“Don’t be too proud of this blogosphere behemoth you’ve constructed. The ability to gain subscribers is insignificant next to the power of engaging them.”

- Darth Vader (paraphrased)

I’d like to be able to write a post with a title such as From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days (by Tina Su) or The One Word That Helped My Blog Grow To 800+ Subscribers in 17 Weeks (by Christine O’Kelly). Both are great posts from two of my favorite bloggers. They gained tremendous momentum early on, and told us exactly how they did it.

But I can’t use a title like that because my blog didn’t grow nearly that fast. “From 0 to 500+ Subscribers in 10 Months” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. On the other hand, people might be able to relate better to a more realistic story of subscriber growth. At any rate, I can only share what I know, so I’ll talk about how I got 500+ subscribers in 10 months.

Be prepared to run a marathon

First of all, if you’re a new blogger with 10 or 20 or 50 subscribers, 500 might seem like an awful lot. It isn’t.

If I had 50,000 subscribers, I could just post anything that was reasonably well-optimized for social media, and watch it rocket to the front page of Digg. I could post a review of any product, then sit back and watch hundreds of people buy it. At 500 subscribers, even minor successes take a lot of work.

Blogging is not a sprint, but a marathon. If you always keep that in mind, you’ll do much better than the people who expect overnight success and get discouraged when they’re faced with reality. For every Tina Su, there must be thousands of bloggers who never make it to 10 subscribers.

However, things get easier as you move along. In the beginning, you have to figure out so much all at once. How do you install WordPress? What theme do you want to use? How do you fix the CSS? What plugins do you need? What is FeedBurner? This is all stuff that you have to deal with instead of growing your blog. Maybe that’s why I only had 3 subscribers after my first full month.

But these obstacles vanish soon enough, and then you really start blogging. And you stumble in the beginning, because you don’t know how to write posts or how to promote them. But you learn from experience, and you get better. The better you get, the more you grow, and then you benefit from exponential growth. I’m sure I’ll have a much easier time going from 500 subscribers to 1000, than I did going from 0 to 500. In either case it’s 500 new subscribers, but it’s a lot easier when you already have 500 readers to link, Digg, and Stumble.

Luck

I don’t think luck plays too much of a role in growing your blog. Tina and Christine may have been lucky, but they also had great content so they were prepared to capitalize on whatever luck came their way. But what is luck anyway?

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

- Seneca

Looking at the chart at the top of this post, you can see where my one lucky break was. On February 24th, I released an ebook called The Zen of Blogging, and it was well-received by my 20 readers. On April 11th, I succeeded in getting ProBlogger to link to it, which put it in front of 40,000 more. This happened right before I left for vacation, when I had 44 subscribers. I came back to find I had 205.

Yes, that was a lucky break, and I’d have more like 150 subscribers now if it hadn’t happened. But what did it take for it to happen?

1. I had to get the idea for the ebook. (Most people don’t spend time brainstorming ideas for ebooks.)
2. I had to write the ebook. (Most people don’t put forth the effort to write an ebook.)
3. I had to get Darren Rowse to link to it. (This wasn’t as simple as just asking; you can read how I did it in my post Persistence Isn’t Using The Same Tactics Over And Over.)
4. People had to like it enough to subscribe. (It could have easily gone either way.)

Preparation, meet opportunity.

Some bloggers seem to be successful just because they were in the right place at the right time. But most people wouldn’t have done what they did, even if they were in the same place at the same time. It always takes more work than a sane person would be willing to do.

Look at Darren Rowse. It might be easy to think that if you had happened to learn what a blog was back when he did, that you would have started ProBlogger and you’d be a 6-figure blogger today. But would you? Would you have been willing to post 20+ times per DAY like he did across several blogs, not knowing whether any of them would ever take off? Hindsight is 20/20. What opportunities are you not seeing right now?

I’ve had smaller lucky breaks here and there, but as you can see in the chart above, they’re all tiny blips in the grand scheme of things. Even my 15 minutes of fame on ProBlogger will appear as a tiny blip eventually. Focus on the journey, not on each step.

What am I doing wrong?

I see it all the time. People say things like, “I’ve been doing everything I’m supposed to–posting great content consistently, responding to comments, leaving comments on other blogs, etc. I’m putting in lots of effort, but not seeing results. What am I doing wrong?”

