I’m certain that I’m not the first person to complain that there’s just not enough time in the day to get things done. In fact I know of at least one other blogger who tipped me off on the polyphasic sleep cycle which he got from another blog on How to Hack Your Brain. This advanced sleep re-patterning is called: the “EveryMan“.

Everyman is a modified Sleep-Wake cycle that includes one 2-4 hour nap, and two-four mini naps. The Everyman boasts that a person can get away with 2.8 – 5 hours max sleep per day.

I’m suggesting a Group Experiment. Join if you want. Just Blog about your Experiences and Share you experiences on Twitter using the hashtag: #SLEEP09 .

Considerations:

1. Timing is Critical – you absolutely must take your core nap, and mini-naps at the same time EVERY day.

2. Beware that this will take a week or so to get used to.

3. There are social issues with this sleep cycle, will it interrupt your family, or work life?

Pick Your Poison:

1. The Everyman 4 Nap – 2.8 Total Hours of Sleep.
   1. Requires 1.5 hours of Core Sleep; and 4x-5x 20 minute Naps.
2. The Everyman 3 Nap – 4 Total Hours of Sleep.
   1. Requires 3 hours of Core Sleep; and 3x 20 minute Naps.
3. The Everyman 2 Nap – 5.2 Hours of Sleep.
   1. Requires 4.5 hours of Core Sleep; and 2x 20 minute Naps.
4. The Siesta – 6.3 Hours of Sleep.
   1. Requires 6 hours of Core Sleep; and 1x 20 minute Naps.
5. Or my 3.5 Hour Mashup.
   1. Requires 2 Hours of Core Sleep; and 3x 30 minute naps.

Please note my version has not been tested. I am testing it personally, and would appreciate anyone else’s feedback on it as well.

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This is the simplest tip I’ll ever write about – it’s also the hardest.

How can you guarantee more traffic?

WRITE MORE POSTS!

Did I say it loud enough for you? Fact: There are a million different things you can do to try and optimize your blog, but if you don’t have the traffic it doesn’t matter. Each blog post I write will bring in at least 200-400 unique hits initially from google and twitter.

That’s a fact. If I write 5 posts a day I’ll get at least 1000-2000 unique hits.

Your theme doesn’t matter, the number of plugins you install don’t matter, the design doesn’t matter (much…) It’s how much quality content you can spit out.

I’ve managed to write around 300 posts in 1 year, I feel disappointed in myself. I took a few months off to work on other projects. My goal for the 3rd year is to write 3 posts per day 5 days a week, or 5 Posts for 3 days a week, or 60+ Posts a month.

Setting goals is important if you’re going to be successful.

What are your posting goals for your blog?

I have an idea for a new business network revolving around social media, application development, and blogging.

My idea is to get some application developers, wordpress theme developers, bloggers. Start a site dedicated to coming up with new ideas for applications. Visitors will be able to submit their ideas for applications. Each idea will be submitted under the terms that we will not use any idea without compensating the person submitting an idea.

The idea came to me because there have been many times when I’ve thought of brilliant ideas for an application, or site but lacked the php knowledge to get it off the floor.

What do you think, will this idea Fly, or will it die?

Recap: Entrepreneur has idea, submits it to us, and we build the software application and bring the entrepreneur  on as a consulting member for that project.  People can also submit ideas for wordpress plugins, and themes which we might do for free or profit. All free stuff will basically be used for branding of the main service.

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You’re presumably reading this blog because you want to make money as a blogger.

Whether you want to make a lot or a little is irrelevant. In the world of blogging it is very possible for the average Joe blow blogger to make at least $1400 a month. The only major secret is constant effort.

To be successful and make fat cash – you absolutely must post blog posts frequently!

With twitter, and the 100+ blogs in my feed reader, I myself sometimes find distractions are a dime a dozen. How often do you find yourself doing something non-important (theme-tweaking, reading, games, twittering, etc..), in place of the important task of writing?

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Link building is an essential necessity for all bloggers, unless you don’t want to be indexed by google and drive a ton of traffic to your blog, then by all means – skip right past this blog post.

Here is a definitive – simple list of things you can do to get incoming links.

