search traffic through linkbait. Just be aware of what it is you are creating. Essentially a traffic vehicle, and some ad opportunities.

My recommendation though is to tweak the strategy somewhat. Will return to that in a second. Let’s get some general impressions down first.

First Visit

Now if you go visit the site, I am sure you will agree that the first thing you will be struck with is that you are unaware of what the site is about. It seems to be about a lot, and then not very much. This is because, as regular readers will remember, we need to offer some sort of orientation.

• Where am I? - People need to know where they are, and might not even be entirely sure how they got there. You might be dropped into a deep page from a search result or blog link, or might have clicked a homepage link in a social media profile, or some other random occurrence. You can not guarantee the visitor will have been given any context.
• What can I see/do? - Navigation is not enough, and in fact more often than not in blogs you are overwhelmed with options. Too many choices is as bad as too few. Your popular content in the sidebar is good but too low down the page to get noticed.
• Why should I care? - The old chestnut of WIIFM - What’s In It For Me? Give the visitor a benefit, or even better a problem that your site solves. Individual guides might well solve a specific problem, but why would they return?
• Now what? - What can we do now? What should we do next. Always have a next step!

Reading Experience

The content quality varies, as does tone and style, which gives an impression of no single voice or personality, while the about page says there is only one person behind the site. Either make it a multi author blog (preferred) or a single author blog with a single voice.

My preference for multi author is because I know your future plans involve really growing the content, and this is your best route to that. If you go single author, you need to put more of “you” into it. Make it more conversational, provide picture and more detail about you.

Individual Articles

A lot of the content is quite “thin” and does not entirely deliver on the promises made in the headlines. This is a similar problem to the content you find on article marketing sites and ezine directories, where the content is simply “enough to meet quota”. Do not fall into the trap of search fodder, create truly valuable resources and you will get far more links, word of mouth and social media votes.

Way Forward

Here is how I suggest you progress:

1. Select an under served niche rather than go up against Wikipedia
2. Target that niche’s specific audience rather than “everyone”
3. Provide the very best answers for that audience’s specific problems - ask them what they need to know
4. Approach advertisers who want to capture the attention of that audience
5. Network with the leaders and personalities of the niche to grow awareness of your site

Essentially, rather than be “everything to everyone” become something specific for a specific group! You will gain by

• Grow links, search and traffic traction
• More profit with no “ugly adsense” downsides
• Easier to create content ideas

Not only that, it gets better!

When you attract a specific audience with something truly useful to that audience, you can grow a subscriber base of people who want to hear from you. I can not underline enough how powerful this is.

It is only a slight change from your strategy, and in fact you can split off content into sub-sites or their own domains.

• Starting a business
• Getting healthy
• Gaming
• etc

All it needs is to really get inside the mindset of each audience and give them what they would most respond to.

Over to you

What do you think of Everyday Guide? Please share your thoughts in the comments …

Spiritual River

Patrick Meninga, aka skinnyninja to forum members, won this blog critique in the Blogger of the Month competition. If you would like to win a blog critique or Authority Blogger membership there is still time to win the June prize, you just need to participate in the forum by being friendly, asking excellent questions that spark discussion, or answering questions well.

The blog is called Spiritual River and is about addiction, or rather I guess is more about sobriety by being more spiritual.

By using the Thesis Theme, many of the techy things you need to do are handled already, so in terms of SEO and having a good web framework, this is well sorted. Patrick has used a basic Thesis install and added a custom header and some adsense for monetization.

There is nothing wrong with the base Thesis look but you get better results by properly skinning it to your own, unique appearance. You should avoid looking like every other Thesis install on the planet! That said, the header looks good.

Another issue design wise is it is not very obvious for a first time visitor what they are being offered. You must communicate where the visitor has arrived, what they can see and most important, why they should be interested. This is fundemental, as a confused visitor is not likely to hang around.

Put some text in the header, a benefit focused statement, such as

“How to achieve sobriety through spirituality“

(although having just read that back, you might find a phrasing that suits your audience better!).

A key part of your differentiation is that you are a person who has been through it. You have been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. I often say to my coaching and Authority Blogger clients that “you are your secret sauce”, and here it is especially true. The people in your audience will likely have well-meaning experts telling them what to do but someone on the exact same wavelength, just a bit further ahead of the them on the path, will be a valuable person to know.

Keeping that in mind, you need to personalize a little more. Your about pages are excellent, but even better would be a small about box with your image in it right in the sidebar. You can link to your main about page and bio from there.