Well, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of people grow their blogs much faster than mine. In some cases, their content was fantastic, and I thought they were deserving of thousands of subscribers. In other cases, I just couldn’t figure it out. Just like how I can’t figure out why Facebook is so popular. But I do know this:

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”

- Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own

And this:

“The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

- Randy Pausch

A few people will have outrageous success. Most won’t. I can’t really tell you why. I do know that we have to take responsibility for our success though.

If you’re not getting ad clicks, the problem isn’t that people aren’t clicking your ads; the problem is that you’re not making your ads clickable enough. If you’re not getting stumbles, the problem isn’t that people aren’t stumbling you; the problem is that you’re not making your posts stumbleable enough. And so on. Keep that attitude, and you’ll find the answers.

There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there about blogging. In How To Write Blog Posts With Confidence, Monika Mundell, with 750 subscribers, talked about how much time someone should spend on a post:

“I’ve heard certain bloggers state that they take between 2-3 hours for each blog post to complete. In my humble eyes, this is crazy. While I occasionally spend a couple of hours on a post, most of the time I get them written within 20 minutes to 1 hour. Even 1 hour is too long…”

Meanwhile, Tina Su spends about 8 hours on a post, and sometimes as much as 20 hours.

20 minutes vs. 20 hours. Who’s right? They both are. There’s no “right” amount of time to spend on a blog post, because bloggers have different niches, target markets, and objectives. Which is the “right” country to live in, the U.S. or Australia? More on this later.

Every blog’s growth comes down to two things: content and marketing. There’s nothing else. You need stuff for people to read (content), and you need people to read it (marketing). Most people do a bad job at both, which means less competition for you.

Content

There are lots of blogs out there about how to write great content, so I’ll mostly defer to them. I just want to say what I think is the most important key to writing great content: find your niche.

What does that mean? Niche in the sense of what topic you write about? No, it goes deeper than that.

Writer Dad says he doesn’t have a niche, and that’s certainly true in the traditional sense. But I think he has a very specific niche. He’s writing for people who like about 1 post per day, about 500 words, broken into lots of short paragraphs, with lots of interaction in the comments section, and most importantly, his unique writing style. Name another blogger who’s similar. Can’t think of one? That’s because he’s the only one in his niche.

What’s my niche? Personal development? Yeah, right. That’s the niche for people who don’t like niches, because everything is personal development, from Abraham Simpson to the Akashic records, and that’s just the As. My topics are all over the place, but the people I’m writing for are by definition those who like to read what I write. So as long as I write differently from other people, that’s a niche. Name another blogger who’s similar. Can’t think of one? That’s because I’m the only one in my niche.

Better and worse are subjective. Don’t worry about being better, worry about being different, about being you. You’re inherently unique, so just let your personality come through. That will be better, for the right people.

Look at metablogging as a niche. There are so many blogs about blogging out there, and most of them are a faint shadow of ProBlogger. That niche is completely saturated. But that didn’t stop Copyblogger, Remarkablogger, and Blogging Without A Blog from carving out their own sub-niches, did it? There’s no more room in that niche for copycats, but there’s plenty of room for trailblazers.

That’s what I meant about whether you should spend 20 minutes or 20 hours on a post. Whatever you decide, that’s part of your niche, and there aren’t any wrong answers. I’m somewhere in between. I couldn’t have written this post in 20 minutes, but I also need to get to sleep at some point.

One other thought about content. Many new bloggers will come up with great ideas for a post and just hold on to them, wanting to save them for when they have lots of readers. Don’t. This comes from a fear that you’ll run out of great ideas. But if you ever run out of great ideas, you’re dead anyway.

Marketing

The best content in the world doesn’t matter if no one ever sees it, and that’s where marketing comes in. Marketing consists of everything that gets your content in front of people: commenting on other blogs, guest posting, SEO, etc. Much has been written about this as well, so I’ll be brief.

I mainly do my marketing by commenting on other blogs. Unfortunately, I’ve found that to be a full-time job. It’s fun to read other blogs and comment, but at this moment, I’m looking at 247 unread posts in my RSS reader and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to get that down to 0. I’m probably going to have to just scan these posts without intending to comment. Less fun, but much faster.

However, I’ve found a couple of marketing methods that are much more efficient. One is guest posting on Pick The Brain, which is bringing me lots of traffic for relatively little effort, compared to commenting on blogs. The other is Steve Pavlina’s forums. I haven’t posted very much in them, but from my limited experience they seemed to be great traffic generators. However, it takes significant time to keep up with them.