1. Give away Freebies
2. Contribute to popular forums, using your link in your signature.
3. Write a pillar or link bait article, and get it plastered on digg, reddit, and other viral sites.
4. Create video link bait that goes viral on youtube.
5. Post your link as the source on Question and Answer sites like Yahoo Answers.
6. Write a Wordpress Theme, or Plugin. Themes are great because you can link back to your site in the copyright area.
7. Do something unusual that gets you noticed on a popular news site.
8. Share the link love, link to others who may link back.
9. Insult an authority in your niche, might get you flamed but it may get you some good backlinks.
10. Become top commenter on do-follow blogs.
11. Produce killer content that people quote, and link to.
12. Use Ping.fm to post your blog posts across multiple social networks so people see it, and link to it.
13. Cross link from your other websites.
14. Provide a great service, or design a web app.
15. Make an ebook. Give it away for a great way to get new email subscribers for your blog.
16. Starting an affiliate program, is a great way to get a ton of incoming links, and authority.
17. Write guest posts for other blogs in your niche, make sure to add your link in the bio box.
18. Submit articles to article sites, linking back to your site in the bio.
19. Purchase Reviews, or ask people to review it.
20. Become DoFollow and Submit your blog to dofollow directories.
21. Write reviews, if you give a good review the site may link to you, if you give a bad review then other sites might link to your review.
22. Submit to free and paid directories.
23. Write list posts, people love lists(you’re reading this post aren’t you?), and lists get lots of links!
24. Make a poll or survey that people are interested in.
25. Create a wikipedia page about your blog, that links back to it.
26. Sponsor other sites, get them to review you.
27. Start a charity or non-profit.
28. Hold contests. Then post that contest at Blog Contest Site.
29. Release a firefox extension or plugin that is a must have.
30. Interview someone famous, or at least semi-famous. Even a popular blogger will work, your mom, though in most cases won’t work.
31. Writing meaningful, non-spammy, comments on do-follow blogs.
32. Ask for people to retweet, digg, or stumble your best articles.

What do you do to build links that I missed?

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via flickr

What do you Blog About When…

Since I myself am having a brain fart, and am wanting to get one post out before I take off for the day. (Going to see Monsters vs Aliens – 3D.) I thought I’d ask everyone the question – what do you blog about when you can’t think of a topic?

I think I’m going to make it a habit of posting Questions to the community and see what happens, when I am lacking anything brilliant to say.

Many top blogs will post questions from time to time to get reader feedback.

Number of comments on posts tends to raise google juice, and asking a question is a great way to get comments on a post.

So I propose the question: “What do you blog about, when you can’t think of something to blog about?”

Do you write a post anyway? Do you skip it? Do you keep looking through your RSS feeds to find something to write about? Do you do like I am, and ask a question? What do you do….?

I’m off to the movie, can’t wait to get back and see what you come up!

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This is my input on day two of  Problogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Day 2 Darren wrote about the benefits of writing list posts.

I have often stated how lists are a great format for pulling content together in a neat, and precise method that will grab the attention of your visitors.

Darren of course being the master blogger has written a good summary on the use of lists.

You can follow my homework assignment here:  “7 Tools, Scripts, or Apps to Follow and Unfollow on Twitter. ”

Read what Darren Rowse has to say about Writing Lists.

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Monday was Day 1 of Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. He mentioned the importance of having an elevator pitch. (Read the first post of the series click here.)

An elevator pitch is a small concise mission statement about what your blog is about. If you aren’t sure what you’re blogging about then that’s where you should start. Figure out what you want to convey to your readers. This doesn’t mean you can’t write off-topic from time to time, we all need to go where our creative juices are taking us.

An elevator pitch should be around 140 characters (yeah that’s the idea behind twitter – originally the elevator pitch of ideas, it has since transformed into something much bigger)…

Darren wrote the following about having an Elevator Pitch:

“One of the most important reasons to do this exercise is that to develop an elevator pitch YOU as a blogger to have thought through and crystallised in your mind what your blog is about.

If you’re fuzzy on what your blog is about it’s unlikely than anyone else will have much of an idea either.

Knowing what your blog is about helps you in developing every aspect of it including:

• Writing Content
• Promotion and Finding Readers
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Networking with other Bloggers
• Branding
• Design…. the list can go on.

In fact almost every task that we’ll be doing in this next 31 days should flow from this task.”

I agree wholeheartledly with Darren on this subject my Elevator Pitch that I submitted is the same as my tagline on this blog:

“Your online guide to: Social Media Marketing, Blogging, Making Money, SEO(Search Engine Optimization), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Affiliate marketing. This is one make money blog with a whole lot of attitude!”

I’m planning on writing a blog post about all of my experiences with the “31 Days to Building a Better Blog Challenge”, so stay tuned!

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There’s a Blog in my Soup – has now opened it’s Registration so that ANYONE can sign up as an author!

All I ask is that you only write 1 post about your blog, and that you make an effort to post at least 2 blog posts on social media topics for the honor of plugging your blog.

I will be adding a link to all authors who abide by these rules to my blogroll – and will remove the posts of anyone who doesn’t abide by these rules.

Recap:

Write 1 Self-Blog Review, and 2 Blog posts on Social Media Topics get a permanent link on my Blogroll. I will only keep Registrations open for one month as a trial run – I may decide to go longer if the program is successful.

