How to be a Better Blogger - Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here with the Community Education Series for the G+ Food Bloggers community. And tonight my guest is Larry Dean, and he's from Side Income Blogging, and he's gonna talk about some ways to help make you a better blogger and help— maybe help make you a little more successful. So I'm gonna turn it over to Larry. Larry, are you good?

Hey everyone, thank you very much for the invitation. It's really a pleasure to be able to do this for you and hopefully you'll find the presentation useful. I'm going to go ahead and do a screen share on the slides here, hopefully. Are you able to see that? Yep. Okay, good. Okay, so the topic for tonight is going to be how to be a better blogger. I'm going to run through some just important things that I've learned over the years for things that I feel are sort of the baseline for how to run a successful blog and how to be successful. So a little quick history about me, just if you're wondering who I am. I started blogging just sort of as a hobby in 2006 on a personal finance blog called Gather Little by Little. I was doing it anonymously. Because back then anonymous blogging was fairly okay and you could be fairly successful. Today it's a little more difficult. Gather a Little by Little became a top 10 personal finance blog in 2008, which I was very proud of. Shocked, but very proud of. I started doing some design and development work on the side for other bloggers while I was doing blogging on Gather a Little by Little. Then in 2009 I decided it was time to move on to some other things. I felt I had written about as much about personal finance as I could write. Again, to my shock and amazement, I sold that blog for a little over $25,000. Then I decided to start Side Income Blogging in 2010 to help people learn how to be successful and blog and kind of do the things that I did, which I was feeling really good about. I also run a number of niche sites, and we can maybe talk about that as sort of a side note later if we have time. I blog part-time, hence Side Income Blogging., and I work in IT as a full-time career. So I generally blog about 2 to 3 hours a day, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, depends upon how much time I have. Okay, so one of the things that I've learned over the past couple of years, especially with social media, is that the blogger is really becoming greater than the blog. Back 4, 5, 6 years ago, you know, the focus of everything was the blog. Again, anonymous blogging, a lot of bloggers didn't come out of who they really were, so people were really going to the blogs for the blog itself. Yourself. Today with social media, with Google Authorship, most people know who the bloggers are, so the focus is really more on the blogger. So there are some important things that you need to know about that. One is be unique. So one of the things that's really important is what does your blog provide that other blogs in your niche don't? And that's the kind of thing you need to focus on that's going to set you apart and make you successful. Your About page, you've got to have a picture. You gotta tell people about you, you gotta tell people about your blog, you gotta kinda share a little bit of a personal story. Let people know a little bit about you, that's gonna attract people to your blog and make them wanna read it. Share yourself and your story. So not only share your story on your About page, but share your story in your articles. If you're teaching something or you're talking about a cooking topic or a food that you like, you know, maybe talk about you know, how you found that food, maybe some interesting personal story that draws people in, helps people get to know you, and just makes them want to come back for more. Be honest and blog with integrity. That's a very important tenet to me, and that's something that's sort of a principle that I found to be very successful. If you're honest with your readers and you blog with integrity and you— the things that you write about, you practice then those people are going to come back because they're going to build trust up in you. And finally, blog with passion. If you aren't passionate about what you're blogging on, it's time to move on, you know, pick a different topic because it's going to show in your writing, it's going to show in how active you are, it's going to show in how active you are on social media about the topic. It's just going to be really obvious to your readers. And people don't want to follow a blogger or a blog that's not passionate about what they're talking about. Okay, always put your readers first. So again, this is another foundational principle that's very important to me. I always make decisions by factoring in my readers' perspective. I think about the kinds of things that they want to hear about, and those are the things I try to focus on. I always write for my readers. I don't write for social media. I don't write for search engines. You won't see me doing a whole lot of top 100 things to be thankful about or think about or top 100 things to make your blog better. Those are all sort of social media magnet