These are just methods that have worked for me, and they might be useless in your situation. The point is to keep trying things and see what works. I’m going to keep commenting on blogs, but I also need to be efficient with my limited time.

Well, there you have it, a realistic overview of going from 0 to 500 subscribers. If you haven’t had enough yet, check out my interview on Jamie Harrop’s blog. Now, onward to 1,000 subscribers.

I don’t know if you’ve been following all the drama at IttyBiz, but let me give you a quick summary.

• First, Naomi released Ninja SEO School, a supremely witty and practical guide to getting more traffic and money with search engine optimization.
• Then she announced that she was taking it off the shelf, because she was becoming overloaded with the free support she was offering with the purchase of the ebook.
• Then her ebook got great reviews and became hugely popular, being featured on Problogger, Copyblogger, Remarkablogger, and other authority sites.
• Then she got 90 comments about her decision to take it off the shelf, with a lot of people incorrectly thinking that she did it as a publicity stunt. After it went off the shelf, someone emailed me to ask if I’d sell him a copy. Despite it being a good darkworker opportunity, I had to say no.
• Then, as if she needed more controversy, she followed in Steve Pavlina’s and Seth Godin’s footsteps by taking comments off her blog.
• Then, Dylan had to decide whether to go to the prom with Brenda…oh sorry, wrong drama.

But here’s the latest: Naomi is releasing an updated version of Ninja SEO School tomorrow (Monday in the U.S.). This version doesn’t include support, but she says it’s “sexed up.” I don’t know what time it will be released, but if you click my link and it says it’s not up yet, try back a little later.

I’d write more, but I happen to be trying to release my own super cool ebook at the same time, so I’ve got my hands full. No problem, I’ll just refer you to the SEO School review I wrote earlier. I’m sure SEO School is like lasagna; better the second time around. But who knows when Naomi will flip out again, so if you missed your chance before, grab it fast!

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This contest allows people to win a copy of ProBlogger the book, not a copy of ProBlogger the blog or a copy of ProBlogger the person. ProBlogger the blog is copyrighted by ProBlogger the person, Darren Rowse. Darren Rowse is a registered trademark of the Rowse family of North Fitzroy, Australia. Consult an attorney if this is confusing.

Want to learn how to create and market a blog with the potential to generate a six-figure income? Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett present a practical guide in ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. You’ll learn how to:

• Choose subject matter that works for you
• Handle technical issues
• Examine different ways your blog can earn income
• Evaluate your blog’s success
• Keep content fresh and interesting
• Use your blog to generate income indirectly

I could go ahead and write a review, but it’s so much easier to just link to FreelanceSwitch’s ProBlogger review.

Here’s your chance to win a copy of this famous book, mailed anywhere in the world. All you have to do is:

1. Subscribe to my blog via RSS or via email.

2. Write a post that links to my main blog page and to this post, so that your readers can have a chance to enter. This can simply be a quick mention at the end of an unrelated post.

I’ll be looking at the trackbacks on this post to see who does this. If your trackback doesn’t appear by the next day for whatever reason, just leave a comment with the URL of your post.

3. Leave a comment below and chime in on the definition of an A-list blogger. I’ve been looking for what makes someone A-list or B-list, but no one seems to offer a definition. I found Are You an A-List Bloglebrity?, which ranks a blog by the number of inbound links in the last 6 months, but I think it’s far too generous, calling me B-list.

I propose this definition: 2,000 subscribers makes you B-list; 20,000 subscribers makes you A-list. Leave a comment and tell us your definition.

If you entered my last random drawing, you automatically get one entry in this contest, but you can complete steps 1-3 above to get another. Non-winning entries in this contest will not roll forward to the next one, because this contest takes hardly any effort at all.

You have until 11:59 PM EST Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 to enter. At that time, a winner will be chosen at random from all entries received. Good luck.

OK, I had a hard time coming up with a title. Anyway, Jamie Harrop has interviewed me as part of his Blogger Interview Series. Cue SEO anchor text: blog tips make money blogging.

Swing by and learn about my favorite blog promotion methods, who I’d like to write a guest post for, my favorite blog post, and a random blogging tip you don’t want to miss.

I had the weirdest dream last night.

Freelance writers James and Harry from Men with Pens had managed to escape from their psych ward cells, stumbling their way through the dark basement until they came to what appeared to be some kind of writer’s museum.

“Write For The Web: The Guide For Beginning Writers,” the sign read, “by JCM Enterprises.”

