credit: bookgrlHave you ever seen a three legged stool? Unlike a chair a three legged stool will never wobble – even if the floor is uneven. Mathematicians will explain that three points define a plane which is just a fancy way of saying that a three legged stool won’t wobble. As long as the legs are reasonably close to the same length a three legged stool will always be a good stable base.

Websites are built on a a three legged base of their own. If any leg is lacking, the site won’t have a stable base for building traffic. What are the three legs of your website stool?

Content

The saying “content is king”, has always been and always will be true. Good unique content in an accessible form is the first thing you need when building a website. Before you launch a site, create content. When you think you have enough, build more. If you’re launching a blog, consider writing a bunch of posts that you can save for the future when you’re focusing on some of those other legs.

What about a site that allows for user generated content – a Flickr or Twitter or MySpace? If you’re launching a site like this, the software is your contribution to the content. If at all possible you’ll want friends and others you can convince to be early adopters to build some content before you move on to the next step. And while I’m a big believer that content rules over design, the look and feel of your site is also part of what I call content in this context. Good looking is great if you can do it, but easy to use is absolutely necessary.

Promotion

“If you build it, they will come.” Trust me, it only applies in the movies. A beautiful, easy to use website with the greatest content in the world will draw no traffic if you don’t promote it. Promotion is a huge umbrella term that encompasses a bunch of tasks from optimizing your site for search engines, building back links, purchasing advertising and otherwise driving traffic to your site. There are so many sites out there that you really need to have a plan for promoting yours. Luckily there are thousands of sites and blogs that talk about how to promote your site. For bloggers, guest blogging is great. For almost any site participating in social bookmarking sites and getting your name out and about (commenting on blogs, posting on forums) are all great. Be careful though to always promote within the terms of the service your using – some social bookmarking sites allow you to promote your own content while on others it will get you shunned. And if you’re promoting via blog comments or forum posts, be sure that you’re contributing to the conversation and not just dropping your link.

Monetization

If you’ve built that great content and done your promotion you’ll start getting that traffic that all web developers crave. Unfortunately you can’t take unique visits to the bank and visitors won’t just hand you money either. If you’re going to make any money off of this venture you need to monetize your site. Again there are a lot of different ways to monetize your site and lots of resources out there to help you. For most people monetizing their site will come through some for of advertising – display ads through a network, affiliate offers, paid links or reviews are all forms of advertising. The key with monetizing your site is to find that point where you can extract as much as possible from your audience without driving them away. What’s available to you, what your visitors will tolerate and what will work best is very highly dependent on your individual site. The key is constant testing and measuring. And to make it more fun what works today will often not work tomorrow.

Don’t Sit on Your Stool!

If you’ve created the content, driven the traffic, and monetized your site you may think it’s time to sit back and enjoy yourself. It’s not. It’s time to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Create more content, do more promotion, monitor and optimize your monetization techniques. You’ll find that this is a repetitive loop that is never done. You’ll need to address whichever leg of your stool seems to be the shortest to ensure that your site retains that stable base that you’re building upon. Initially you may spend weeks or months at a time focusing on just one aspect but as time goes on you should be cycling through the various legs on a much shorter period. If your site is well established you may find that you need to focus on each of the legs more than once each week.

You won’t find many guarantees in entrepreneurship. Building that solid three legged base for your project doesn’t guarantee you’ll be raking in millions. The one guarantee I can give you however is that without that three legged base your project will fail.

See, there are many excellent how-tos, techniques, tricks, and schemes out there about how to earn your online keep. They tend to be practical advice and I think what we’re missing is a theoretical grounding. We need a backdrop that anchors all these articles into your mind giving you a map of sorts.

And this is exactly what I want to do now. I want to give you my mental model of thinking about online income generation and then show you how to use it.

The Basic Ways of Making Money

If you boil down the techniques for earning money online to their essentials, you can group them into 3 basic categories. You can make money by:

1. Selling products like Amazon.com.
2. Selling services, like eBay. Access to a restricted part of the site or an API is also a service.
3. Selling ad space, a straightforward trade of pixels for cash.

