Thrilling Heroics » Problogger

Darren Rowse Shares How He Built His Ultra-Brand Through Blogging

Cody McKibben — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:50:26 +0000

In a recent interview with Dan Schawbel at the Personal Branding Blog, Darren Rowse, the original Pro Blogger and co-author with Chris Garrett of the new book ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to A Six-Figure Income, talks about how he uses blogs and social media to connect with his audience and build a globally-recognized brand:

“I see my blogging as one important component in my overall personal brand. For me blogging is definitely a foundational part of my brand but also important are other elements such as social media presence (using tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.), the book (which opens up new opportunities offline), speaking at conferences, etc.

Blogging is a fantastic tool in this mix because it enables you to build trust and develop an ongoing relationship with those who read it. I liken it to real life relationships – when you meet up with someone every day for a few years and they catch glimpses of different sides of you over that time a deep relationship can open up—this is the opportunity that blogging affords people.”

Darren says that direct revenue from your blog is just one small part of the benefits of writing online. A more indirect but profitable benefit of branding yourself with a blog is establishing yourself as an expert, which opens the potential for speaking, landing a book deal, and selling related services or products. Read the rest of Dan Schawbel’s interview with Darren Rowse here: Darren Rowse Interview: Brand Yourself Like a ProBlogger

Need help setting up a blog of your own? Check out my business blog consulting & WordPress development services available at ThrillingDesign.com

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Darren Rowse Shares How He Built His Ultra-Brand Through Blogging

Announcing an Awesome New Community Search Tool for the Blogosphere!

Cody McKibben — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:51:36 +0000

Ever since I discovered Google Custom Search, I’ve been using it to pinpoint the exact kind of awesome articles, tips and tricks I’m looking for much quicker, and to increase my efficiency and decrease the time it takes me to find answers or write up blog posts.

Personally, I’m a big fan of productivity lists, how-to’s, and life hacks, so my custom search engine includes a lot of big name sites like Lifehacker, Zen Habits, Tim Ferriss’ 4HWW blog, and many more. Anytime I’m curious how to do something, like how to install a certain software application, how to improve my resume, or how to get the most out of a particular social networking site for instance, my custom-build search engine returns incredible results! And if you like to hyperlink to other resources and articles as additional support when you write new blog posts, this will serve as a fantastic tool for you just like it has for me.

I highly recommend Google’s Custom Search, and since I’ve already done the work and compiled a master list of over 50 of the web’s most credible and authoritative blogs, I’d also like to introduce my own Thrilling Blog Search engine as an open community tool for the Brazen Careerist network and the blogosphere at large. Try it out. Seriously! It provides some really cool results for all sorts of subjects from personal development to social media to finance. Link to the search engine page here and try a search for “resume,” “savings account,” or “LinkedIn” for example:

If you’d like to utilize this tool for your own blogging workflow, feel free to bookmark my directory/links page, or you can easily add it to your iGoogle homepage or your own website. Be aware that this search engine already crawls several of the most trusted blogs on the internet, but I will be adding to the sites in the future. If you’d like to contribute to the project or suggest a site for addition, you can get in touch with me but be aware there will be a strict review process. In other words, if you email me with a suggestion, you better be ready to pitch your site and why the community will benefit from it!

Here are the top-notch blogs/bloggers that are already a part of this fun customized blog community search tool:

Personal Growth/Productivity

Career/Personal Branding

Lifestyle Design/Travel

Generation-Y Issues

Personal Finance

Freelancing/Entrepreneurship

Social Media/Technology

Blogging/WordPress

Remember, this is a community project, so please feel free to get involved!

» Add a search widget to your Google homepage.

» Add the custom Thrilling Blog Search to your own site.

» Get in touch if you’ve got a suggested site that will benefit other bloggers and readers.

» Blog about this or tell your friends about the Thrilling Blog Search engine!

These are just the first round of additions to the Thrilling Blog Search community search tool. As I come across more great sites, I’ll be updating the list and the search engine tool. You can view several of my favorite blogs and suggested resources, as well as my custom Thrilling Blog Search tool on my Links Page here.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Announcing an Awesome New Community Search Tool for the Blogosphere!

Learn How to Build Membership Sites That Sell! Get Involved in Brian Clark’s New Course While It’s Still Dirt Cheap

Cody McKibben — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:02:05 +0000

Update: The guys just sent out a message that the program has been filled to capacity a day and a half early! So disregard this post. If you’re interested in this awesome training course, you’ll have to wait until early 2009 when they open their doors to new members again, with more, updated content. I’ll keep you updated.