“JCM Enterprises?” James asked, as if it were strangely familiar. “I sense something, a presence I’ve not felt since…” He never finished that thought.

Harry didn’t like the stiff look of things. Even in the gift shop, he was afraid to touch anything because it looked too nice. “Who are these pretentious pricks?” he wondered. “I’ll bet they put caviar on their Corn Flakes, and make people call them ‘Esquire.’”

Still, Harry knew they had stumbled onto a gold mine. “You know James, we wasted a lot of time early in our writing careers. All this information really could have helped us shortcut our learning curve. There’s so much hype out there about how great freelance writing is, but it’s hard to know who’s really shooting straight with you.”

As if he had been waiting for a cheesy cue, James drew his gun and began a series of dramatic poses, flitting around the room and desperately looking for an excuse to squeeze the trigger.

“Put that thing away before you hurt someone!”

“Are you new here, Harry? This is what we do.”

“Yeah, but you don’t even know what you’re aiming at.”

True, James had to admit that he couldn’t really find anything worth shooting. He was really impressed with how diverse the museum’s collection was, covering many different kinds of web writing as well as many aspects of the business that new writers might not have even though of.

James began rattling off weak excuses to shoot. “I’m just not sure how useful this would be to experienced writers.”

“Yeah, but it says right here: ‘The Guide For Beginning Writers.’”

“Hmph. Well, it could really use an overhaul so it looks like it’s wearing a leather jacket and smoking, y’know?”

“True, that would definitely help. While the information is sound, it doesn’t exactly come across with much style. You’d never see us doing something like this. Not in a million years. But I think they can be forgiven. Besides, it looks like they’re under new ownership.”

“OK, well then what about all these resource links? They look good, but I haven’t actually gone and checked them out, have you?”

“Well, no, but you can’t blame the museum for us being short on time. These guys really know what they’re doing, and I’m sure they’ll only point us in the right direction.”

James was getting anxious. “But I’ve never come back from a job with a full clip yet, and I’m not going to start now!”

“Tell you what, James. Take my gun. You can do the shooting for both of us next time.”

###

In case a translation is needed, this is a review of Write For The Web: The Guide For Beginning Writers, a $19.99 ebook by Men with Pens. The review is done in the style of their brutal “drive-by shooting” blog reviews.

Their ebook has a lot of useful information for people looking into freelance writing, but it’s written in the corporate style they had back when they went by the name of JCM Enterprises. I hope they grace us with an updated version one of these days. In the meantime, this is solid information from people who learned everything the hard way, so you don’t have to.

I’m not sure if this happened because of my Akashic record reading, but Havi Brooks (the one with the duck) and Naomi Dunford (pictured duckless) have created a course called “Self Promotion for Wimps: How to promote the hell out of that cool thing you do without being gross and/or getting tangled in scary, overwhelming horribleness.”

It’s a 6 week power course for creative types, small business owners, and people who are too busy freaking out to properly live their dreams. Yeah, that sounds like me.

They met each other through Twitter, and eventually had a conversation that went something like this:

Havi: Gee, Naomi. You know, every time I’ve put one of your marketing ideas into practice, I’ve made money. That’s so awesome.

Naomi: You rule. Every time I’ve put one of your stop-freaking-out ideas into practice I’ve made money. That IS awesome.

What’s interesting here is that they’re merging their two completely different areas of expertise (home business marketing and “not freaking out”) and making a course for “people who are ready to clear out the crap that’s standing in the way of their awesome life and start having more fun and making some money doing it.”

Starting this Wednesday, September 10th, they’ll be doing 6 weeks of group calls where they say what they’ve got to say, take questions live, and record the call for you. The call topics are explained on their landing page, but basically they’re going to help people get past their personal issues that are preventing them from actually making money from their business ideas. Here’s one example they give that I can definitely relate to:

“I’m NOT good enough, I’m NOT smart enough, and gosh darn it, people HATE me. There’s no way on God’s good earth that anyone will ever pay me for this. I totally suck. This was a stupid idea. Forget it, I’ll go back to my cubicle and/or bed and die.”

What you need is a phone, a thing you want to make big crazy progress on, and willingness to do a little homework. I’ve signed up and I don’t even have the “thing” nailed down yet. I figure that this course will address a major issue I’m having with making money from home (psychological blocks and limiting beliefs), be generic enough to apply to any business idea, and no matter what, it’s bound to be highly entertaining.

