How Blogging Led to a Million Dollar Business

 Darren: Hey there friends and welcome to Episode 279 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com; a blog designed to help you to start and to grow a profitable blog. 

Today on the podcast, we have a special guest, Jeff Goins. I’ve been wanting to bring Jeff Goins to the podcast for a while now. Many of you know of Jeff, he has a fantastic blog that I do encourage you to check out. We’ll link to it in the show notes today. He writes great advice for people who write. If you want to become a better writer, particularly if you want to write a book, he has some great advice.

I wanted to get Jeff on the show today to talk a little bit about how his business or his blogging business has evolved over the years, because he started a number of years ago now. What he’s doing today is very different to the way he started. He really started in a personal record keeping kind of way with his blogging and he’s grown his brand, and his business around that. As he says in this interview, he’s actually had nine blogs over the years and his last one has really built the business. He’s got a lot of great advice today as we talk about this idea of evolving your blog. 

Today’s interview is actually a little bit different to any interview I’ve done before because I sent Jeff the questions via email and he recorded them in one hit. He kind of interviews himself, although the questions do come from me. It’s a new style of interview, it helps me to create this because we’re in different time zones. I really like what he’s put together, so this might be something we do in the future a little bit more because I think it’s very effective. In fact, Jeff says stuff during this interview that I really needed to hear on a personal level myself. I might talk a little bit about that at the end of this interview.

The other reason I’m bringing on Jeff today is that he’s speaking at our upcoming ProBlogger Event in Melbourne on the 9th and 10th of August. We still do have a small number of tickets available to that, particularly the mastermind which Jeff is going to be at for two full days. If you enjoy Jeff in this and you can get to Melbourne, Australia on the 9th and 10th of August, go to and you can see what we’re running there. You might just be sitting around the table with Jeff for a couple of days in August.

I’m going to hand over to Jeff now. At the end, I want to come back and just pull out some of the things that really impacted me in this interview of sorts. Here’s Jeff.

Jeff: Hello, this is Jeff Goins. I am answering some questions that Darren sent me. I think what I’ll do is I will read the question, and then share my answer. 

SEO Elite - Search Engine Optimization Revolution or Waste of Money?

The Internet used to be a small community with thousands, rather than millions of sites devoted to products and information. Ten years ago, all it took to have a successful Internet business was to have a presence. If you were there, you could be successful. Those days are gone, and the competition is now fierce with companies struggling to be found when people use the search engines to find them. A new science has been created to help with this dilemma - search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization, sometimes known as SEO, is the science of creating a Website in such a way that the major search engines, such as Google, or MSN, see it and "think" that your site is more about a particular topic than the sites run by your competitors. If your site is about widgets, you want to design your site in such a way that when someone types "widgets" into a search engine, your site comes up first. This is known as relevance, and search engine optimization specialists charge thousands of dollars to consult with Website owners to help them create "relevant" sites that the search engines will like.

Not surprisingly, software products have been developed that claim to help with the search engine optimization process with a lot more ease and a lot less money than the consultants charge. One of the most heavily promoted of these products is SEO Elite. This is a software program that claims to do a lot of things quickly and easily that will help you get a higher ranking in the search engines and, as a byproduct, get a lot more traffic to your site.

An important measure of a site's importance is the number of other sites that link to it. The more links, the more important the search engines think a site may be. Provided, that is, that the links are quality links. SEO Elite claims that it can find hundreds of quality link partners to your site in mere minutes, and that it has an easy to use interface that can allow most anyone to learn to use it in no time. Furthermore, SEO Elite says that it can actually let you see how your high ranking competitors have designed their sites so that you can copy their model and move up the search engine listings the same way they did.

Can SEO Elite do all of that? Yes, it can do all of that and more. Plus, it's easy to use. You don't have to be a "computer geek" to use it. The instructions are easy to understand and the product is easy to use. You actually can find other sites that are suitable link partners in minutes, and you can easily contact them using the software. Once you are done, you can use the program to see if these sites are still linking to you and you can monitor your progress as you make changes to your site and as it climbs up the search engine ladder.

read more / https://www.affiliatmarketing2015.blogspot.com

How To Attract Prospects To Your Business Magnetically

A magnet has the properties to attract certain metals, and a magnetic person has the qualities, talents, or skills to attract others in a magnetic like manner.

