Blog Success

A short report today as I am busy with chats and new updates that are coming to Blog Success soon. It is a really exciting time and in an effort to continually improve the learning experience for members Blog Success is about to receive a new look by the end of this year.

I can’t tell you too much about it right now but it will include more details on how to make money with your blog in less time than it takes you to make money by building an authority presence online, because becoming an authority isn’t something that happens in a few months, but when it does it is sooooo worth it!

If you are an expert it is my personal opinion that Blog Success is THE place to learn how to take your expertise and turn yourself into an authority in your niche but the training is not just for trained professionals, it is also for mom and pop businesses, parents looking to bring in some extra income and anyone really who wants to leverage the power of the internet.

It’s time for me to go connect with another member of Blog Success (as a member you can book time to speak with me via Skype) but before I go I want to wish you an awesome weekend, have fun whatever you are doing and remember to keep connecting – it’s what being online is all about

Diane Corriette
Membership Manager
Blog Success
http://www.blogsuccess.com

Its summer break and loads of people are right now enjoying life in the sun someplace (hopefully) or at least taking a break from the usual routine of work.

When people return at the end of August the usual thing to do is to complain about going back to work and think about what alternatives are available. This is when people turn to how they can make some extra money or change career for those who blog about how to work from home or how to make money online this is an ideal time for you to make sure your blog is in order and ready.

Plus for those of you who run theme blogs Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner so even more reason to work on the SEO of your blog to make sure that when people are looking for gifts they find you!

That is the message I passed on to members last week and I thought I would share with you too

We had an awesome webinar this week with content creation expert Anissa Wardell who spoke about something many new bloggers find difficult and that is content development. The trouble comes when people do not have a plan and Anissa took everyone through exactly how to build a content development plan which was excellent.

There are some great changes coming by the winter this year because at Blog Success we are continually looking at how we improve and provide the best quality service to members. It is my personal opinion that Blog Success exists purely to create professional authority bloggers and it can take a little while to develop your authority but it is well worth it as one member announced in the forum. He is looking at selling is blog for a very high 5 figure sum (over $60,000) after building it based on what he learnt at Blog Success. He didn’t advertise or try to make money but spent his time building his authority in his niche.

Great stuff

With the influx of new members needing support I think I completely missed out last Friday so will catch up on this post today.

Firstly, a continued welcome to all the new members who have put their trust in the Blog Success system. One of the comments I hear a lot in the members area is how much they value the support through our forum. Not only because all the Blog Success team are in there (yes… including Jack Humphrey and the Blog Success partners) but also because there isn’t a question “too silly” or “too basic” to ask. I always encourage members to ask away and ask often because it is the best way to shortern the learning curve. Plus you help other people who may have the same question.

Last month’s newsletter focused on the importance of list building and our next issue due out July 8th will focus on creating marketing buzz. Our buzz group continues to be tested by a few members but we could do with many more using it. Its still under beta and a little challenging but the technical team are working on improving its effectiveness.

I am still providing the now well used 20 minute chats for any member of Blog Success who needs time speaking to a “real person!”
There are a few common issues that come up with new members that I help to answer quickly

1. Knowing where to start – believe it or not despite having a welcome video and getting started guide people still join and wonder where to start! It really is just a case of wondering “what am I supposed to do” rather than where do I start because as soon as I let people know what to do first they go ahead and do it. The first place to start is always the welcome video!

2. Knowing what to blog about – I have never met a member who had no idea whatsoever about what to blog about. Instead they tend to have a vague idea but are not sure whether it is something they could write about, or they have a bunch of different ideas and have no clue which one to pick.
The free 20 minute chats are usually long enough to empower people to make that decision. As much as members want me to answer that question for them I flatly refuse because 99.9% of the time they already know the answer – they just have this self talk in their head that they believe which says “you really have no clue what to do!” A quick conversation with me and we “kill” that inner voice and start getting down to decision making.

3. Not having enough time. It always amazes me that anyone would really use this excuse for anything. I even wrote an article about the “not having enough time” excuse – for me, one of the weakest excuses there is going – and added it for free members to gain access to. So if you are not a member and want to read it just visit the main blog success site.

