Hello and welcome to new visitors who are arriving from The Creative Penn podcast. Joanna was kind enough to invite me to be a guest on her regular podcast to talk about blogging strategies for writers and authors.
To my regular readers I highly recommend checking out Joanna’s podcast and listen to my interview because I do talk about strategies that non-writers can use just as effectively.
A Quick Introduction
Just to recap my intro from the podcast I am a IT professional, husband, father, blogger and writer. Blogging Teacher is one of my two blogs and I use it to help other bloggers overcome the challenges that we face when starting and building our blogs. You can find out more on my about page or read the backstory of how I started blogging.
What We Discussed
Joanna and I talked about a lot of things and honestly we could have gone on for hours just on those topics alone. But don’t let that scare you, because a lot of this stuff really boils down to a few solid fundamentals.
Blog Design – The Creative Penn is a great example of a blog design that keeps the reader focussed on the content itself, with very few distractions or things to click on other than Joanna’s own products.
We both use Thesis as our WordPress theme. Thesis is a terrific theme because of its rich feature set and limitless customization options. Even the default look and feel is perfect for writers because it puts the focus on the written words rather than flashy design elements.
For the budget conscious there are also plenty of free themes out there that would suit writers. Check out some of these:
- Aparatus, a free theme with four subtle color variations available
- 45 Best Free WordPress Themes of all time (a big list of free themes)
- 100 Amazing Free WordPress themes for 2009 (another big list of free themes)
Blogging Schedules – adding some structure around how often you blog can do wonders for your traffic and audience engagement.
- How to blog 3 times per week – a short video that demonstrates a simple blogging schedule
- How to find new blog post ideas – 7 ways to monitor your niche for things to blog about
- How to turn ideas into great blog posts – a workflow for turning ideas into high quality posts
Revenue – Advertising options such as Google Adsense might seem appealing but you need the right topics, audience, and traffic to make them work. Besides which, every ad that Google shows on your site potentially damages your brand, and is a way for a visitor to click and exit your website completely.
Focus on engaging and building an audience, and develop your own products to sell to them. When you’re the product creator you get a much higher portion of the sale price. You can also leverage your blog and products into other revenue opportunities, such as seminars and speaking gigs.
Mailing Lists – You can write a terrific book but if you have no one to tell about it then you will struggle to make any sales. Building a mailing list is something you should start well before you think you will actually need it.
RSS – A great technology but not as widely used as email. My opinion is that you should offer RSS (it is usually turned on by default anyway) for those who know how to use it, but you should emphasise your email subscription options. This has the dual benefit of being more accessible to people not familiar with RSS, as well as building your mailing list faster.
Would You Like to Know More?
If there is anything else you would like to know please leave a comment below or use my contact form to send me an email.
You can also sign up to my mailing list to receive new blog posts automatically, as well as my monthly newsletter, and follow me on Twitter.
Thanks again for stopping by, and I hope you found the podcast useful.
Image Credit: Flickr
About Paul Cunningham
Hi Paul, Wow! That’s so useful! You’re a star. I shall link to it from the interview page and I am also getting a transcription done.
Very useful – thanks again, Joanna
Joanna, I really enjoyed doing this interview with you. Hope your listeners get a few useful bits of info out of it.