There is a fourth category, namely developing and selling domain names and websites. I will not discuss this here because I’m assuming that most readers of this blog will be interested in the top three.

The Classic Conversions Funnel

In the world of marketing, we think of the sales process as a funnel. Imagine a vertically-standing funnel with the wide side facing up and the narrow neck at the bottom. The line from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel is the sales process, the stages that someone goes through that ends up with them opening their wallet and giving you money.

The width of the funnel is the number of people that reach that stage. This way of thinking tells us that the number of people that reach the next stage is less than the number of people that enter it. This is called the bounce rate. As an example: if you have a 5-step checking out process on an ecommerce site, and 100 people reach the third step but only 80 people make it to the fourth step, then the bounce rate of the third step is 20%.

You can also calculate another number for the whole process: think how many people enter the process and how many actually end up paying up. This ratio is called the conversion rate. This is a key number to know for any of the ways of making money.

Calculating Conversion Rates

As it is a key measurement to know, calculating the conversion rate accurately is very important. You need to know two numbers: the number of users that enter your sales process and the number that finish it by paying you. The latter is usually (by no means always!) easy to figure out as you can track it with payments. The former though can be a tough one to call.

The key point here is to understand where your funnel starts. A term you’ll hear a lot in this context is the landing page, i.e., the very first page a visitor sees to start the sales process. In an ecommerce site, the funnel can start at the page a visitor enters the site, thus defining all pages as landing pages and that the whole traffic to be in the funnel. Another way is to look at product pages as the sole entry points into the funnel. The problem is what do you do with pages like top-10 lists? Clearly those browsing the list may end up buying something on the list but not always. So is the list the start of a sale?

Whatever you decide, make sure you always calculate the conversion rate in the same way. Always. If you change you method every time you will have no idea whether you’re improving your conversion rate or not.

Which brings me to the next point…

Track Everything

Web analytics is the art and science of understanding what visitors do on a website. Knowing how people behave on your site will allow you to experiment. Some things you can test:

1. Sales messages. Different people respond to different benefits. Telling someone that their iPod has 80GB may mean nothing to them but telling them it has enough space for thousands of songs might tell them all they need to know.
2. Landing pages. Again, different people respond to different pages and content. You can test the actual text, the layout, the colors, typography, punctuation, and pretty much anything.
3. Funnel steps. Each step in the sales process can be optimized and you should look at each one individually.

Of course there is a lot more. The key point here is this: if you can track, you can experiment. Find the best tracking tools you can and learn them!

Market Segmentation

Every market in the world can be segmented. A market segment is a group of people that have similar traits. Typical traits are money (some like free, some are willing to pay – that’s two segments right there). Another is age (10-15 year olds, 16-25 year olds, etc). Another could be body size like height (like when selling clothes). Gender is also an easy segmentation method. There are many more and each market will have different segments.

So how do you build a market segmentation model? First you think of why people would pay you for whatever you’re selling. Are they solving a problem? Where does this problem come from? Do different people respond to the same problem differently? How? Keep probing the minds of your buyers and you’ll see themes emerging. These themes, collectively, give you the market segments.

This is easier said than done, but extremely valuable. A market segmentation model is your map of the market.

How to Make Money

credit: TheFemGeekVery simple actually: You set up a sales process, a funnel, pour people in at the top and watch paying customers come out at the bottom. Shocking, isn’t it?

This should tell you the basic elements of how to make money on the web: get more people to go through the funnel, and optimize the funnel so that you lose as few people as possible at each step. The end result is upping the conversion rate. The other thing you should note is that different people will respond better different funnels. It is very likely (even guaranteed) that each market segment will need a funnel on its own.

How do you get people to pour at the top of the funnel? That’s another blog post, I’m afraid, but it’s pretty much any way you can get traffic. You’ll hear that different traffic sources are more “targeted” or more “qualified”. What that means is that these traffic sources will fit into a segment that’s more likely to follow through till the end of the funnel than other segments.

Setting Targets

credit: keepthebyteSo you have a funnel, a steady stream of people going in, a steady income, and all of this is being tracked. Now what? Experiment and set targets. Very methodically, tweak one thing at a time and watch your conversion rate. If it goes up, keep the change. If it goes down or stays the same, ignore the change.