Whatever we want in life making time for it is the only way to get it – giving in to excuses and reasons will just keep you where you are now. (That’s what I keep telling myself when I really don’t want to hit the gym LOL)

4. Writing content. Blog Success has a huge section on content development, writing a content development plan and preparing your content even BEFORE you put your blog up! It is one of the biggest fears of new bloggers – that they might run out of things to say – and so we have made sure that could never possibly happen. Plus the insights and training by our content development expert Anissa Wardell provides an endless stream of ideas, inspiration and tips to help anyone with “bloggers block”

Blog Success is one of the most powerful systems on the web for serious bloggers looking to become professionals and I am so very proud to be serving the company and it’s members. The one thing I would love to do is more live training and as I think about how best to make that happen I always welcome feedback about what you need if you are a member of Blog Success.

The recent affiliate opportunity went well and I want to welcome all the new memebrs. Affiliates were given an opportunity to promote Blog Success offering the installation of a free blog with the Thesis theme (which is brilliant) that they get to keep even if they don’t stay at Blog Success.

David Olson, the Technical Support manager at Blog Success provides excellent support, which is needed especially for newbies. There is nothing worse than finding something you can’t fix and when you turn to David he gets it fixed real quick!

I am now a proud owner of hosting with DavidO (as we know him in the membership area) and have the Thesis theme set up for a new blog which will target my home ground in England!

The buzz group gets closer to being released and there is a lot of excitement around what it will mean for members who will be able to gain a real surge of traffic once it is up and running.

I continue to meet with members from around the world because a free consultation (or chat as I call them) with me is available for everyone and I love looking at what people are doing with their blog business.

Toward I should have been looking forward to meeting Jack, Peter and Brandon for the first time but unfortunately the event in London has been postponed until end June/early July so I will have to wait until then.

Diane Corriette
Membership Manager
Blog Success

This week my focus has been on the newsletter and my goal of wanting to help members understand as quickly as possible the power that is the Blog Success system. When you are new to a membership site or training within an online site and excited about what you will learn it is easy to start off by looking over loads of different information at once and wanting to get started with every single one of them at the same time. What happens is you start reading, then you stop and click to another part and start reading that, then you see another area that looks more interesting so you go onto that and then you realize you hadn’t finished what you were reading earlier and you try to remember what it was!

When you do that it is easy to become overwhelmed! I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it

My role as Blog Success membership manager is to stop that from happening and to help people get a clear picture about where they are and what they are doing but it can only happen if people contact me to arrange to talk with me! I love being able to catch up with members and find out which part of the world they are in. I have even met a few that are up the road from where I live in London.

Our affiliate/JV manager Michael recently mentioned a great affiliate opportunity coming up plus there are quite a few other things in the pipeline that will be announced soon.

And finally if you want to hear a great webside chat with Jack and Social Marketing Maven Nancy Marmolejo click that link and go listen.

Until next time.

Diane

Hey everyone and welcome to another Friday report about Blog Success and all things related to blog training and how to make money blogging!

This week I have spent most of my time talking! Every time I send out a new post about the opportunity to connect and chat (it’s a free 20 minute opportunity for Blog Success members) I have another 10-20 people get in touch but only 18% of those so far take that next step towards actually booking a date and time. I guess everyone does things in their own time!

The forum has been relatively quiet and hopefully that’s because everyone is busy with their training but I always remind people to come back and leave questions because it is the quickest way to learn and also to connect with other people.

I continue to follow the 60 day plan and have been on day 20 for around 3 weeks now!!!!! Goes to show that not every day needs to be completed in one day. I added a forum post about where I am with all of that so if you are a member of Blog Success you can log in and read that.

Next week I hope to be able to connect with Blog Success founder Peter Lenekefi and tear him away from his busy schedule to record another interview with me and the subject of that will be announced soon.

Have a fabulous week and remember to stay focused, stay committed and stay in (consistent) action!

Diane

I am always on the look out for new and interesting topics on the web and today I found this great one on Google Juice by Leslie Walker, the Techology Columnist at The Washington Post

The article focuses on a particular contest that was started as a way to attract links but what was most relevant for me was this one paragraph that included a quote by the person who holds the winning spot right now

“…..Holding the No. 1 spot is a page maintained by Jim Westergren, a Swedish search consultant. In an e-mail, Westergren said his winning formula involves writing material “relevant” to the contest phrase, getting lots of links to his page from elsewhere on the Web and already having a good Google rank for his personal site, where he writes a blog.”