Don’t Miss out on this Great Opportunity Register Now!

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I wrote the first part of this series about a month ago, and it’s taken me awhile to get back on topic. November has been a busy month for some of my other business ventures.

The rest of the series can be found here:

1. Set Goals or Die! Part 1: Posting Frequency Goals…
2. Set Goals or Die! Part 2: Traffic Building Goals..
3. Set Goals or Die! Part 3: Monetization Goals…(forthcoming).

I’ve been doing a lot of ppc campaigns, as well as some blackhat techniques(shhhhh)…

In the first part of this series I spoke about setting and keeping a daily posting schedule of at least 1 post per day, but 3 is an ideal number. If you can post religiously 3 posts per day, your blog will be at the top of your niche in just a matter of months.

Today I’m going to talk about traffic building. Traffic is also paramount to a good successful blog. In fact traffic is the lifeblood. We include with traffic building – building followers or subscribers.

Here are a few steps on getting a lot more traffic.

1. Help people on forums. The more help you provide on forums like digital point, blackhatworld, or one specific to your niche, the more credibility you will build. Apply your link in the signature and you’re sure to get a lot of new visitors and blog subscribers.

2. Use google trends. I’ve spoken about this a lot. Google trends is a great way to get some immediate traffic. If you have some other good posts at the ready, people will stay a lot longer and might even subscribe. One thing I’ve done though that I’d actually advise against is using this exhaustively.

I posted a large amount of posts related to google trends, and got a lot of traffic – but it wasn’t the best quality because it didn’t always match my blog’s topic. Use this technique sparingly – but use it. I’d recommend posting 1 google trends blog post for every 5 normal blog posts.

3. Build backlinks. A great method I use for this is comment kahuna. This software finds blogs that remove do-follow and helps you write comments faster. One tip though: When writing comments try to find a post related to a post on your blog, then for your link back link to that post, not to the front page of your blog. This will build your google PR better, plus the people who visit your blog will be looking for similar information and will be more likely to subscribe.

4. Moniter your traffic. Part of setting goals is monitering what you’re doing and seeing if you’re making progress or not. I use statspress reloaded wordpress plugin, alexa, and google trends to track my traffic. I think it’s best to use multiple tools so you can get a more realistic picture.

5. Tweak. To be successful in blogging you will always be tweaking your efforts. Find what works for you. There will be some things that work for one specific niche that would never work for another. Just keep working and researching new ways to gain traffic.

6. Newsletter. To build stickyness and repeat traffic it is highly recommended that you give away an ebook, and build a newsletter with it. You can see an example with my newsletter form at the top of this blog.

7. Set little goals. The best way to build anything is to set mini goals. For instance set a goal of 1000 unique hits for December. Then set a goal for maybe 1500 for the next month. Do what you need to do in order to get those hits and you will be pleasantly surprised that you might get a lot more.

Bottom line: Don’t get discouraged, and never give up. You will succeed if you stick with it. Most big blogs began as small blogs. Also most big blogs took at least a year to build to big. It takes a lot of time and effort but in the end it is so worth it. It’s recession proof. I make money each month regardless of the financial woes of the nation or world. That’s job security.

Feel free to add any traffic tips you might have to this post and help others out.

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6 Techniques to get more RSS Subscribers to your Blog!

1. Comment on someone’s blog who has as many or nearly as many subscribers as you do – Tell them you’ve subscribed to their blog. They may reciprocate – a lot will.

2. Ask your Readers to subscribe. Make it easy and blatant. If people see links asking to subscribe all over the place then they’re more likely to subscribe.

3. Write Guest Posts for other Bloggers. This is a great way to get new subscribers – instead of puting your link in your bio, put a link to your feed url.

4. Bribes are always welcome. Offer something nice to your readers if they subscribe to your blog. This is always a good method to get new RSS readers.

5. Build your network, and then ask your network periodically to subscribe to your rss feed.

6. Start Podcasting. Podcasts are great ways to get more traffic, and get the word out about your blog. It’s also a great way to get new rss subscribers.

These are just a few methods – what’s your favorite method of bringing in new subscribers?

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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Image by AJC1 via Flickr

The past few months I’ve been doing some big experimenting with bringing in new people to this blog. I’ve been focused big on writing for google trends, over writing real deep informative articles on social media, marketing, and making money.

I’m planning on making some changes to that in the upcoming weeks. I still plan on having at least 1-2 google trends related posts every day or so, but I will also have a lot more blog posts to help you – the reader.

One thing I have learned from this experiment is that if you can write posts that are related to happenings of the day, you will get a lot in search traffic.

I’m planning on adding some keyword related content for Thanksgiving, and the Holiday Season as well.

If you haven’t already subscribed to this blog – please do me a favor and subscribe now!