The only drawback is that it’s not cheap, but what did you expect for exclusive access to two superstars? The regular program (which I’m doing) includes 6 weeks of group calls, homework, recordings, notes, and “surprises,” for $205. The VIP option (limited to 8 people) includes all that plus one hour of private consulting with Havi, and one hour with the duckless wonder, for $365. But, use the coupon code “sale” to get $30 off either program. There’s also an affiliate program, so you can subsidize the cost that way.

For more details, read Self Promotion for Wimps. Hope to hear some of you on the calls!

Image courtesy of Alex Shalman

My guest post Bloggers Must Have These 3 Ducks In A Row is now up on Alex Shalman . com. If you’re trying to get your blog to take off and you’re busy learning all the many details of blogging, you still don’t want to lose sight of the fundamentals. Make sure you have your ducks in a row, or all the blogging tips in the world won’t save you.

This is the guest post I recently mentioned that I had forgotten about, but reading it again now, I’m pleased to find that I agree with myself!

Alex Shalman writes about a bunch of different topics related to human potential and personal growth, not unlike myself. And he’s from New Joisey, so he’s got that going for him too. And I just found out he’s only 23, which is very cool for a blogger!

Also, I just learned that Naomi Dunford will stop selling her ebook SEO School on August 8th. In her post Sell More Stuff: Legitimizing Scarcity, she explains why:

“This is because it’s a supported product, and I’m the only one supporting it. If readers have questions, I answer them. If they need advice, I give it, and there’s no limit. It’s not like one question per person. Lifetime support, dudes. I’m the last stop on the SEO School train, and enough people have bought it that I can’t afford to sell more and subsequently give [bad] service.”

So if you want to get a copy of SEO School, you have a bit over a week left. But before you worry too much about SEO, make sure you have your ducks in a row!

In ten minutes, Yaro Starak will reopen Blog Mastermind. This is his coaching program, where he teaches people how to make a full-time income from blogging part-time. It has been closed since December, and now it’s reopening with updated material.

I’m not planning to join it right now. I’ve read some reviews, all positive, but I just haven’t been convinced that it’s worth the money ($97 a month for six months, or a one time fee of $497). I’m sure it’s a great program, but I’m just not sure that anyone really knows the secret of blogging.

Actually, Leo Babauta recently told us his secret of blogging that made Zen Habits one of the top 50 blogs in the world in its first year:

“There’s no secret, really. If I have any secret, it’s this: pick topics that I know about that people want to learn about, and then provide as much useful information about those topics as I possibly can — and then write it in a clear, fairly concise, easily scannable (because people are busy) form with a catchy headline.”

That’s a simple formula for success, but there are a couple of problems here.

One is that not all successful bloggers follow the same formula. For example,

• Stuff White People Like is not about topics that people want to learn about (it’s funny, but you don’t learn anything).
• Brian Clark built up Copyblogger with two posts a week, not as many posts as possible.
• Manolo is not clear, using a strange voice in the third person.
• Leo himself is not concise. Not that I’m one to talk, I’m just saying…
• Steve Pavlina often writes posts that are not scannable.
• Seth Godin does not use catchy headlines.

The other problem is that many bloggers are following Leo’s formula without success. I’m not saying it’s a bad formula, just that it doesn’t make success guaranteed, or even likely.

If I were asked what I thought the secrets of blogging are, I’d say these are the three most important things (in order):

1. Don’t expect overnight success. It doesn’t matter what you do if you don’t give it enough time. Leo was an anomaly; the average age of blogs in the Technorati Top 100 is 33.8 months (this stat is almost two years old, but it probably hasn’t changed much).

2. Provide lots of value. There are countless blogs out there, and it’s too easy for someone to come across yours and say “next!” If people don’t have a reason to feel drawn to your blog, they won’t subscribe, stumble, link, etc. The tricky part is that value is highly subjective. All that matters is how your target audience perceives it, and this can be hard to figure out. (But one thing I know is that value is not cumulative; lots of low value posts do not add up to a high value blog!)

3. Do lots of promotion. I have no idea where people got the saying “If you build it, they will come.” I mean, yeah, Field of Dreams, but did any top blogger actually say it, or are we really taking blogging advice from a disembodied voice in an 80s movie? And wasn’t the quote “If you build it, he will come?” As in, one person, who happened to be a ghost? Regardless, the reality is that people won’t find you (until you’re well established). You have to find them, by leaving comments on other blogs, posting in forums, writing guest posts, and so forth.