As well as this, engage the reader more in a conversation. If you go back over your recent posts, most end with a statement. Switch that up and instead end on a question. You will see wherever I write I normally end with a question of some sort, it is rare that I do not. Something like “What do you think? Please share in the comments …” works a treat.

The key to getting comments is to spark the conversation using questions that have no right or wrong answer. Everyone has an opinion, but not everyone dare answer a question in case they end up looking dumb or worse. So make a good, welcoming environment, where people feel safe to respond, and also make sure that people know they can be anonymous as much as they need to, because it is a sensitive niche.

If people do not want to comment you still need to engage them. Really push your contact form as a place where people can interact with you. Ask questions and ask them to ask you questions. Some of my very best content ideas are simply questions I have been asked by readers and customers. These are beyond precious.

As well as reaching out to readers, also reach out to other bloggers. This networking will help you boost your link profile (although you are already doing pretty well in that) and help you raise your referral and search traffic. It might also lead to profit opportunities.

This can start with Twitter connections, and guest posting, which can also lead to paid writing gigs which is something you mention on your site.

If you are serious about getting paid writing opportunities then you need a service page and to mention this in your sidebar, about page and when you guest post. You could list experience/appearances, how to book you for writing and the kind of work you do. Of course you do not have to stick to only writing on addiction sites. You have a particular frame of reference that would allow you to write personally on many subjects and a writing ability that would allow you to write on topics that you have not personally experienced but could research. After all, I have written about rehab without experiencing rehab or addiction!

Consider the related subject areas you can connect to:

• Spirituality
• Self help
• Health
• Life Coaching
• Hypnosis
• NLP
• etc

All of those are topics that you could expand to or network with but also when you look over those again, they are all areas where there are products and services that can be reviewed or joint ventured. You could make advertising deals, affiliate commissions or partner to develop products.

When you look at your blog as aimed at an audience rather than a subject, your opportunities expand.

Speaking of which, I am not sure how much money you will be making with Adsense, but consider getting sponsor ads (Thesis allows you to add a column easily) as I imagine rehab could be a high paying niche, but also look closely at making money via affiliate and your own products. For the affiliate side, because people in your audience will be vulnerable, you need to be even more open and honest in your recommendations, but there is a lot of potential there. I know that rehab leads are worth a lot of money, and are not as ugly as Adsense

Finally work hard to show your subscription options and provide a call to action that shows why someone should sign up. Why should they subscribe? Also provide subscription links under your articles as this is where someone who has enjoyed your content will want to see them.

What do you think of Spiritual River? Please help Patrick by adding your feedback in the comments …

How would you like to ask Darren Rowse of Problogger fame a question?

Next Tuesday Darren is joining me on the telephone where I will be asking him YOUR biggest questions about blogging, traffic, subscribers and how he makes so much money - and you can join us online.

Windows users will be able to listen live from your computer speakers, no phone necessary. Due to scheduling issues and time zones the call will be at 11am UK time, which while fine for the rest of the world is early for our USA friends, but even if you can not make the call live, if you sign up below you will be able to still ask your question and get access to the recording and transcript after.

Last time I did a teleseminar it was over subscribed and people got locked out, so make sure you get in quick to avoid disappointment.

So sign up now in the form below!

Get Access to the Call, Replay and Downloads Here:

Free Pursuits is a blog about “Lifestyle Design”, or How to Live the Good Life Without Being Independently Wealthy or Retired

• Find the flexible career you were meant to have
• Manage your career to maximize your happiness
• Make time for and pursue the things that really matter to you

What this means for you is a blog packed with content guiding you towards living the life of your dreams. Of course what this means for Corbett as a blogger is he is pitting himself up against Mr 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris and the fantastic Non Conformist, Mr Chris Guillebeau.

This is two challenges in one:

1. Most people do not know what “Lifestyle Design” is (you need to do some keyword research to find what people are really looking for and build lots of content around those items)
2. Those people who do know what Lifestyle Design is probably turn to the learned gentlemen mentioned above.

Now all is not gloom and doom because in Corbett’s favor he has a great blog. Let me briefly outline some of the good points:

• Well set up (WordPress + Thesis)
• Nicely designed and usable, if not a vast departure from the default Thesis look
• The content is well written and clearly readable.
• Good emphasis on reader benefits, including running a survey to get insights
• Beginnings of some peer-outreach

In fact this all makes my job of critiquing much harder. You can’t see this but I am shaking my fist at the monitor, heh.

So the blog is on good foundations, what is the answer to the aforementioned challenges?

Differentiate!

You must move past the template, both visually in terms of Thesis, and also direction as compared to the rest of the niche. How are you different?

