News and Reviews

Well it’s finally here! The third edition of the Problogger book is now available to order. (You might have already seen the news at Problogger). The first edition came out May 2008, co-authored by Darren Rowse and myself, and published by Wiley Publishing. We released the second edition in 2010 to expand and update the…

I have finally managed to start unboxing all our collected shipping container cruft that recently arrived from England and this book from Threadless was right at the top. If you don’t know Threadless then you should have a browse around their site.  It is a real treat just to explore, even if you do not…

Have you noticed I have been a bit quiet lately? There are two reasons. The first, of course, is that I have been moving country. These things tend to constrain your time a little … I can happily say I am typing this from our rental home in Canada 🙂 Today’s post is about the…

You might have already seen some of my fellow bloggers talking about this product. So much that I actually avoided posting about it because I felt with my Authority Blogger launch you might have gotten sick of hearing me toot my horn, until Michelle gave me an email bottom-kicking … So here I am telling…

It’s time to announce the winners of our Copywriting Success Summit 2009 Competition!

The first Northern UK Bloggers Meet-up took place last friday at the Old Broadcasting House

Why people blog was one of the blogging survey questions I most wanted to get numbers on. We blog for many reasons, and I was fully aware “Why We Blog” might well be different from, say Darren‘s readership.

Turns out way different to how I imagined. It seems I have very few “make money online” readers. We are split pretty much between “for pleasure” and “for business”.

Why People Blog Detail

Why do you blog?	Count
For pleasure	414
To promote my own business	299
I make money from my blog	60
For my employer	40
I get paid to blog	34

So Why Do Bloggers Blog?

I would say in fairness this was a multiple choice question where people could select more than one answer. Most of us will have primary and secondary motivations and it could be that “for pleasure” was many people’s secondary motivation.

How do these results match up with your expectations, or how well do they compare with your own motivations for blogging?

In this part of the Global Blogging Survey I asked some personal information about yourself. The aim was to get an idea of the sorts of people who blog, and to see if the “young male geek” stereotype was true. More Bloggers Are Male Than Female To be honest I was expecting the male/female balance…

Blogging survey results, as promised! Even though we didn’t quite get to the magic 1,000 mark once junk entries were taken into account, I am going to start rolling out my survey results. Hopefully I will be able to get through them before my vacation so I can incorporate any feedback required to make them…

Last week I mentioned my Global Blogging Survey and your chance to win one of 10 ProBlogger books. Well we are just over half way to the magic 1000 submissions mark, can we get some more?

If the total can get to 1000 or more then the results will be more reliable and statistically “ok”. It’s always better to draw conclusions from a good base rather than infer something that might not be based on anything real.

As well as 10 books I am going to sweeten the pot. One lucky submitter will receive a blog critique right here on this blog outlining all the advice you need to take your blogging to the next level.

So if you haven’t filled in the survey, please do it now. It takes mere minutes. Tell your fellow bloggers. Bring friends!

While of course I am happy to be home with my family there is a part of me that is already missing the people of SOBCon. I am full up with a cold now, some strange foreign nasty I picked up on my travels, but even so I am on a high.

The subtitle of the conference should have been “Hugfest 2008″. I have never had the quantity and quality of hugs from so many people. This will be one of my enduring take aways and I am deadly serious. Until the internet can deliver a hug experience, ie. an unmistakable and deep human connection, we will need to keep going to events such as SOBCon (especially SOBCon).

Liz told me what to expect but of course the reality can never be done justice with words, it has to be experienced.

As far as learnings, my head is still buzzing. Every single person I met gave me a new, fresh and invigorating perspective. There are people using this social media stuff for everything from adversity, to parenting to health. We had an expert on making sales coming from the other direction and wanting to make community, and we had the guys with community asking how they can make sales without losing the trust of their audience. A lot to process. I am sure there are lots of reports popping up all over and I will try to link to some in a future post.

One thing is for sure. You have to make SOBCon09.