Of course, if you’ve spent any significant time reading blogs about blogging, you probably already know this. And every blogger has plenty more secrets to share. In fact, I should have a guest post appearing this week where I talk about some more. (I wrote this upcoming guest post a month ago, and I don’t remember what I said!) Despite all this knowledge being passed around, plenty of bloggers still seem to be struggling.

Yaro did give some new (new to me, at least) blogging advice in his conversion blogging video. Using an email list in conjunction with a blog seems like it could be a good idea in theory, but if I had an email list I’d want it to be genuinely useful, and so far I haven’t seen a good example of a list that isn’t made up of sales pitches and duplicate content from the blog.

I’d be interested in joining Blog Mastermind, but for now, I just haven’t been convinced that it really holds the secrets of blogging. Yaro’s Blog Profits Blueprint is a great value for free though.

If you know the secrets of blogging, please share them in the comments!

Yaro Starak has just released a new video about a concept he calls Conversion Blogging. It’s basically what you get when you start by building a good blog, and then add an email list.

It’s no secret that most bloggers have a very hard time making money from their blogs, even if they can get decent traffic to them. Conversion blogging is Yaro’s idea of how to make a full time income without working yourself to death trying to generate page views. This concept has worked very well for himself and many of his students. And while I don’t have an email list of my own, I’m starting to warm up to the idea because of Yaro.

About a fourth of my subscribers are subscribed to my blog via email. This means that every time I publish a new post, they receive an email containing the content of the post. This is a lot more efficient than having to come to my blog every day to check if I’ve posted something new.

But the problem is that it becomes overwhelming when you start subscribing to more and more blogs. Email is a somewhat intrusive medium. It’s easier to ignore than a phone call, but it’s still kind of “in your face.” People are obsessed with checking their email many times a day, and they stress over keeping their inboxes clean.

So at some point, many blog readers will stop subscribing to blogs via email, and will start subscribing via RSS instead. This is a big step up from email subscriptions, because it keeps all your blogs in one place, and you only have to check your blog feeds when you want to read them (no cluttered inbox).

But from the point of view of the blogger, what’s the downside of having people subscribe via RSS? Your posts no longer stand out. They’re lost in a sea of posts from other blogs. When people get around to reading their blogs, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to read every single post. It’s bad enough that they might not see the posts you’ve worked so hard on, but also, they might not see the product launches and affiliate promotions that you depend on for your blogging income.

But consider this. Let’s say you have a blog that gets traffic through commenting on other blogs, StumbleUpon, and so forth. And you create engaging and entertaining content for your readers, so they keep coming back for more. And then in addition to your blog, you also have an email list where people can sign up for more specialized information on a particular subtopic, and they can get a free report or video for signing up.

Not all, but some of your blog readers will sign up for your email list. They’ll receive emails that are not just repeats of the blog posts, but original valuable content. They’re more likely to read an email than a blog post, and they pay more attention (after all, the emails are addressed to them by name). They look forward to the emails even more than the blog posts. And so, when some of these emails are promoting a product, they’re much more likely to buy it. That’s what conversion blogging is all about.

I don’t have an email list and I don’t think I’m close to creating one. I don’t even have any idea what the topic would be. But it’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while, and if I continue to learn about conversion blogging, I’ll have the knowledge ready if and when I get an idea for an email list.

You can watch the Conversion Blogging video for free, and you don’t even have to opt in to anything. It’s 33 minutes and I really like the presentation. You see Yaro talking up in one corner while the rest of the video is showing his computer screen.

After you watch that video, you’re invited to watch a brand new video version of Yaro’s hugely popular Blog Profits Blueprint, which has now been downloaded over 40,000 times. It’s 55 minutes and free, but you have to opt in to his mailing list to see the video. But because it’s done with AWeber, you know you can always unsubscribe with no problems.

How many of you have mailing lists, and what has your experience been?

“Stumble Stampede” was my suggested name for Caroline Middlebrook’s course on StumbleUpon, the wildly popular social media service that’s responsible for the bulk of my traffic. And while I was too late in making my suggestion, I have to admit that she picked a much less cheesy name: Stumble Rush. (Update: Caroline renamed it as Traffic Rush, because StumbleUpon didn’t want it sounding too similar to their own name.)

Stumble Rush is a home study course in StumbleUpon consisting of 20 lessons and 20 videos. The 10 basic lessons are free, and the 10 advanced lessons are $47. I recently started the free lessons, and while I’m not planning to buy the advanced lessons at this time, that’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a great value for the right person.