The experimentation should have an aim or a goal. You could say that I want to increase my conversion rate from 1% to 2%. Or you could say that I want more people from Europe to buy from my site. Or you want to reduce the bounce rate of a particular step from 5% to 3%.

Anything really but keep a list of targets and aim to achieve them. If market segments are your battlefield map, goals are your objectives to win the battle.

Pulling it All Together

Now let’s think about the three ways of making money by thinking about the funnels of each one.

1. Selling a product: the funnel starts at the landing page, however defined, and however the people come to it. Conversions are when people buy the product. An interesting model is when you give out a free trial. Trials tend to have a higher conversion rate than not having a trial version.
2. Selling a service: exactly the same as selling a product.
3. Selling advertising: your website viewers are the people who enter the funnel and the people who exit and earn you money are the people who click the ads. This means that your ads’ click-through rate (CTR) is your conversion rate.

Conclusion

So what did you just read? What I hope you now have is a set of techniques and concepts to help you think about making money online. I also hope to have sown the seed of experimentation in you so you can try different things and improve on your status quo.

I’ll leave you with this thought: At the end of the day, reading posts like this will not earn you money. What you need is execution: you need to actually do. You need to try things, fail, succeed, improve, and start again. You need to set a plan, vow to stick to it, set some targets and chase them like your life depended on achieving them. Good luck.

Pierre recently launched Social Alerter. He writes a science blog, maintains a set of SEO tools and moderates at Cre8asite Forums. He has a PhD in Genetics from the University of Cambridge, UK, and works as an innovation consultant. The thinking detailed above has been influenced by me learning from lots of people at Cre8asite Forums, in particular Ammon Johns from freshegg, and Seth Godin. Everyone’s input is acknowledged with great thanks.

Most of the time blogs are run by experts in other fields; hobbyists sharing their love of their niche topic, office workers sharing their latest web finds, technicians discussing their favorite new gadgets, etc.. You write with heart, you write with passion, and you write what you know. This works!

However, blogging for a profit require elements that heart, passion, and knowledge alone won’t bring to your blog. To reach a broader audience you also need an extensive skill with language; a way to communicate beyond the narrowed view of your intimate knowledge. Yes, you love your topic, but sometimes this creates a short-sighted perspective that secludes your blog from average, non-expert readers.

Do you research? Do you stretch your knowledge? Do you answer questions? A professional writer or blogger will do these things. If you don’t, then you are already short changing your readers. Are your readers experts or do they ask questions? Do readers come to you for ideas and advice? Are they unfamiliar with the topic?

How do you reach these people? Some say they are the lost, they will never become your readers because they’re “outside your niche”, but the truth is, many interests are formed by readers who stumble into the writing or design of a blog that is outside their usual niche.

This is where hiring a professional writer, editor, or designer can contribute to the flair and professional feel of your blog. Readers can tell when a blogger is simply passionate about a topic and when they’re immersed in their subject. The air is different. Readers want to be entertained, to learn, and to experience. Creating the emotional involvement readers crave requires expert skills in language that passion for topic cannot substitute.

A hobbyist blogger can make income from their blogs but it is usually, a hobby-sized income. To take your blog to the next level you need to invest either your time, (learning to write, edit, and design), or your money. Hiring experts who can spice your blog for new readers and a broader audience can be an investment that skyrockets your blog’s value and income.

Is your blog worth the investment?

Many goals seem ambitious, like Ben’s primary goal for Blogging Experiment or my own primary goal for 2008. When goal setting, it is important to consider the impact of your aim. You will accomplish great things by striving for a higher bar than you would normally feel comfortable expecting of yourself.

An archer’s creed is to aim high, shoot low. The bow and arrow are scientifically designed. Archers learn that wind resistance, trajectory, weight, and obstacles all come into play when making an effective shot. Arrows are agile; a well aimed shot can slice through a minuscule target. Knowing you can hit a target, despite constant variations of uncontrollable elements, requires a degree of skill and faith.