As you read this I will be either on my way to Chicago for SOBCon, or landed and trying to recover from jetlag, depending on where in the world you are right now. Hopefully one of the two, I am trying not to think of the unfortunate alternative scenarios!

I am excited and nervous, and not just about the usual long haul travel logistics. It’s a while since I attended any event like this, let alone speak at one. Pretty well out of practice. But, we have to keep pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones and the program looks a lot of fun. There is even a boat trip with a gang of boozed up bloggers to look forward to. You can be sure I am taking my camera and video phone to that

One thing few people know about me is how shy I am. You know when people are afraid of spiders they go to the zoo to hold tarantulas? And if you are afraid of flying you can book a special “fear of flying” trip in a jumbo? When I started my career I was so introverted I took a teaching course to get over it.

I went from being unable to order a big mac without blushing and stuttering to talking to packed auditoriums. I found I actually enjoyed teaching, it was the most satisfying thing I had ever done.

Now I am in a “feel the fear and do it anyway” kind of place. I will sweat and shake but get a big kick out of it too.

For this event I have decided against bringing business cards or anything like that. All the attendees get a copy of our ProBlogger Book, so I figure that is a more business card than I need!

The aspect I am looking forward to most is meeting all the speakers and attendees. Chatting virtually is great but nothing beats actually meeting in person, even if I fully expect one or two of the harassed organizers to want to shake me by the throat rather than the hand

For all the people attending, I look forward to meeting you, please do grab me when you see me! For those who are not watch this space for my conference report

If you want to have a taste of what is in store when you buy the ProBlogger Book we have a treat for you. We just uploaded the special preview to the email signup success page. So now, when you sign up to the email list and confirm, you get access to download the PDF.

Now I know some of you have found a PDF on the Wiley site, and some of you have been curious to know why the PDF wasn’t already available. Well, we have been waiting for this version to be built for us, we wanted something a bit more meaty to give you a proper preview. So even if you have the version off the Wiley site, download this one. Our version is a bit more polished and contains more content.

We hope you like it!

A few people have asked how the sales are going. To tell you the truth, we don’t know yet exactly BUT the book has been going up and down in the Amazon best seller rankings like a yo-yo! At one point ours was the best selling book in the “internet” category, which is quite an achievement to say the book isn’t out for a couple of weeks.

Remember, right now if you pre-order online you get additional discounts.

As many people have pointed out, even without the pre-order discount our print book is less expensive than many much smaller ebooks out there, and this one has been printed out for you

Get more details about the book at the ProBlogger Book site.

If you subscribe to this blog via email you might see some strangeness while the list migrates from FeedBurner to Aweber but hopefully the end result will mean a much better email experience 🙂

I woke up to find that today was a new world holiday invented by Darren We’re in it together, blogging is about collaboration and together going further than we can by ourselves – so why not help another blogger today by shooting them a word of encouragement, a pep talk, a congratulations, an idea to…

You might have already worked this out, but for a while Darren and I have been beavering away on a little book project: ProBlogger Book —” Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income The book is our combined experiences in professional blogging. Making a full time income either directly or indirectly by building…

While I often recommend that bloggers “link out generously and often” I don’t take my own advice quite enough so here is a roundup of some links you will love: Is it really 2 years since we launched Performancing? Ryan is doing a fun treasure hunt to celebrate. Want to win $1000? Put a value…

In my last article on Social Media I said getting more Digg traffic means understanding and appealing to the peculiarities of the Digg audience without alienating your own. What do Digg users like? Pro Apple, Anti-Microsoft Pro Open Source, especially Linux, especially Ubuntu Anti George Bush, pro Ron Paul At least half seem to be…

Teaching Sells? It certainly does! I have long maintained that bloggers can sell by educating and building trust, it is a large part of my AuthorityBlogger concept. Brian Clark of CopyBlogger fame has produced a free ebook telling you why you should have your own product and how to go about it. Whether blogging is…