In the world of network marketing, how can someone acquire that type of personality, how can someone become a magnetic sponsor, and develop a large base of customers using magnetic like attributes?

Before I answer that question, read this quote:

"Nobody who bought a drill actually wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Therefore, if you want to sell drills, you should advertise information about making holes - NOT information about drills!" - Perry Marshall

There is a lot of meaning behing this quote, but in a few words it contains the secret to becoming a highly successfull magnetic sponsor.

Would you rather spend $200 bucks on a drill, or first get free or inexpensive information to learn how to operate that drill properly and effectively? If you are like me, I am sure you would first learn more about how you can make a good hole with this tool before making that kind of purchase.

Would you rather buy from a salesperson who insists that his/her drill is the best tool for what you want to do? I wouldn't. Because I don't like to be sold, and I don't like people to pitch their sales number on me.

Would you rather buy from a person who gave you free information or inexpensive information on how to properly operate, and get the best results from that tool, and who did not try to pitch a drill on you?

Again, if you are like me, you would buy from a person who first took the time to educate you on how to make that hole proper. In your mind, this person is an expert in his/her field, he/she knows what he/she is talking about. So you sell yourself on buying that drill from him/her.

This is what many network marketers keep doing, they keep pitching their opportunities on their family, friends, relatives, and get all hyped up on the net, on their ads, and every one they encounter. But guess what? People do not care about your business opportunity, what they care about is a solution to their problems. In other words, you did not buy a business opportunity (drill) because you wanted one. You wanted a solution (hole) for more free time to spend with your family, be your own boss, earn a living online, or get rich, etc..

New Google Blog Search is Great Marketing News for Business Podcasts, Blogs and RSS Feed Publishers

Google just introduced Blog Search in beta yesterday. This new search function allows for you to search the internet for Blogs, Podcasts and RSS feeds. You simply type in your keywords and it will show you results that have come from these sources.

The results they display are not showing any preferences to Blogs that are published on Blogger. We are seeing results for all Blogging platforms. Actually Google Blog Search is not just looking at Blogs. They are looking for any RSS feed, which might be from a Blog, Podcast, or any other XML feed. It appears that the search tool is pretty responsive and we are seeing results show up in a matter of hours after a new post is made to the RSS Blog and Podcast Feed. This is another way that you can create online visibility for your business.

The organic results are sorted by relevancy, but you have the option to sort them by date as well. This is especially nice if you want to locate the latest post for a fast breaking news topic and want to find it quickly in the blogosphere. The other thing that Google has done is to try to eliminate some of the "noise" and Spam of the blogosphere. They are looking at high quality Blogs and show them at the top of the page under what is called "Related Blogs". This is prime real estate for your Blog to be listed in.

As an example: Go to the new Google Blog search ( http://blogsearch.google.com ) and type in podcasting tips. The results that are shown at the top 2 of the 3 Related Blogs happen to be authored by me. You will also see over 1600 results and we have several additional results on the front page. This is because we are writing 6 quality Blogs and publishing quality content frequently to these Blogs. http://blog.podblaze.com

Google currently does not support a manual submission for your Blog feed. I think this is smart, since it keeps the unethical people out of the picture. If you are Blogging or Podcasting properly and following best practices; your feed will be found by Google. Make sure that you are also following best practices for pinging after your feed is updated. This will ensure that your feed is updated by Google.

It looks like Google started to index Blogs, Podcasts and RSS feeds in June of 2005. They are currently not showing posts that were made previous to this. They may change this in the future. Google has found a way to somewhat keep the black hat SEO and unethical Bloggers out of the results. We can all celebrate this; because this means quality and relevant results for searchers.

Podcasters should also take note that individual podcast shows are also being listed in the results. This is a great way for users find your podcasts and individual podcast shows, based upon specific topics and content.