Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:
“Pat. You seem to be EVERYWHERE online. Everywhere I go, people are talking about you and your name always comes up. How do you do it?”
To be honest, I never believed I would become this successful online, especially with SPI – a blog in the “make money online” niche, which as you probably know is wildly over saturated. Although my success is partially accidental I know exactly why I’m here.
What it really comes down to is this:
If you want to become successful online, you must think about what you do as building a brand. In order to build a brand, you must do what you can to be everywhere.
A successful blogger is not just a blogger. True – it’s the blog where things get started. It’s where authority is constructed and content is published. But if you stick to just a blog, you’ll be just that – stuck to your blog.
Your blog or your website is only the beginning. It’s your hub, your homebase where people can go to find out more about who you are and what you do, but it’s also just one piece of the giant puzzle that is your brand – your omnipresent, influential and (if applicable), money making brand.
What I mean by this statement is that a lot of a blog’s success is not only determined by what you write, but what some of your readers do after they finish reading what you write.
Blog readers are divided into two groups: those who just read, and those who read and take action. One isn’t better than the other (since our primary goal is to reach and teach as many people as possible), but it’s obvious which group of people help to accelerate a blog’s success.
So how do we convert the “just readers” to become those who take action? We don’t.
Here are 51 blogging and internet marketing tips that you can use as inspiration for the upcoming year.
Mindset
1. Revisit your goals. Take a moment and rewrite your goals. You may find that they may have changed since the last time you really took a good look at them. If you don’t have any goals, than what are you working towards?
2. Remember where you were. Where was your online business or blog at one year ago? Are you seeing any improvements? If yes, be proud of how far you’ve come along and the fact that you haven’t given up. If you haven’t seen any improvements, why do you think that is?
3. You can always do a little bit more. If you’re up to it, try this 2-step exercise:
Raise your hand as high as you can.
Raise your hand even higher.
If you do this exercise, you’ll notice that you can always stretch your hand a little higher, even though you were told to put it as high as you can at first. When I did this exercise as a teenager, it changed how I thought about everything I did after that moment. It made me realize that I can always do a little bit more. Apply this to what you do online.
4. Take action. As I mentioned in my first law of business and success, every business in a state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. With that in mind, you can read and get inspired all you want, but nothing will happen unless you take action. Become the external force that is required to get your blog, business and life to exactly where you want it to be.
5. Flaunt your unique. In other words, know what makes you stand out from the crowd, and milk it. In order to succeed, especially online, you can’t blend in and just be another blog or website that talks about X. Your site can still be about X, but you should be one of the only ones that does Y, or Z.
6. No fear. Fear kills progress, and it kills business. When you’re reluctant to take an action or do something new, take a minute and think to yourself, “what’s the worst that can really happen?”. The worst usually isn’t as bad as you might think.
7. Failing is okay. We all want to succeed, but we shouldn’t ever be afraid of failing. Failing is part of the process and teaches us valuable lessons along the way. Learn from your mistakes, and improve on your next attempt.
8. Don’t work more, work smarter. When we think of putting in the extra mile to get things done, we often think that means just putting in more hours of work. Instead, think of ways that you can work smarter, which will accomplish the same (or even more), in a considerably less amount of time. It may take a small investment of time in the beginning to figure out how to work smarter, but you’ll make up for that time (and stress) soon enough.
9. Give back. I truly believe in “online karma”. The more you help others and the more you give back, the more success you will find. If your primary motivation is just to make as much money as you can and do things just for yourself, you’re only going to see a limited amount of success, if any.
10. Just freakin’ enjoy what you’re doing! If you enjoy what you’re doing, it doesn’t become work anymore. You’ll accomplish more, and be happier. If you’re not doing something you enjoy, why not?
Over the last month, I’ve been trying to figure out how to best utilize Facebook as a blogger. To be more specific, I wanted to focus on what Facebook could offer me as far as:
Getting traffic to my blog
Interacting and building relationships with my target audience
Helping to establishing myself as an authority
These three things are all important aspects of becoming a successful blogger, as you probably already know.
I tried to look for posts from the big time bloggers specifically about Facebook and how one could utilize it for their blog, and if it was even worth it. Well, I couldn’t find any definite answers, so I figured I’d just do it myself, see what happens, and report my findings back here for you. That’s kind of what I usually do on this blog.
Anyways, the following is a compilation of what I’ve learned, which I hope many of you can use as a guide if you’re at all interested in using Facebook for something useful other than poking your old high school friends, or showing off your latest Bejeweled Blitz scores and Farmville achievements.
Facebook. I hear that word everywhere now: on the radio, on television, and even in conversations while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. Facebook seems to be taking over the world…and judging by the numbers, that statement isn’t that far off.
Over 300 million active users (that’s one for each U.S. citizen!)
The fastest growing demographic is people age 35 and older.
People spend an average of 20 minutes a day on Facebook.
A couple of notable points here:
That’s a LOT of people. A lot.
The fastest growing demographic (35 years and older), is probably the same demographic that has and is spending the most money.
Guess what the average time people spend on a given website is…10 seconds. Facebook: 20 minutes.
Ridiculous numbers. Ridiculous.
I guess this is why we’re seeing more and more companies today ditch the website address on commercials and are putting in their Facebook addresses instead. It makes perfect sense, and it’s a sign that we should be doing the same thing.
Just a week ago, I added a new WordPress plugin to my blog’s arsenal. It’s called digg digg.
It could also be called awesome awesome, because it is. It’s an all-in-one plugin that allows you to easily add the digg and retweet button onto your blog posts or page. You can see it in use on the upper left part of my posts when you’re on the website. It also has reddit and buzz.yahoo.com, but I don’t use those right now. It’s customizable with a few different options and it was exactly what I was looking for.
A couple of months ago, I would never of thought of adding a retweet button to my blog posts, but now because twitter is growing at such an alarming rate, I thought I’d give it a shot. Twenty-five minutes after I posted my first post after installing the plugin, I saw this in twitter:
Every once and a while I’ll come across a video on youtube that I’ll want to share with you, usually because it’s contains some valuable information. Here is the first one, and it’s a great lesson given by Perry Belcher about how he thinks Social Media should be used to make money:
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show you what I've learned...
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Listening to classical music while feeding by baby boy some oatmeal mixed with pears, apples and bananas. Now I'm hungry!about 20 hours agofrom TweetDeck
Doing some hard core mind mapping on the home office whiteboard wall.about 1 day agofrom TweetDeck
Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:
Here are 51 blogging and internet marketing tips that you can use as inspiration for the upcoming year.
e last month, I’ve been trying to figure out how to best utilize Facebook as a blogger. To be more specific, I wanted to focus on what Facebook could offer me as far as:
Facebook. I hear that word everywhere now: on the radio, on television, and even in conversations while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. Facebook seems to be taking over the world…and 
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
Enter your name and email below to get Free Instant Access to the most comprehensive guide available on how to Publish, Market, and automate a killer eBook. 
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