First with the design, while it looks great and a lot of people would love to have a blog that looks as good, the niche is competitive and dominated by strong, well positioned personalities. You need to stand out from the pack by offering something richer, more impactful and most of all, yours.

As always the strategy, once you have moved past infrastructure, is to decide, and to effectively communicate, your positioning. What is your uniqueness, remarkability, or brand?

When you are not the first, not the biggest, and not the most well known, in any niche, you need to find ways to stand out on your own and cut through the fog.

One way I like to approach this is by using the following fill-in-the-blanks phrase:

Unlike other Lifestyle Design Blogs, Free Pursuits ___________, which means for you __________.

The first part of the phrase identifies how you are different, the second part answers “so what?”.

You could be different by painting yourself green, but that doesn’t mean anyone should necessarily care

After you can answer this in a compelling way, then you can translate that into action.

Audience Focus

Your first port of call when differentiating outside of yourself is your audience. After all it is these folks you are aiming to serve. At present the blog aims to capture pretty much everyone interested in lifestyle design. This could be a tough struggle, better to focus and grow outwards.

For example David Hobby writes a photography blog, but instead of all of photography he focused on photography lighting using inexpensive strobe lights. Now he is a world renowned photography rock star

So what part of the overall audience can you most appeal to and help?

• Beginners
• Advanced
• Freelancers
• Travelers
• Wealth-focus
• Spiritual-focus
• Productivity folks
• Cubicle escapees
• Passive income dreamers
• Silver surfers
• Eco-living
• Families
• … the list goes on

You will find if you focus on a sub-group then you will have more content ideas rather than fewer, plus nobody will be in competition and therefore everyone will be much more willing to help, link and comment.

Multi-Author

Rather than fixate on one smaller group, you could go the other way and make your blog (and you have a great name for this) into a multi-author blog. Think of your blog as Techcrunch or BlogHerald for the lifestyle designers maybe?

You could even bring in the existing lifestyle design personalities for regular or guest posts.

Grow Your Community

Of course the logical extension of a community of bloggers is a community forum, membership site or social network. This kind of connection and interaction is practically designed for lifestyle design and nomadic lifestyles as very often the old face to face networks become strained and a virtual socialization takes its place.

Perhaps Free Pursuits could be the biggest community for the lifestyle designer?

• You need to drive more people to comment using in-content call to action
• Post polls
• Drive people to comment with questions in Twitter
• Draw people over from forums and Facebook
• Find out where people hang out and interact there

In particular you will want to look in social bookmarking sites for what was popular previously.

Once people are on your site you need to keep them around, and there are two main ways your site is ideal for this

1. Build a real email list now, not Feedburner but with a service like Aweber - this will enable you to send out interactions and alerts, along with free reports and other exclusive content. It also allows people to reply and know they will get a human being.
2. Create series posts on “big ideas”, and perhaps collect them into reports that you can give away

I also find conversions much better when I use an obvious email form rather than a sign up link.

Sell the Dream

Any lifestyle blogger needs to remember that the majority of the people reading will not make the full leap. You need to sell the dream, give vivid pictures, video, audio. The full multimedia life stream. Use flickr, youtube, twitter so people can live your life via proxy. Show Don’t Tell.

This is also

1. An excellent way for your audience to get to know you better
2. A way to introduce other prominent folks from the niche and network with them

Consider a blogtalkradio show? I imagine Webinars/Teleseminars would be a huge draw (and profitable if you wanted to charge)

Fix Real, Compelling Problems

So we have talked about how you can stand out, and we have briefly looked at community. Both of those are going to aid you getting more visibility and traffic, while branding your site.

The biggest impact you can make though is if you take the overall “dreamer” aspect of the niche and turn around and solve real, pressing problems for the people who really need to make a change.

Interact with your audience, on forums, in social media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) and find out the real challenges that people are coping with and can not find an answer to. Once your audience grows, make it obvious and easy for people to send you their problems.

Most of my best content ideas are from consulting clients or reader questions. You can not top the inspiration and good feelings that come from actually helping people with real issues.

A great example for how to gather reader issues is over at CopyBlogger … sometimes how people do something is more instructive than what

One of the problems with “Your guide to lifestyle design” (other than “what’s that?”) is the “That’s nice dear” effect. You know, when you tell someone something really cool and they just smile and say “That’s nice” rather than get as excited and passionate about it as you are?

So work out the real problem your blog solves on a macro level and for each post aim to solve a problem on a per-article basis also. A real problem that people can solve with your help. If possible use the exact phrasing that your audience uses.

Summary

Free Pursuits is an excellent blog and has been given a great start, and is now ready to be taken to the next level.

Check it out now.