articles. So I tend to write on topics that I think people really need, they want to hear about, things that are really beneficial to them and really help them out. And I found that that's just a really good practice to follow. It's really going to help you. If you always put the needs of your readers first, you're going to be successful. Provide them with value and strive to be helpful. So again, think about the kinds of things they're struggling with. Think about the kinds of things they need to know. Think about the kinds of things that are going to be beneficial to them. Those are the topics that you want to focus on. If you focus on those topics and meeting those needs, your blog is gonna grow because they're gonna continue to come back to get that information. Always make your readers a priority. So this is actually a topic that's become kind of passionate to me in the last couple of weeks because I've seen where a lot of what I call elitist bloggers or the kind of the big guys, they've kind of forgotten their roots, they've kind of forgotten the folks that have made them successful and the people that started reading their blog that allowed it to grow to the level that it is. I think it's really important that you Always focus on your readers. Always make sure that you're approachable, that you're following up on comments, following up on emails, and make sure that they know that they are number one to you. And give generously. You know, I'm not one to hold back content because I want to try to sell it down the road. If I think my readers need to see it, then I'm going to go ahead and share it with them. And there's always monetary content that's available down the road. Be social and approachable. Writing and publishing alone just isn't enough. Back in the days, early days of blogging, you know, you could write an article, you could publish it, and people would come to your blog and read. That just doesn't, that formula doesn't really work as much anymore. Social media has become such a major part of blogging that you have to be active on social media. You have to engage with your readers. You have to talk to them via comments. You have to respond when they ask questions. If you don't build relationships with your readers, and again going back to that trust relationship, they're just not going to come back to you because there's a million other bloggers out there that are doing that. So again, respond to comments. I think that's really important. I'm not one to always get every one of them, but I certainly try, especially if it's a direct question or something that deserves a reply. I always try to respond to emails. In fact, I actually just started doing something here recently. Where as part of my newsletter when I send the welcome email out when you sign up for my newsletter, I ask 2 questions in that welcome email and that gives me a chance to write them back when they answer the questions and they send them to me. I can write back and reply and give them some things to think about, maybe take a look at their blog, help them out. The great thing, the beneficial thing for me there is that I have been able to get a lot of content ideas from those questions. I kind of learn what things my readers are struggling with, and that gives me a chance to understand them a little better and know where I need to take my blog. So build an email list. So email is not dead. Contrary to popular belief, it's still very, very much alive. So if you don't have an email list and you're not building an email list, you need to do that. An email list is a really great way to be very intimate and personal with your readers. It allows you to send things directly to their inbox. And allows them to send things directly back to you. Include subscribe forms all over your blog. I put one below my articles, I put one in my sidebar, I have a couple on my About page. Just play with that, put different subscription options in various different places and you're going to try to track those if you use a large newsletter service like AWeber or MailChimp. They let you track where people are subscribing. Just like you would do in advertising, you want to test that. Give people a reason to sign up. So a nice little free incentive is always nice. Free ebook, maybe in the realm of cooking, maybe some free recipes that might be exclusive to just people signing up for your email list. I mean, there's sort of a lot of really good, great ideas that you can do there. Encourage your readers to visit your blog and content in your emails. So when you send out your email and say, "Hey, I wrote this great article," you know, try to do a little more than that. Try to encourage them to come to the blog and visit. Come to the article and make a comment. Encourage them to click through. Encourage your readers to share your content with others. So again, put those social media icons in the email that you are sending out. And people always say, well, how do I encourage people to come to my blog and how do I encourage people to share their content? You ask them. In the email say, hey, if you like this article, share it with your friends. And you give them a share link.