In one of the early free lessons, Caroline makes the excellent point that unless your blog happens to be about internet marketing, many of your users probably don’t know what StumbleUpon is. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to give a basic introduction for those who have not yet dived into the wonderful world of StumbleUpon. If you have a blog, you need to know this.

If you’re already well-versed in StumbleUpon, feel free to jump to the very bottom and read my question about the right way to ask for social media votes. It’s a controversial topic, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.

What is social media?

Social media is a term encompassing many different types of collaborative systems for sharing content on the internet. Popular social media sites include StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

One of the most common reasons people use social media is to drive traffic to their blogs. Social media can easily deliver far more traffic than you would get naturally. For example, my blog has about 300 subscribers, but because my post 10 Reasons Japan Is Better Than America was submitted to StumbleUpon, it was viewed 28,620 times.

Out of all the social media sites, why use StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is extremely popular. If you ask someone for a vote on Mixx or Reddit, there’s a good chance they won’t even have accounts for those services. If you ask someone for a stumble, they’re very likely to be able to do it, unless they just don’t use social media at all.

StumbleUpon is fun and easy to use. There’s an incredibly broad range of categories, so you can submit pretty much anything, as opposed to Digg for example, which is supposed to be just tech and news. You also don’t need very many votes to get some significant traffic, again as opposed to Digg, where you either hit the front page or you don’t.

And perhaps the best reason of all is that StumbleUpon is my biggest traffic source! While most of these visitors come and go very quickly, you’ll eventually turn some of them into loyal readers.

How do you use StumbleUpon?

Go to the StumbleUpon site and sign up for a free account. You pick a username and tell it which topics you’re interested in. Then you can download the StumbleUpon toolbar, which works in either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

The toolbar appears at the top of your browser, though I keep mine hidden when I’m not using it (Ctrl+F11 shows and hides the toolbar). Out of all the toolbar buttons, there are three I use far more than the rest:

Stumble: This button redirects you to a web page that StumbleUpon thinks you’ll like, based on the topics you chose, the pages you’ve voted for, and the pages your friends have voted for.

Thumbs up: This tells StumbleUpon that you like the page (or photo, or video) you’re on, you’d like to vote for it, and you’d like to see more pages like it in the future. When someone asks you to stumble a post, they mean they want you to visit their post and then click this button.

There’s also a thumbs down button, but I rarely use it. The idea is that StumbleUpon will learn not to show you similar pages in the future, but I doubt it works well. If you thumb a post down, how is StumbleUpon supposed to know whether you dislike it because it’s too long, or because it contains profanity, or because you’ve already read something similar, or because you disagree with the author’s opinions, or for some other reason? Plus, I’d rather use StumbleUpon to make friends than enemies.

Review: This button looks like a speech balloon. It lets you see what other people are saying about the current post, and it lets you write your own review too. It also lets you see how many people have clicked the thumbs up or thumbs down button.

Stumbling a post

Stumbling a post means clicking the thumbs up button, but this can actually mean two different things. Normally when you see a post you like, you click the thumbs up button and your vote is recorded. Then you can write a review if you like.

But if you’re the first one to stumble a post, it says “You’ve Discovered a New Site…Please let us know about it.” You enter a short review and select the topic this post best fits in. Then you click “Submit This Site,” and the post is now in the StumbleUpon database. Now all future stumblers can just click thumbs up without having to do this extra work.

How do you get traffic from StumbleUpon?

Simple! When you write a post people want to stumble, they click the thumbs up button. This causes StumbleUpon to send more stumblers to your post. If they like it, they’ll click the thumbs up button, and this in turn brings even more traffic. More thumbs up equals more traffic, and it can really add up. The key is to get a good number of stumbles within the first day or so, as time is a big factor. It’s also best if you get stumbled by “good stumblers;” people who stumble a wide variety of quality content, instead of just stumbling all their friends’ posts.

OK, but how do you get people to give you a thumbs up?

First of all, you’ll get the best results when you write a post that is specifically optimized for StumbleUpon. For example, Cosmo-type headlines, list posts, resource posts, and great images will help you. I’m sure Caroline will go into much more detail in even the free Stumble Rush lessons.