Why did I find that interesting? Well it is exactly what you have to do to maintain a high ranking blog. Providing relevant information that people love to read/watch or listen to. Get loads of links to your blog from other places on the web (and encourage other people to link to your cent) and build up a blog with a good Google rank. All this adds up to getting noticed in the search engines.

That is really all you have to do! So you can see that building a high ranking blog really doesn’t have to take much but of course there is effort involved in creating that great content and getting links from other places.

I hope you enjoy the article. CLICK HERE TO READ IT.

It is definitely worth reading because the penalties for trying to beat the system or buying links are quite severe and the result is ” the juice can turn to poison and lead to the Google death penalty.”

Diane

Its Friday and it’s the end of February already. We are moving into month 3 of 12 in 2009!

How is your business going right now? Are you still collecting shiny objects or are you focused and on task? For Blog Success members the week has been spent enjoy more great content (especially the stuff written by me LOL)

As I get to know everyone and spend time on skype with many of our newer members one thing that comes up a lot is a feeling of being overwhelmed. Especially when you are new to all of this. There is traffic to get, blog posts to write, information to research. Its never ending and having a routine or at least a way to sort out what gets done when for a lot of things can really help.

After hearing another member talk about overwhelm from running their online business I decided to create an audio that took them through some of the things they can do to help themselves.

I have been busy encouraging everyone to keep sharing their successes. I love hearing about any kind of win-win situation and sometimes its easy to forget about them and focus on your blog training until something major happens. It helps to keep you motivated when you can get a “good job” from someone. We may not be kids anymore but praise really does help!

Jack Humphrey has been busy with reviewing the blogs of members. It was a special offer made a little while ago that he would review blogs that are receiving no traffic because they are new or need improving and the ones that are established and pulling in traffic and money. It will be great to be able to contrast the two and when it comes to blog marketing and blog training no one knows better than Jack what it takes to succeed.

So another busy week for Blog Success members and another opportunity for me to meet a few more as Membership Manager.

Diane Corriette

I was reading an article recently about the difference between two men. Both won money on the lottery. The first won $16.2 million and 12 months later had lost it all and was 1 million in debt (not to mention his brother had hired someone to kill him and his girlfriend was suing him). The other won $85 million,
surrounded himself with experts, invested in different areas and planned how he was going to use the money.

The story of the successful lottery winner reminded me of Blog Success members because they have made a commitment to succeed by investing in their education and surrounding themselves with experts to ensure they succeed. They have recognized the need to plan their business to ensure it’s success and are taking the necessary steps to learn from people who are more experienced and able to help.

When you choose to join Blog Success you couldn’t surround yourself with a better bunch of experts.

Rusty Moore continues to shine as the star at Blog Success and this week he sat and had a chat with Jack about how he monetizes his blog. It’s a simple and yet highly effective method that anyone can use. Rusty keeps it simple, he only uses a few promotional techniques and he has so far stayed away from banner ads. His blog is http://www.fitnessblackbook.com if you want to take a look.

Two awesome audios this week. The first with Rusty as mentioned above and the second with Dean Hunt who spoke about creating blog content that gets results, gets people commenting and brings traffic to your blog.

After listening to that audio a few members posted the link to their blog in the forum area to share with us how they had used what Dean had taught. It was one of those webinars you had to listen to over and over again because it contained so much great content!

Along with the audios a new Twitter guide has been produced for members that is (in typical Jack fashion) full of great information, tips and answers as to how to make the most of Twitter. It’s a definite must read!

Behind the scenes that Blog Success team have been working to ensure that all members are informed of any new content added so if you are a member of Blog Success you may have noticed you are now receiving email notifications every time we add content. At least now you won’t ever miss a thing.

The Buzz Group was a major part of the old ASC system before Blog Success came into being and it is about to get a complete over haul. The aim of this private group is to provide a place where members can go and share their blog posts for other members to read. It has a few other tactics that I can’t reveal on this blog but what it does is help bring you more traffic – and we all need more of that. The newly improved Buzz Group will be available soon.

As membership manager I continue to have chats with new members to help settle them in and it is great to note that since starting these I have had 100% attendance. No one has cancelled or not shown up. Plus everyone calls exactly on time. Goes to show what a committed lot of blogger we really are!

Until next Friday. Stay well, keep posting and if you’re not a member… what are you waiting for??

Diane Corriette
Membership Manager
Blog Success