Brian Clark, the successful writer behind Copyblogger (with over 40K subscribers!), along with Tony Clark of Success From the Nest, have been running a fantastic training program for online marketers and content producers for the last several months. Many of the world’s top bloggers, from Australian Problogger Darren Rowse to Maki of DoshDosh have been raving about the Teaching Sells program ever since it started up in October 2007, calling it the best program for kick-starting your online content marketing and creating awesome paid-content membership sites.

Teaching Sells is a multiple-course educational program that encourages internet entrepreneurs like you and me to “Teach and Grow Rich.” Brian and Tony will walk you through all the specific strategies that online marketing gurus are using right now to make a fortune from setting up members-only multimedia learning environments online and sharing their expertise with others. If you’re a coach or consultant, this program is the perfect fit—and if you’re a blogger or online publisher, these guys will show you how to leverage the authority and exposure you’ve built with your online presence and funnel it into paid-content and create additional revenue streams for your online business.

Click here to learn more about and enroll in the Teaching Sells program.

Teaching Sells has nearly 1000 Charter members already and they will be closing their doors to new members Thursday night, July 31, so I finally bit the bullet and joined the program. I’ve worked through the first course and the program looks really well put together—the subscription cost is just $97/month, but it certainly looks well worth it. Access to the members’ area includes tons of great articles in easily-digestible chunks, audio and video files, interactive assignments, helpful user discussion boards, and even a library of valuable private label rights content that you can republish and repurpose to fit your needs.

The program currently includes over ten detailed courses (and more to come!):

How to Create Content That Sells
How to Effectively Market Membership Sites
How to Create Killer Multimedia Content with Quick and Easy Tools
Seven Profitable Business Models for Interactive Content Developers
Your Blueprint for Building Membership Sites with Open Source and Low-Cost Software
“Under the Radar” Marketing: Persuasive Educational Content That Sparks the Buying Process
Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites
Explosive Content: Delivering Your Message Payload with Multimedia Storytelling
The Winning Difference: Advanced Positioning and Creative Adaptation Strategies
Launch Strategies for Membership Sites and Training Programs
The “Entreproducer” Model for Online Business Success
Under the Radar Affiliate Marketing
Quick and Easy Content Strategies
How to Explode Profits with Seminars and Workshops

Teaching Sells even has a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not totally impressed with the material, and you can opt to discontinue your membership anytime you choose.

At the time of printing, there are currently 36 seats left, and when Teaching Sells re-opens its doors to new members several months down the line, the subscription cost will increase at least threefold as they continue to roll out new material. Just like I did though, you can still get in before they close on Thursday, and take advantage of all the new features and benefits they have planned at a much lower price. To learn more about the program and the curriculum, check out their free report first.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Learn How to Build Membership Sites That Sell! Get Involved in Brian Clark’s New Course While It’s Still Dirt Cheap

The 10 Best Books For WordPress Bloggers

Cody McKibben — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:49:18 +0000

If you need help with WordPress Hosting, Themes, Maintenance and Support, check out FreelanceWP to find answers and hire freelance WordPress designers & developers!

I’ve had a few great guidebooks on my shelf ever since I started fiddling around with blog templates years ago, but when Michelle Goodman recently asked me a few questions for ABCnews.com, it brought my attention to the fact that many of the resources I recommend are aimed at readers with more XHTML, CSS, and PHP experience. So I immediately mined through my bookmarks for the best books I had read or come across so far for the less technically-inclined. Here are ten of the best books for WordPress beginners, either recommended by Automattic themselves (developers of WordPress), or highly respected in the business blogging community, in no particular order:

Blogging For Dummies

In this super-easy introductory primer, Susannah Gardner & Shane Birley provide a guide to blogging for business owners and folks with a cause to promote. They teach you all the basics of the “blogosphere,” about the anatomy of a blog, how to stand out in the crowd, find your niche, attract readers, generate revenue from your blog, and much more.

WordPress For Dummies

Fellow WordPress evangelist Lisa Sabin-Wilson wrote the definitive beginner’s WordPress bible! She explores the differences between hosted accounts on WordPress.com, self-hosted WP blogs, and multi-user blogs, and examines all the basics of plugins, templates, moderating comments and spam, and troubleshooting common problems.

WordPress Complete

Another introductory look at WordPress, designed to get you up and running quickly with your very own blog. Looks at the main aspects of a blog—users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds—and how to manage them using the open-source WordPress software.

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble (whose blog has over 3.5 million readers!) discuss the benefits of blogging as a communications channel: they’re easily publishable, findable by search engines, social and viral in nature, syndicatable, and linkable!

Blogwild!: A Guide for Small Business Blogging

The original blog evangelist, Andy Wibbels, gives a history of blogging, compares the features of several blog software options, provides tutorials for creating and maintaining your own blog, and shares key tips for a successful business blog.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Some sources say Darren Rowse’s two blogs bring in over $20k per month! In this new publication, the Problogger founder teams up with Chris Garrett to look at how bloggers make money, the best monetization strategies, and optimizing your advertising.

Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress

Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little, and Jared W. Smith look at content management systems, blogs, and online forums, and the most popular open-source platforms that run them.

WordPress Theme Design

Tessa Blakeley Silver gives clear, step-by-step instructions and best practices for building your own blog templates for WordPress, including code markup, testing, debugging, and incorporating third-party plugins.

Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them

Bob Walsh takes a no-nonsense look at what blogs have to offer, and how to use them for job hunting, business branding, news gathering, and more.

Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers

Michael A. Banks interviews thirty of the most influential and successful bloggers, who write about everything from business trends to parenting. Includes eye-opening insights from Dave Taylor, Chris Anderson, Gina Trapani, Frank Warren, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and many others.

Remember, if you need help with your WordPress Hosting, Themes, Maintenance and Support, check out FreelanceWP to find answers, and hire freelance WordPress designers & developers!

Happy reading!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The 10 Best Books For WordPress Bloggers

9 Helpful Lessons To Help You Succeed As a New Blogger

Cody McKibben — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 08:59:39 +0000

Sudeep D’Souza wrote a useful little post recently at ProBlogger that details some lessons he’s learned that will help bloggers get their start on the right foot. The list of nine tips includes many practical pointers, but I also really appreciate when he says Expect to Ride an Emotional Roller Coaster and Research, Read, Reflect:

Every post is a brand new post. Don’t be surprised that you would have to regularly research on your topic, as there is always something new out there. Read what others have to say and reflect. It involves a lot of hard work, patience, persistence to read content, assimilate and formulate your own content. At times, you should be ready to dig deep within your self.

I know only one or two very successful bloggers who claim they can get into a flow state and crank out posts in 10 to 20 minutes, however in my experience blogging since 2006, it often takes me two to three hours to write good content for a moderately-sized post. This is why I’ve struggled to continue writing at a consistent rate as I’ve gone through employment changes, started up my own freelance business, and moved. Blogging is a big commitment, so be sure to account for that when you make the jump. Click through to learn nine helpful lessons from some of Sudeep’s mistakes!

[source: 9 Tips to Start Blogging Successfully]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 9 Helpful Lessons To Help You Succeed As a New Blogger

Filtering Through the Static: My Media Consumption Habits

Cody McKibben — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:45:14 +0000

I’ve put together a primer on my media and entertainment consumption as part of the Media Diet internet meme. It’s a big post, but I highly recommend each and every one of the useful links contained here, and if you take just five minutes to read through this, I’ve included a few little gems on how I handle information overload. Since it’s such a link-intensive article, I’ve set all the hyperlinks to automatically open in new windows for you.

Bob Glaza (One Reader At a Time) tagged me last week for the Media Diet meme, a discussion that’s been propagating across the web since last year about our media consumption habits, to share with others how we get our information. I tracked this particular thread as far back as James Gordon-Macintosh and a few others at Seventy Seven PR, but I know that Jeremiah Owyang was also talking about it months earlier.

Everyone’s talking about information overload these days, so I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to share both 1) some of my personal interests, but also 2) how I filter through the vast amount of knowledge and media that’s available to us these days through the blogosphere and all the mainstream entertainment and news channels. Being a blogger, I like to follow a tremendous amount of information in this “Age of Conversation.” But, I like what Bob says: “Why NOT bite off more than you can chew?”

photo credit: drspam

Readables

When I was at my desk job, I used to read a few more newspapers and magazines (like the WSJ, Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and BusinessWeek), but I pretty much entirely get my fix through the Internets these days! To be honest, I rarely watch the news or read the papers, let alone visit the sites of any mainstream media directly these days because there’s just too much information, and much of it I find too hyped (fearmonger much?) and unbalanced for my tastes. I do highly enjoy Wired.com, and I’ll pick up a copy of FastCompany now and then. But I concentrate mostly on niches that directly affect me, like the personal development and web design blogs, and I tend to hear all the most important headlines through friends, family, and social media anyway (Robert Scoble was covering the China quakes on Twitter before the USGS reported them).

I get a few Google Alerts sent directly to my email account for certain search terms, so that I get a daily summary and know immediately when someone on the web is talking about me, one of my sites, my business, or a couple of key interests of mine, for instance.

I use Google Reader almost daily to sift through nearly 70 blog subscriptions (and a few other RSS streams like freelancer job feeds). That means there are usually about 250-350 new articles in there daily. How do I keep up with all these? Well, firstly Google Reader makes it easy to organize your feeds into different folders, or categories, so I’ve got them organized by priority and into groups like “friends,” “business opportunities,” “blogging tips,” “web design,” and “personal development.” Some of the feeds I check every day, but others are marked for just occasional perusal when I’ve got the time. I generally browse through the titles in List View to dwindle the number down to just those that seem applicable or interesting to me (I probably read about 10-20% of the updates that come through my RSS reader).