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Image via CrunchBase

The top 3 laws of blogging.

Law #1 is write.
Law #2 is write some more.
Law #3 is never stop writing!

I know this sounds quite redundant. Writing is the untold key to successful blogging.

The more you write, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.

Yeah, I know sometimes it’s not easy to ‘just write’. Sometimes we want to do other things that we feel are ‘helping’ but aren’t as important.

Some common distractions that can ruin our blog:

• Twitter
• Re-designing
• Trying new ad networks
• Reading other people’s blogs.
• Thinking. Sometimes we try to hard to think up the perfect idea for a blog post, when it would be better to write 3 quick opinion pieces, or smaller articles
• Commenting on other sites. Yes this has a place, but again not as important as writing.

Get this in your head – if you’re not able to write 5 blog posts per day, there’s a good chance that you’ll never be a full-time blogger.

You’ll never be like John Chow, or Darren Rowse. They know how to keep quality content coming.

Sure it’s all been said before, I’m sure some of them have said the same thing many times.  For the person arriving from the search engines though, it’s only the first time.

If you don’t write, they won’t come. I worked so hard on so many things that just didn’t matter, and when I finally just decided to write as much as I can – my blog took off overnight.

Here are some ideas on types of posts you can write:

News Posts. Every blogger should make it a point of blogging about current events, even if you’re a niche and your blog is on pet grooming.

News posts are great and can bring a tidal wave of traffic. The best place to find news to report is google trends.

I talk about google trends a lot, If you don’t check google trends at least 1-2 times a day while writing, then stop reading my blog, and give up blogging.

Sure that’s harsh, but ya know it’s a tough world, and I’m not going to sugar coat this. You can be successful, or fail – your choice.

Regular on-topic Posts. These are the cream of the crop posts that you write. These have to be extremely tailored toward the topic of your blog. They need to be above and beyond, most news posts I work maybe 10 minutes on. Pillar Articles I work an hour or more on.

Series Posts. These can take a couple of days to write sometimes, but they are great for building sticky traffic.

Here’s another great idea for building your blog – tired of writing? Why not try adding some different media types. Why not record a video instead.

Video’s are great because you can upload them to a ton of different places, and will bring you a nice amount of traffic.

A nice tool which lets you upload your video to many different sites at once is tubemogul (it’s free) give it a shot!

Poll: Do you find yourself getting distracted when you should be writing? Also have you had similar results using Google Trends to bring in traffic?

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This new resource for Wordpress Theme Developers is simply put: Awesome.

It lists pretty much every template tag possible, template tags are the little parts that look like: <?php the_template_tag(); ?>

Each Template tag is layed out with a description to the left, and the actual code on the right, and when you click on a tag it drops down even more info on how and when to use it.

This is a must have resource for Wordpress Themers.

Let me know what you think of this great tool!

Check it out here. Also checkout the official wordpress theme codex.

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Google Trends

Is Google trends the new linkbait?

There are sites popping up that create random text posts using keywords from google trends, and other sites of such, but when you view the listing in google it’s apparent that it’s a scam-site even before visiting.

I must say, blogging about Google trends topics is very smart. It’s obviously what people are searching for. I’m amazed at how much traffic I’ve gotten from google after using google trends – lets just say I went from 90% of my traffic coming from Twitter and other Social networks, as well as from subscribers of the blog, to now getting 75% coming from google, many of which decide to subscribe.

Now it used to be a great idea to come up with a really unique and popular pop culture post, that everbody links to. This would be called linkbait. It could be a list of things related to a specific topic as well. All that matters is that it’s widely popular, and spreads virally.

However writing linkbait, or trying to – is a hit or miss. Either your post becomes viral or it doesn’t. I’ve had a few posts go viral, but I must say that google trends is guaranteed.

You write a post on a google trends topic, and you will get traffic, and it’s very likely that you will also get linked.

Here are some tips to writing a good google trends article for maximum traffic:

1. The Number 1 trend isn’t always the best – sometimes the topic has peaked. If you click on the trend it will show you whether the item is going up or down.
2. Choose a topic that you’d like to talk about there are many to choose from, choose one that fits in well with your site.
3. Keyword saturation is key – you need to use the exact google trends phrase as often as possible, and insert at least 1-2 variations. For example today I posted about “Hummingbird Sex Position” I included the keyword phrase about six times, but also used the hummingbird sex technique, once throughout.
4. Always include related posts – you’ll get trackbacks that will help bring in more traffic.
5. Add a picture. You’ll also get traffic from google images.

Another great suggestion is to use a tool that helps me greatly, called Zemanta – it’s a firefox addon that suggests related images / blog posts, so that I don’t have to find them myself – it doesn’t always find related posts but it’s pretty good.

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