Larry, before we move on, we had a couple questions here on your welcome email. That seems to be a hot topic right now. One of them was, what is a welcome email? And another question was, what are the two questions you ask in your welcome email?

Ah, sorry, I'm not watching chat. I guess I should be doing that.

That's okay, I got it.

Okay, so the first question is, what is a welcome email? So the welcome email is really the first— it's an email that goes out Now let me step back a second. If you use a service like Mailchimp or AWeber, when a visitor to your site puts the email address in, they're going to click subscribe or whatever. They're going to get an email back into their inbox saying, hey, it looks like you want to sign up for this list. Are you sure? If so, then click through. Once you click on that, that's going to officially sign you up. The next thing that's going to happen if you use a service like that is you can send out a welcome email. It's a template email that gets that gets sent out to anybody that subscribes to your mailing list. That welcome email is a really great opportunity to first off thank them for subscribing to your blog, tell them what they can expect, and maybe even share a little bit of personal information about you that maybe they wouldn't have found by just going out to your blog. A lot of people, some people go to about pages, some people don't. So one of the things I do is I, again, I thank them, I share a little bit of information, I tell them what they can expect and I ask 2 questions. I've changed the questions around a little bit. I think right now I'm running, "What is your biggest blogging hurdle right now?" or "Your biggest blogging challenge?" and gosh, what's the second one I've got running right now? Biggest blogging challenge.

So the 2 questions can basically be anything you want them to be at the time, at that point in your life or that point in your blog.

Yeah, the first 2 questions I had, I noticed that I wasn't getting a real big reply on, so I actually asked a different set of questions and started getting a better reply. So it's definitely something you want to play around with. And again, it's— the reason I do that is one, I want to see what their needs are. That way when I write articles, I can serve those needs. And what you'll find is as people sign up, you'll get very similar types of challenges or answers to the questions. And that will kind of show you a pattern of topics that you can write on. Great. And I'm sorry again, Dennis, what was the second question?

Oh, the second question was just, you know, what were the two questions in your welcome email? We got them both, so we're good.

Yeah, I failed and couldn't remember the second question.

That's okay.

It's along that line, it's around the challenge or struggle that you're having.

It's going to be different for each one of us, I think, in how we want to approach it. It's a personal, I would think, a personal thing.