Skill and faith are required for anything you set out to accomplish. There will always be uncontrollable elements. Resistance, obstacles, and misguided trajectories can add to the weight of every step. You must aim high no matter how low you wish to shoot. You are more likely to hit a $2000 a month goal, if you stretch yourself aiming for $3000 or $4000.

Of course, setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea either. Learn to reward yourself for ALL accomplishments, be they large or small. If you aimed for $4000 but fell short at $2000 you have still accomplished a remarkable success.

Examine each aspect of your progress. Search out ways to improve your progress. Spending time evaluating your successes and failures allows you to learn from your mistakes, to grow from every experience, and to create greater success and more ambitious goals in the months to come.

These early days of March are a great time to evaluate your progress through January and February this year. How have you succeeded? What have you accomplished? Have you achieved goals you have set for yourself? Where have you allowed yourself to leap small hurdles when you may have accomplished more by aiming high?

What are your goals for the coming months? Are they ambitious?

Create new goals for yourself today! Aim High; Shoot Low!

Ben is recharging his batteries so this is a guest post from Bill over at The Blog Entrepreneur. If you like what you read here then you can find more on his blog.

You’ve heard of Tiger Woods right….cultural icon, greatest golfer to ever live, supermodel wife, millionaire; all that stuff, right? Of course you have, but have you heard of Jim Smith? Chances are No. He’s the guy who quit golfing after the first dozen golf balls ended up in the drink because he couldn’t hit the ball straight.

How about Bill Gates, everyone has heard of him…..cultural icon, richest man alive, supermodel wife…..you get the idea. Well then how about Joe Thomson? Joe was a nerdy kid who liked to play with computers too, but he got frustrated easily when things didn’t go just right and decided to take up gardening instead.

See a pattern here?

Quitting is Easy

If you’ve been blogging for very long then you probably have already figured out that it’s hard work. That nonsense about working a few hours a day and making thousands of dollars is a load of crap foisted on you by the latest wannabe internet marketer who stumbled out of the Warrior Forum.

You have probably even considered quitting and taking up some other hobby like Joe Thomson or Jim Smith; in fact, you might have already quit the last project you started.

You’re not alone. Quitting is easy. It makes all the frustration go away. You don’t have to be Tiger Woods to quit, it’s much easier to be Joe Thomson or Bob Smith or Jill Nobody. That’s easy and anyone can do it. It takes no talent, no skill, no training and you can get very, very good at it in a very short period of time.

Quitting doesn’t seem like it has a whole lot of consequences but what if? If you were to quit tomorrow, what could you have become? Wouldn’t you always wonder what could have been, what might have been? One more week, one more month….maybe a Front Page Digg and you could be on your way to blog stardom.

What if you stuck to it?

Quitting might be easy but quitters will never enjoy the thrill of reaching a new goal, of raising the bar just a bit higher, of that warm satisfied feeling of getting the job done. It’s a crying shame but for every blogger who quits, another one is waiting there to take their place. At the end of December 2007, Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs, do you think anyone will miss yours?

So if quitting makes you happy, get on with it. Turn off the lights, lock the door and quit polluting the blogosphere with your recycled posts and half hearted efforts so the rest of us can make it happen. If you don’t want to be here then maybe you shouldn’t be.

With over 112 million blogs, we won’t miss you….or will we? Don’t leave just yet.

The Lessons of History

Their is a popular saying that goes something like “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I have always been an avid history buff and I enjoy trying to decipher the lessons that history can teach us. I got to thinking what life would be like if some of the truly great people from the past, quit….BEFORE they became great.

What if they decided to throw in the towel right before they hit it big, right before they achieved success? What would the world be like without the greats of the past?

History’s Teachers

Ben Franklin – Where would be without the creator of electricity? What if Ben Franklin quit and just decided to fly a kite for the fun of it? I am sure those long nights experimenting were difficult, I am sure it was discouraging to fail occasionally. But quitting was not an option for someone who destined to succeed, destined to make a mark. Life without electricity? I can’t even live without cable let alone electricity.

Paul Revere – Really ANY of our founding fathers. What would our country be like today if not for George Washington, John Hancock, Paul Revere? Would we be sipping tea everyday at 4pm? Could we still be loyal subjects of the Queen if not for the perseverance of our founding fathers? Quitting would have been easy for them, but fortunately for us they did not.