Some of my most frequent reads are blogs like Problogger, Web Worker Daily, Life Beyond Code, Freelance Switch, Real Social Dynamics, Zen Habits, and blogs from the Brazen Careerist network. One big secret: probably 50% of the useful knowledge I share with my friends and blog readers comes from Lifehacker and Tim Ferris’ Experiments in Lifestyle Design Blog (from the author of The 4-Hour Workweek).

Aside from what’s in my feed reader, I find that the social web does a great job of “filtering” the most important/useful/sometimes completely silly news for me, so when I’ve got the time to wander, I frequent aggregators like PopUrls and Guy Kawasaki‘s Alltop network. I’ve been using PopUrls as my landing page for the last several weeks to keep my finger on the pulse of the web, because it is customizable to your tastes (by source or category), and I like to track the most popular articles, recommended articles, and the top hits on del.icio.us, Digg, and StumbleUpon each day. Additionally, the extremely illustrious, bright folks I follow on Twitter are also a renewable resource for awesome content!

If you want to follow some of my favorites, please checkout my Google Shared Items page, or my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I do read a little bit “offline” too! I try to read about a book per month, but these mostly consist of business or personal development books. A few of my favorites have been The 4-Hour Workweek, Vagabonding, The BrandYou50, Now Discover Your Strengths, and Never Eat Alone. A nice, warm book is good for travel, or when I feel like pulling my eyes away from the computer screen for a bit and laying in my hammock outside. Right now I’m reading Blogging Heroes, which has interviews with 30 top bloggers from around the world. Stay tuned for a list of top-recommended books from me and my mentors soon.

Viewables

I do have cable at home, but the only show I’ve watched religiously for the last four years has been to tune in to “Lost” when I visit my folks each week (it’s been slow to answer all our burning questions, but it has the best character development of anything I’ve ever seen on the tube). I use TV more for the very occasional break from work—since I work from home, it’s fun to completely disengage for an hour or two and enjoy some pure entertainment once in a while. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only news/politics I can tolerate these days—faux news with plenty of comedy and satire mixed in for good measure (and Stephen Colbert has the biggest stones of anyone on television!). Otherwise, I’ll watch some pointless drivel on E! or MTV for an escape when the opportunity presents itself.

For trends in technology, entertainment, and design, I’ve enjoyed the inspiring TEDTalks for a long time, which you can subscribe to as video podcasts through iTunes.

And I do enjoy the occasional movie! (Looking forward to seeing Indiana Jones today!)

Audibles

Ah this is key: I pretty much have some sound going at all times! I listen to a tremendous amount of music. I live and breath music! (I even have a sleep playlist!) But I hate the radio (ever notice how ALL the stations go to ads at the same time!?), I always listen to iTunes at home and CDs in the car. I have a huge MP3 library, where a few of my favorites are Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, and Kings of Convenience, but I also listen to a few great online radio stations that you can stream directly into your iTunes, like Soma FM‘s Groove Salad and Beat Blender, Ibiza Sonica, and Ibiza Global Radio.

For good business and personal growth information, I highly recommend several podcasts: Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, Escape from Cubicle Nation, iinnovate, and the FallingFruit.tv podcasts. Listening to podcasts on the iPod is a great way to leverage your time if you’ve got a long commute on the bus/train, or a plane trip somewhere, or if you’re just doing chores around the house.

When I was at this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, I was motivated to buy the first three albums I’ve bought in probably years: Dark Side of the Moon, Kraftwerk’s live Minimum-Maximum, and Portishead’s first CD in a decade, Third. All highly recommended (you can sample below with my fancy new Amazon widget).

Other Resources

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of my interests, and about how I filter through the static. That’s it for me, but here are a few recent posts from other great writers in the blogosphere that might give you a few tips on dealing with information overload and productivity in this high-bandwidth media world we live in.

Chris Brogan, a huge voice in the blog community, shares his tips for processing information effectively and turning out awesome content in How I Do It
Maki shares how to get through too much information in too little time on DoshDosh with Managing Information Flow: How Prioritization Will Improve Your Work and Learning Efficiency
Leo does an Exclusive Interview with Stephen Covey on His Morning Routine, Blogs, Technology, GTD and The Secret at Zen Habits

I’m gonna tag Ryan Healy, Ronnie Nurss, Meg Roberts, Erik Folgate, Jamie Harrop, Susan Johnston, and Holly Hoffman, my fellow bloggers in the Gen-Y conversation, to participate in the Media Diet meme! Anyone else who’s got 2 cents to throw in can jump on board too!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Filtering Through the Static: My Media Consumption Habits