Yes, I agree. Okay. Okay. Yep. Alright, so do basic keyword research. This is a big mistake I see a lot of new bloggers making. They just don't understand how search engines work. It's really worth your time to go out and do a little bit of reading on basic SEO, and I'm not talking about an SEO expert kind of thing, but just basic search engine optimization. Understand keywords, understand how your articles rank for keywords, and understand the basic kinds of things that you need to do to make your articles rank. So the sort of the process I follow is I write my article first focusing on the reader. I don't, again, I don't ever focus on social media. I don't ever focus on search engines. I write my article focused on the reader. I then go out and do a little bit of research using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find out what people are searching for and what those volumes are. I then do a little bit of keyword research using that tool and then I go back and I tweak the article to optimize it for those keywords. So that will help the article rank better in the Google search engines, which will increase your Google search. I also use a plugin called the Yoast SEO Optimization plugin. It's a really easy-to-use, simple plugin that will give you a little red, green, yellow light for whether you're optimized or not. It makes it really simple. And I would also recommend using an SEO optimized theme such as Thesis or Genesis Or there's a number of other larger ones out there that work really well. Write articles for other blogs. Again, guest authoring is a really, really great opportunity to expose your blog to others, help the other blog out by giving them some content. So it increases your readership, increases your exposure, helps build your authority. Because if you're publishing on a large blog in your niche or on another blog that has a large readership, it's going to help establish your authority. It's going to help the other blogger out because you're going to give them some content to put up for the day and they can go work on other things. I'm sure they got a backlist like we all do. Helps build backlinks back to your blog which is going to help with your search engine ranking. Increases your authorship. Builds relationships. The list just goes on and on here. It's a classic win-win scenario. Guest blogging is something that I highly recommend you do. That's basically just approaching another blogger and say, "Hey, here's an article that I think would work great on your blog. Would you be interested in sharing it?" Most of the time if it's a good article and it's well written they're going to do that. All right, Google Authorship. If you spend any time out on Google+ I'm sure you've heard of authorship. Basically what authorship does for you is, first off, your picture is going to show next to some of your articles in the search engine result pages. Authorship is going to increase your ranking on those search engine result pages. That's been proven. Allows Google to know you and allows Google to filter out spam and duplicate content. So if some scraper is grabbing your content, they're not going to outrank you anymore. You're going to actually— Google is going to know that it's your original content. They're going to rank you higher. It's going to help establish credibility because when people are looking at that search engine result page and they see your picture, they're going to say, "Oh, this person's got a picture. They must be pretty credible." It's very easy to implement and it's going to help you with brand recognition because if you're searching on similar topics, that you're going to start seeing those same consistent pictures and you're going to say, "Oh, this person must really know what they're talking about." So they're going to click through. So Google Authorship is something that if you have not implemented on your blog, Go out and spend half an hour, 40 minutes getting it working. It's not that hard at all and it's going to be well worth your time. Okay, less is more. This is another one I'm pretty passionate about. So just a few things here. Great content posted less often is far better than mediocre content posted more often. The old days of just throwing out content just to attract search engines doesn't work anymore. Google is smart. They know what good content looks like. Google+ allows them to know what other people think good content looks like. So it's worth your time to invest in creating great content. Even if it takes you longer and you can't post as often, it's better to post the great content. Another thing to remember is people generally don't unsubscribe because you don't send enough emails. Right? So the more emails you send out because you're either writing articles or because you're sending stuff out every day, that tends to drive people away. Sending out less emails is generally going to keep them on longer. Less ads pay out better than more ads. So there's been a lot of studies done on this. I mean, you can plaster a page with ads, it's just going to overwhelm the reader and they're not going to know what to click on. But if you put 3 or 4 really high-quality ads on your blog, it's going to really increase your click-throughs. Blogs are made to be read, so don't distract your readers with tons of widgets and gizmos. Big mistake I see a lot of new bloggers, they put all these crazy widgets out there and all these little groups that they're members of and things that scroll by, and all that does is distract people from reading your content, which is why you really want them there in the first place. So just try to avoid that mistake, just practice less is more. If whatever you're putting on your blog doesn't provide very clear, immediate value to your readers, Remove it. And you always need more white space than you think. This is another thing I always help my blog clients with is more white space. More white space just makes the site look cleaner. It makes things more readable. It makes it look less overwhelming. It makes people want to stay. Okay. And that wraps up the presentation.

Okay, great. So far those are the only two questions we've had. So we have a little time right now until they start asking more. When you started blogging, you said you were anonymous. Now, I guess I started late. I missed that section of blogging. Was that more prevalent early on?

Yeah, it was more prevalent because blogging was new and people were sort of scared of the internet. And, you know, who knows, some crazy stalker might find out who you are. For me, it was actually sort of a very intentional intent thing because I was actually working in the banking industry and writing about personal finance, so I didn't want there to be any conflict of interest. But I know that a lot of the bloggers that I worked with early on when blogging was really starting to grow, most of those folks were anonymous. Again, not really because they were trying to hide anything, they were just a little more concerned about security, which I don't think is a big concern anymore today.

No, and I guess with Google+ or authorship changing the game, you really can't remain anonymous anymore either.

That's very true.

They're really— and it seems like the brands, like where brands were really, especially in food blogging, brands were very prevalent and people were sold the brand, like the name of the blog, and they still are. But now again, I don't know if it's just because of authorship or how Google's changing things, as more of the bloggers are coming to the forefront of their blog and they're identifying themselves with it, which I think is a really good thing because, you know, people always seem to connect better with people rather than, you know, just an inert group or a company. Now we do have a question here. Let's see. Susie Supnet wants to know, what do you think about colored background instead of white? Not dark, but not plain white either.