Over to you - what do you think about Free Pursuits? What would you do differently? Do you disagree with what I have said here? Give the benefit of your thoughts in the comments …

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing two very cool internet marketing gurus, Naomi Dunford and Sonia Simone of Marketing for Nice People.

We talked about lots of interesting stuff in this fun interview, but there are definitely some strong lessons for all of us contained in this interview.

Play the interview

Download the MP3 here.

As promised, here is the download link to all the cool stuff mentioned in the call

Did you win?

Wow! I knew this Social Media Success Summit was generating a lot of interest, but when I had the idea to hold a competition to win tickets I didn’t realize how much it would take over my Twitter stream and test my web hosting to the limit! Read more

UsefulTools is described as …

… a web magazine for people who love web tools and apps. There are new and exciting applications being developed all the time. We sift through the abundance of technologies available to you, and help you find the most useful tools.

Right away you might be thinking this puts them right up against such web power houses as TechCrunch, Mashable, Scoble and every other tech blogger out there. And that is true to an extent.

The way that UsefulTools is differentiating is through focus. By sacrificing the news, gossip and editorial, and aiming just for the review slice of the pie, they will stand out. Also, and this is just my hope, they will avoid the echo-chamber and TechMeme chasing behavior of some of the other blogs out there!

On with the critique … Read more

All around the world people are very excited about Social Media Success Summit 2009 — the first major online event dedicated to helping you successfully market your business with sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 500 people have already registered.

Now you have the exclusive chance to win two valuable seats to the event for no cost!

Update: Contest Closed

[See the winners announcement here]

I am not bragging when I say that the line-up is an all-star cast (well… maybe a little).

Presenters include bestselling authors and social media marketing experts such as Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Darren Rowse (Problogger), Mari Smith (Facebook guru), Jason Alba (wrote the book on LinkedIn), Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Denise Wakeman (BlogSquad). Oh, and me.

Sessions include:

• How to Create a Mega-Following and Mega-Sales With Social Media Marketing
• Building a Loyal Facebook Following for Increased Profits
• How to Grow and Engage an Audience on Twitter
• Using the Power and Reach of LinkedIn to Grow Your Business
• How to Productively Engage in Social Media Marketing
• Five Reasons You Need to Be on Twitter (and Tools to Help You Manage)
• Social Media Start Up: 3 Key Tools to Build Your Social Media Marketing Plan
• How to Attract Tens of Thousands of People in Mere Days
• Using Social Bookmarking for Improved Traffic, Links and Visibility

Go here to see the full details of all 11 sessions …

This event does not require any travel (no hotel, rental car or wasted time). You simply attend sessions online and meet the experts and network with peers from the comfort of your home or office. Pretty cool, eh?

Contest Prizes

There are two prizes:

1. Twitter Prize: Valued at $497
   One ticket to Social Media Success Summit 2009
2. Grand prize: Valued at $1,693.90!
   Two tickets to Social Media Success Summit 2009 (one for you and one for a friend)

PLUS

• A social media marketing consultation with Michael Stelzner (Michael will spend an hour with you, helping you get your plan in order)
• A site-critique by me (I will identify actionable steps you can take to improve your blog)
• A copy of the Problogger book by Darren Rowse and me
• A copy of the book Writing White Papers by Michael Stelzner

Just think how your business or online efforts could be boosted by this package. Just the consult with Michael is priceless; he after all put this whole summit together.

How to Enter

Step 1: Enter for Twitter Prize

Simply post a Tweet on Twitter using the button included here, or simply copy and paste the below Tweet message. This automatically qualifies you an entry into the prize draw to win a free seat at the summit. You may tweet up to 5 times between now and 21st May 2009. The tweet must contain “#smsuccess” to qualify. We will select the winner randomly on the 22st May 2009.

The Tweet:

Win a FREE ticket to Social Media Success Summit 2009: http://cli.gs/Grq8RX #smsuccess

How to Win the Grand Prize

To win the grand prize, write a blog post (no longer than 1,000 words) explaining why you want to win a seat at the Social Media Success Summit 2009. Have your post published by midnight 21st May 2009 (GMT). So we are notified about your post you will need to leave a trackback on this blog post or comment with a link.

Remember the grand prize includes two summit tickets, social media consultation, a site-critique and two awesome books, so it is well worth getting your friends on board. The more friends who enter the more chances you have of getting a seat yourself :).

Good Luck!

UPDATE: Already purchased a ticket?  No problem. If you win, you get your money back and free access to the summit!

The winners will be selected by Mike and I and announced right here on this blog on the 22st May 2009.

Update: Contest Closed

[See the winners announcement here]