There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

I found this very nifty free tool that will build simple graphics.

It is really easy to use and can be found at this url:

http://cooltext.com/

Have a play around with it, it could come in handy.

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Over the last month I have had to put a new team together for Alive Online.

One of my dilemmas was the choice between a university graduate with two degrees, IT and Arts, over a non graduate with 4 years industry experience. The graduate was very articulate and clever but he had no referees nor any IT work experience. The industry trained applicant had reasonable referees but no where near as much confidence as the graduate.

I have to say it was a tough choice. Both were the same age, willing to work under the same pay and working conditions as well as both being really nice young men.

So who did I pick.

Thanks to my friend who happened to be over for dinner! Her sister is a draftsperson and employs people on a regualr basis. Hands down every time she advocates for industry trained over graduates. I took this story as a sign and decided to follow her lead.

So far all is well. But of course it always takes a while to get to know new staff and how well they are going to work out.

The other thing I noticed through the process of putting on 3 new staff members was that there are definately not as many resumes coming through at the moment compared to say 2 years ago.

This still did not prevent the whole process taking about 3 weeks from initially advertising to having the new team in place. Thank Goodness!!

My husband Barnaby has just come home from Mal Emery’s 2 day Platinum seminar in Sydney and happened to be chatting to Pete Godfrey (copywriter). Pete mentioned to Barnaby to pass on to me, that he liked my blog. Now this blog has not even been launched and as you can see with all the great intentions to update it on a regular basis, like most people I have failed.

Last entry was in the middle of last year. Shame on me!! I was so enthusiastic when Barnaby set it up, as well.

So I was very surprised that someone had found it, and the reason he had found it was because he was searching for his own name on Google. My entry all about his seminar from last year came up in the search engines under his name. Very interesting!!

This of course has sparked my interest in keeping it going.

Since that seminar our business has been through a few changes. One of which is the launch of a brand new fully managed blog service. If you do want to leverage off the powerful search engine optimization capabilities of blogging software but know that no way in hell will you have the discipline to update it at least 2 to 3 times a week, contact our business on 1300 721 603.

I absolutely love this list planner. I can access it any time on the internet and I do not need to fuss around with paper lists and lists written in word.

Go to: http://www.zoho.com/

Click on Zoho Planner

Click on New User Sign up for Free

This is very easy to use.

Let me know if you would like a hand with it.

Have a look at this interview between myself and Kelvin Davis from Greymouse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s12p6jmsJQs

A few weeks back I was lucky enough to be at a 2 day seminar run by Pete Godfrey who is a master direct response copywriter. The main thing I got out of this event was how to go about  writing sales copy from scratch. He exposed all the special techniques and analysed how to approach  different pieces of copy with the right technique.

The other amazing thing about learning from Pete is a feeling of confidence from the knowledge. He is actually a practising copywriter that commands a huge price tag because he gets results for his clients.

There is so much to being a great copywriter, it is a huge endevour which requires a lot of research and understanding of the market to whom it is being directed. To get a response it is all about tapping into the emotions of the reader and really understanding what pushes their buttons.

Some of the books that Pete recommends getting are:

Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar

How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in the Selling by Frank bettger

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

Words that Sell and More Words that Sell by Richard Bayan

If you want to subscribe to his mailing list go to: www.emotionaladwritingletter.com

There was a lot to be learned from T Harv Ekker’s sales and marketing process for his company Peak Potentials. To sum up his sales process what he does is offer a free 4 day event on Your Money Blueprint. In order to get tickets to his event you must buy or be given his book which contains the free tickets.

The event that our family went to was at the Los Angeles convention centre. Along with 2000 other  people I was put through lots of different personal development processes aimed at facilitating a greater understanding around how I deal and relate to money. The content was valuable. Some new and some not so new. Like going back to basics and revisiting money management , inherited beliefs around money, blind spots around attitudes to money and lots of other good stuff. Along with Barnaby and Mia I  have since implemented the  budgeting system. What I have found by doing this is an increased discipline around money management and a feeling of more freedom and control.

One of the exercises was particularly clever and insightful designed to push buttons and reveal more hidden blind spots around my personal behavior and attitude to money. I will not spoil it just in case you do the seminar, but I highly recommend it, not matter what level you are at in your wealth creation.

It is at this 4 day free seminar that Peak Potentials markets the 16 or so other paid seminars that they  offer. The selling techniques from the stage could not be faulted and one of their seminars called Train the Trainer is even all about teaching people how to sell on mass from the stage.

On the same weekend another exact same seminar in Atlanta was being run which had over 1500 attendees being put through the same process and exposed to the same offers and special discounts for registering into one of the paid seminars.

They also offer generous incentives for people that want to promote their seminars with commissions given across all paid programs that guests register into.

At the end they give you a free 3 month program to follow in order to reinforce the learning.

They told us that they make between 1 and 4 million dollars at each event. Los Angeles being a particularly lucrative market for the company.