Great question. That's actually a very popular one. I actually I'm going to generate a lot of controversy over this. I'm a dark text on light background person. I think that blogs that have light text on a dark background are hard to read. There's been a lot of statistical or analytical studies done on what kind of article, what is easier to read, what isn't easy to read. Black text on a white background is heads and tails above any other color combination. Now if you want to be a little more artistic, want to be a little more interesting, you know, I think using maybe a light tan with a darker text would be fine. But again, you really want to avoid using dark backgrounds with light text. It's just very hard to read, hard on the eyes, it's going to run your readers off. Again, your primary intent needs to be making your blog readable. And there's a reason that books have been white paper with black text for years and years and years.

Yep. Okay, we have another question here from Carrie Wiebert. Is it possible to be successful at blogging without having ads? I've decided to take mine down recently. Never liked how they made the blog— the site look too cluttered, but it seems against the trend of what everyone else is doing.

Well, that's again another great question. I think it really depends on what you consider success. There's a lot of bloggers out there that aren't making any money off their blogs at all, and they— I would consider them a huge success. They have tons of readers. They have folks that engage with them all the time, folks that visit their blog every day. If your definition of success is how much money you make, then pulling ads off of your site is definitely going to have an impact on that. But there's lots of monetization opportunities above and beyond ads. I mean, ads are just one option. Affiliate offers, there's products that you can make yourself and sell. You might consider those ads as well since they're for your own product. But running Google AdSense or some other ad network isn't the only option. There are others. And if that's not something that you're comfortable with and something you don't like, then I think that's perfectly acceptable. I think that you can be very successful without that.

Great. Okay, we have a question here from Mary Papalohoulis Platis. Are there any ad companies that you use that you think are good, or any out there that you recommend?

So really the only ad company that I, I tend to use— I've tried a bunch of others, I just never get the same level of performance that I do with Google AdSense. Google AdSense is pretty much the only ad network that I tend to use. Now I do throw in a lot of affiliate opportunities. So I go out to like Commission Junction, ShareASale, FlexOffers. Those affiliate companies have a lot of different banner ads that you can place on your blog and text ads that you can include in your articles for products that you can earn a sales commission off of if your readers click through and buy it. The one thing I'll mention there, and I don't want to take too much time on this answer, but is I tend to only recommend products that I have personally used because there's a lot of websites out there that people are promoting products that they've probably never used and don't know anything about just because they pay a high sales commission. That's just not the way I want to run my blog. Again, it all goes back to your readers being able to trust you. If they can trust you, they're more likely to click through and the more likely they are to buy that product. So I only promote or talk about or write up reviews for products that I actually have personally used and like and have found value in.

Great answer. I think with food bloggers, the game is just a little bit different because we have ad groups that target us more because of our, our specific reach. I mean, basically it's like 99% women will read, or moms, stay-at-home moms, or people that are looking for food are going to be the ones that read us. So our ads are more geared towards those people rather than just like AdSense ads, which are very good too. Yeah, so there are some different opportunities for, I think, for food bloggers. Here's a question from Samantha Ferraro: With SEO, do you put the keywords that you find— or, uh, I guess, where do you put the keywords that you find from Google AdWords?

Okay, so if you use the AdWords Keyword Tool, If you just start typing in things related to the article that you wrote, you want to have your keywords in the title. You want to have your keywords in the permalink, which is the URL for your article on your blog. You want to have the keywords in the first paragraph, and then you want to have the keywords interspersed throughout your article. The actual, the Yoast plugin that I told you about will give you a guideline on how frequently you want to use those keywords. You also want to try to include the keywords in any subheadings, which is very important. If you're not using subheadings in your articles, you definitely want to do that for two reasons. One, it helps with SEO, and two, it helps with people being able to read your articles. So again, in the title, in the permalink, in the subheading, first paragraph, and then throughout your content.

When you say subheading, are you talking about just having like a highlighted heading in a paragraph or talking about a paragraph or—

Well, if you use WordPress, generally for most themes, the title of the article is going to be an H1 or an H2 HTML tag. Subheadings would be an H3 or an H4, and you want to try to put those in sort of just to put little breaks in your content, but also as keyword SEO opportunities. Because Google gives preference to those subheadings over regular paragraph text.