There’s definitely an art to it. Sometimes when I’m reading or writing a post, I’ll think “This is just screaming to be stumbled.” For example, regarding the post I mentioned before, “10 Reasons Japan Is Better Than America,” some people accused me of deliberately choosing a title that was designed to get traffic. Well, yeah, that was the idea!

So writing a stumble-worthy post is the first part. The next part is getting it in front of people who will stumble it. If you’re lucky enough to have a huge readership for your blog, you can just post something and since a tiny percentage of your readers are bound to stumble it, your post will take off with no effort. But if you have a small or medium-sized blog, you might want to consider asking for help.

Asking for stumbles

And now we’re getting into a very controversial topic. Isn’t StumbleUpon supposed to be organic? Aren’t posts supposed to rise to the top on their own merit, instead of by people gaming the system? Ideally, yes. But in reality, a blog with 50,000 subscribers is going to trounce your blog with 50 subscribers no matter how good your posts are. Gaming the system in an ethical way puts you on a more even footing with blogs that would otherwise have an unfair advantage.

When I say “gaming the system,” I simply mean taking any action specifically intended to win stumbles. Some methods are ethical, and some are not. Asking your friend to stumble your post is ethical. Hacking the StumbleUpon database is not. Creating fake accounts and writing fake reviews is somewhere in between, but I’d say it falls on the unethical side. We’re just going to talk about ethical methods here.

It’s very easy to email someone and ask them to stumble your post. The problem is that it can easily become excessive. If you email someone you know well once in a while, that’s fine. If you email a stranger every time you write a post, it gets annoying very quickly. And if you email someone multiple times every time you post, don’t be surprised if they file for a restraining order!

I had to turn off shouts (request notifications) on Digg because I was starting to get multiple people sending shouts for the same post. And this might have been a post that I had already been emailed about, possibly more than once. When you send emails out to different groups, there might be some overlap, meaning duplicate requests will go to the same person, and this gets annoying. A nice way to manage stumble requests is to create a group specifically for this purpose. Assemble a team of willing participants, set up a Google group, and email the group when you have something you’d like to be stumbled.

But an even simpler way of getting stumbles is just to be a good stumbler yourself. When you see a post you think is special, give it a thumbs up and write a review. Do this enough, and people will start to recognize and appreciate you. They’ll be likely to remember your generosity when reading your posts, and they may return the favor by giving you a stumble.

Discover new sites

I think StumbleUpon’s tagline used to be “discover new sites.” Ironically, I had very little interest in using it for this purpose. I don’t understand why someone would sit there clicking the stumble button to be directed to sites that may or may not be any good, when it’s very easy to fill up your RSS reader with your handpicked favorites.

Two exceptions to this, though. One is that if you keep stumbling the same sites over and over, it severely drains your StumbleUpon power crystals. You can recharge them by using StumbleUpon the way it was intended, by stumbling a wide variety of quality content. And a really easy way to do this is to every once in a while, just spend a few minutes clicking the stumble button and giving a few thumbs up.

The other exception is that I sometimes like to set StumbleUpon to only show me pages in the Humor category, and just go through a bunch of those. It’s a very entertaining way to spend a few minutes.

Is there any downside to using StumbleUpon?

The main thing is that people can write negative reviews of your posts. If you include a stumble link in your post, it will encourage people to write a review, and if they didn’t like your post, watch out! Caroline Middlebrook had a stumbler say: “May africanized bees find your page and leave a thousand welts on it.” She also received comments that were much less polite.

However, even if you don’t put up a stumble link, anyone can still easily use the toolbar to write a review, so you really can’t protect yourself from people who want to say something mean. I see this as a small problem though, because while I got a lot of negative comments on my Japan post, I also got more traffic and AdSense revenue than from any other post. You can’t please everyone, and controversy sometimes sells.

Another downside is that you could find yourself spending way too much time stumbling your way across the blogosphere. The initial thrill wears off pretty quickly though, so I don’t think this is too big a risk once you get used to it.

How to get started

1. Sign up for a free StumbleUpon account and start playing around.

2. Sign up for Caroline Middlebrook’s free Stumble Rush lessons, and optionally buy the advanced lessons.

3. Start growing your network by adding me as a friend on StumbleUpon. While you’re at it, you can follow me on Twitter.

The right way to ask for social media votes

Those of you who have been using StumbleUpon or other social media services for a while probably have an opinion about asking for votes. Do you mind being asked to vote for something? Are you comfortable asking other people to vote for your stuff? How much is too much, and what’s the right way to ask? Share your thoughts in the comments.