Okay, great. Nicole Burkholder wants to know, where do you start with implementing Google authorship?

Well, where do you start? So there's actually an article that Mark Traphagen wrote on his blog, and I don't have the URL handy. Maybe that's something that we can share outside of this or along with the notes. But Mark is sort of the guru on Google authorship. And actually, if you just go out to Google+ and do a search on Mark Trepenhagen authorship, you're going to find his article. He sort of has the go-to article for how to implement authorship. And it'll basically tell you exactly what you have to do. But in a nutshell, there's a little tag called rel="author". That you put in your link tag and that's going to link back to your Google+ profile page. When you do that, that's going to allow Google to associate that article with your profile on Google+ and thus associate that article with you.

Okay, very good. Mark is a treasure trove of information. He is really an amazing person. He and Joshua Berger are actually doing a session on SEO for me for the conference too. He's a really good guy. Okay, uh, Kelly Wilson would like to know, how do you use ShareASale? Do you mostly do sidebar ads, or you do the white post trying to get more people to click? Or do you write posts trying to get people more to click? I'm sorry.

So I do both. I use some banner affiliates. I have found that they're generally not real effective. You will get some sales if you have enough traffic. The far better way to use affiliates such as ShareASale or Commission Junction is to write up a review article for a product that you like or just if you mention that product in an article in the context of what you're writing about. Like for example, I write a lot about SEO optimization so there's a tool I use called Market Samurai and Market Samurai is a really nice SEO tool that you can purchase and they have a pretty good affiliate program as well. And I will link out to Market Samurai from within my articles from a text link. Text links are far more effective than banner ads. The problem with banner ads is people are kind of becoming blind to them. They sort of just ignore them. Where if you see it in a text link in some context, they can see, oh, here's the benefit of me using this tool. I think I'll go out and take a look at it. It just tends to work a lot better. Okay.

Alright, we have another question here from Kirsten Matos. It's, "I have a question about developing an email list. I know that people subscribe to my blog via email, but I have no idea how to figure out who they are on my Blogger blog. Could you point me in the right direction to go looking?" So how do you find out who they are?

Is there a—

there is a Subscription list, I think, on FeedBurner.

Okay, so depending upon what email service provider you're using, and it could be anywhere from FeedBurner to MailChimp to AWeber, generally they have an interface where you can go in and you can actually see who your subscribers are. If you're using FeedBurner, when you log in, there's— I think there's a tab at the top called Publicize. And then there's an email option at the side. If you scroll down, it will show you who all of your email subscribers are within FeedBurner. If you go into AWeber or MailChimp, it's really obvious because they have mailing lists and you can go in and view your mailing list and that will show you who all is in your mailing list.

Those services are really nice. Yeah, those services are nice because you can actually see your mailing list and you can divide them up if you wanted to test market something. You can send half of them one thing, half of them another thing and see who responds the best.

Well, the other thing with FeedBurner too, and I don't want to digress, but FeedBurner's future is very iffy. Right. So I would not suggest building your mailing list off of FeedBurner. I would look at going with MailChimp or AWeber. MailChimp's free for under 2,000 users, so it's kind of a nice solution.

Yeah, I think another one out there is Mad Mimi. A lot of bloggers are using that.

I've seen that, yeah. I need to check them out a little more.

Okay, we have a question here from Carolyn Hurley. She wants to know what your opinion of Amazon's affiliate program is and do you have any tips on how to use it effectively?

I actually, actually love Amazon's affiliate program. I was actually very successful with it. Unfortunately, I live in North Carolina where they decided to implement an affiliate tax, and Amazon said, okay, we'll show you, we won't run our program in your state anymore. So I can't use it. It is very effective. The problem is people misuse it. People generally take the little banner ads or the product ads and stick them in the sidebar. And again, banner ads with affiliate just are not very effective. You want to use text link ads. So if you've got products that are related to an article that you're writing or, you know, in the cooking space, you know, cooking products or, you know, then you would just link to those within the article as you're talking about that. If you just sort of naturally put that affiliate link into the content, people are going to be a lot more likely to click through. The only problem with Amazon is I would encourage you to shop around a little bit. Amazon is very, very trusted, so your conversion rate is going to be pretty high, but Amazon's affiliate commission is fairly low. I think it's 5%. There are some better offers out there if you go out to like ShareASale or Commission Junction. You can find some other vendors that sometimes are trusted just as well. That pay a much higher commission rate on the product. So just something to do a little bit of homework on.

Excellent. Do you have to notify your readers that you have affiliate links? Is that something—

Yeah, you absolutely do. The guidelines on that are a little gray. I tend to err on the side of over-communicating than under-communicating. I've seen two styles, and my understanding is both are acceptable. One is right after the affiliate link to put in parentheses, say, affiliate link, I benefit from sales, or. You can just say affiliate link or you can put some text at the very bottom of your blog that would say, you know, this site uses affiliate links and as a result of that I get paid a percentage of the commission. There's some verbiage that you can use that basically communicates to people visiting your site that you do make money off of some of those links. And the risk of not doing that would be your blog gets shut down. So that's definitely something I strongly encourage that you do. You want to disclose those links.

Yeah, I have heard that some, some blogs were just putting them on there. They have a page that talks about the companies they work with and a disclosure, and even just leaving it there isn't really enough. You need to put it at the bottom of the, of the article, or like you said, after them, just so you're— I guess a truth in advertising kind of a law.

Yeah, if you read over the FTC guidelines, it basically says it needs to be So, in a nutshell, it basically says it needs to be really clear and really obvious. And the best way to do that is put it right there on the page where people can see it.

Yep. Okay. Jennifer Morrissey would like to know, "Is there an ideal ratio of sponsored affiliate posts to regular content?" Well, let me give you a little bit different answer.

I don't specifically write affiliate articles. Now, well, let me take that back. I do write review articles. I don't do that very often because I think if you write too many review articles on a general blog, it's going to look like you're trying to be too salesy. So what I generally have found that works much better is write a review article and then write other content around that review article and link back to that review article. From your other content. And then, so people will read your article and go, "That looks interesting, I'll go read the review." Then they'll say, "Well, that looks like a really great product, I think I could use that." Then they'll click through on the affiliate. So I don't, I'm not a big fan of writing articles just for affiliate programs. If I'm writing an article and I think an affiliate program fits in pretty well, then I'll go ahead and include the link. Again, when you try to include those links in a much more natural kind of fashion and not a salesy fashion, you're going to have a lot more success converting those than you would if you're just saying, "Hey, here's a great product, go click on this and buy it." That just doesn't tend to work very well. People kind of see right through that real quick. Unfortunately, there's a lot of, for lack of a better word, shady bloggers that that's exactly what they do and people are really gun-shy about affiliate offers because of that.

I know this is the same thing with— we see some bloggers that every other post is a review of something or they're with a disclaimer after it, "I'm getting paid to say this. And I think after a while you have to try and balance it so your readers don't get just burned out on nothing but, you know, is this real content or is this just because the person's getting money to do that? So you have to find that balance for yourself.

But yeah, I would definitely, I would definitely recommend erring on the side of providing great content with very few of those affiliate sort of marketing articles. Okay, great.

All right, no more questions right now. You were going to touch on a little niche blogging, I think you said earlier. We have some time for that if you like.

Yeah, sure. So nothing formal I have presented but as you guys were asking some of the questions, I was thinking, "Well, that doesn't work in blogging but it works really well in niche sites." So one of the other things that I do— so first off, one of the things I think is really important in your online business is that you diversify your income. So if you just have one blog that focuses on a particular topic, I think that's setting you up a little bit to be hit really bad if for some reason Google blacklists your site or for some reason they think that you're doing something spammy and they stop all your traffic. That's really going to potentially hurt your income. It's an unfortunate lesson I kind of learned the hard way. So I diversify. So one of the things I really enjoy doing is building out niche sites. What niche sites are, are sites that focus on a particular keyword phrase that has really low competition. So for example, digital cameras, huge topic. But if you go search on the keyword phrase "best digital cameras," you're going to find that there's probably a lot of traffic there and probably a low amount of competition. So you can build a site that's called bestdigitalcamerareviews.com.. And you can publish articles that does nothing but review articles on digital cameras. And then you can include affiliate links to Amazon or other affiliate vendors for those cameras and earn money that way. It's a win-win because you're providing valuable content through writing a review article for people that visit that niche site, and in return you're getting paid sales commissions for doing that review. Again, reviews are one type of niche site. The other side is informational, which is one I really like doing. Informational sites are where you go find a topic that gets a lot of search volume, again, low competition. That's the whole magic of creating a successful niche site and building content that helps people find the answers that they're looking for. Shameless self-promotion here, but I just built one called Bed Bugs bedbugtreatmentsite.com, and it's all about bed bugs because I actually read an article in our local paper about how bed bugs are increasing, and I thought, why not do a little bit of Google keyword search on that? And sure enough, people are searching on it like crazy. And, um, so I actually enjoy doing that because I get to learn about new things, I get to write up the content about what I'm learning, and it helps people out, and I get a little bit of ad revenue and affiliate revenue for it. So right now I've got about 4 different niche sites. They're not making a lot of money, but I hope in the next couple of months they're going to start growing as the search engine traffic grows. But again, niche sites are all about focusing on a particular topic, particular keyword, fairly high search volume, low competition. You generally write about 15, 20 sort of what I call evergreen articles, which are your articles that are sort of the main content, and then you just. About once a week I'll publish a blog article that will have new information about the topic or some news announcement or some new product that's come out or some new information around the topic that I'm blogging on in my niche just to update people. So it's sort of similar to a blog but it's a little bit more targeted toward a specific topic.

So it would be a— yeah, it would be a good way to get another foot in the door there too and then— and give you a little more way to express something maybe you didn't want to put on your regular blog.

Exactly, that's another great opportunity to do that. Actually, I was just talking with another blogger on Google+ that was doing exactly that. Great.

Good way to test the waters too.

Yeah, it's just fun. I like playing around and building sites and learning new things. It doesn't take long to put a WordPress site together and go out and do a bunch of reading on a topic and write some articles up about it and hopefully help somebody out and earn a little money at the same time. It's a definite win-win.

Absolutely, absolutely. Alright guys, if you have any other questions out there, now's the time to ask them. Larry's been kind enough to be on with us tonight and answer. It's always great to see, you know, we, we talk, we talk a lot to food bloggers all the time, and it's one perspective to get, but when you get another type of blogger on, I mean, we're all in the same business, it's just a different aspect or a different way to look at things. And sometimes we don't see things because we don't look at them the way other types of bloggers do. So this is one of the reasons I had Larry on. He writes some really good content and he shares some really good content on Google+. And things apply. Just because it's not necessarily food blogging doesn't mean it doesn't apply to us. So it's good to listen to other people and get some ideas. Looks like that's about it for tonight then, Larry. If they have any questions, I'm sure they can put them in the bar, and if you have an opportunity, you can look over it and maybe answer. Or if you have any links you think might be helpful, throw them in the comment bar for them and they can go on for it. So thanks so much for being with us tonight. It was my pleasure to have you here and talk about blogging.

Well, thank you very much for having me. It was my pleasure to have a chance to talk to you guys this evening.

Great. So again, we're the G+ Food Bloggers Community, and this is our community education series that we— I do try to run every week. And thank you so much for coming, and we will see you next week.