Winston Churchill – When the Germans marched through Europe bent on invading England, one pillar of strength stood firm against the impending forces. Winston Churchill was a symbol of strength and courage for his countrymen to follow. The English stood firm against the Germans despite incredible odds. They could have folded but the strength of Winston Churchill would not allow it. He willed them to stand firm and stay strong. What would the world look like today if Churchill had folded up the tent and evacuated to the USA?

Abraham Lincoln - Abraham Lincoln is either revered as the savior of this country or the destroyer depending on whether you are north or south of the Mason Dixon line. Love him or hate him, it took a man of very strong convictions to take the path that he chose. In his mind he firmly believed that to save his country he needed to quell the rebellion in the South. He could have quit, he could have stopped and taken the easy way out…but what would our country be today?

Martin Luther King – The father of the civil rights movement in this country surely ran into adversity during his lifetime. Wouldn’t it have been easier if he had just stayed the path, looked the other way? Sure he could have done that and maybe he’d even be alive today. But it wasn’t how he was made. He couldn’t deal with failure and couldn’t dismiss his convictions. He wanted it too badly.

Success is a Choice

The examples I gave above are meant to be a bit extreme. I want you to think about where the world would be without them. Would we be living in the dark ages? English subjects? German citizens? Exactly the same as it is today?

I would like to think that someone else would have filled the void, that another person of great character would have stepped up to the plate to get it done. Maybe I am naive about that but there is one thing that I am certain of and that is that there won’t be any tears shed if you do decide to quit today. Someone will step in to take your place before the day is out.

Harsh? Maybe, but life is harsh.

As harsh as it may sound you should know that if you have thought of throwing in the towel then you have a lot of company. I don’t think there is a blogger alive that wouldn’t admit that they have questioned themselves at one time or another and hadn’t considered quitting. If they haven’t, then either they haven’t been doing it very long or they are delusional.

Whether you stick to it or not is a decision that only you can make for yourself, but you can take comfort in knowing that doubt and frustration are perfectly normal when building your blog from scratch. You will often question why you even bother, but if you are truly meant to be an A-list blogger then you need to find the will to push through the doubt and into success.

Options

In lieu of quitting you may consider some of the options below.

• You Deserve a Break Today – Take a short break from blogging. The world won’t end if you take a week or so off from posting. Just make sure you prepare yourself to get back to regular posting. It can be very alluring to spend your nights goofing off instead of crafting the next masterpiece.

• Guest Posters – Recruit some guest posters who are willing to contribute to your site and decrease your stress level. Be aware that this works best when you both give and receive. The better your network of bloggers then the better for all of you. Some people don’t see this but it’s obvious to those who “get it.”

• Recharge – Attend a conference, take some time to strategize, sharpen your saw…whatever you want to call it but invest in yourself. Even pro baseball players go to Spring Training every year even though they are pros. They invest in themselves to make themselves even better than they were last season.

• Draft Day – In lieu of any of the above you might consider just saving up a series of draft posts and set them to autopost while you are away. Your readers don’t necessarily have to even know you are gone although it will be difficult to partake in the comments section. This may not be the best option as if you need a break and are considering quitting, your writing may not be as good as it could be right now. Guest posting might be the better option but it’s your call.

The Next A-Lister

Before you turn the lights out…make sure you ask yourself what if? What if I were to keep going? What if I am a few months away from being the next ProBlogger?

What if I were one stumble campaign away from becoming the next evil gajillionaire? What if I took a week off instead of quitting and then came back better, faster, stronger than I was before?

All of these questions have been asked before, but all of them can only be answered by one person and that is you. I won’t guarantee very many things in life but one thing that is guaranteed is that if you quit today you are ASSURED of failure. You have zero chance of succeeding if you aren’t in the game. 100% guaranteed.

To quote the Mountain Dew commercials….Do you Have it In You?

Note from Ben: Thanks Bill for the great guest post. For any of you that haven’t yet clicked through to his site, please do. He has great content and also has one of the best examples of just what can be done using the Blogging Experiment Theme. Also, be sure to check in on Monday to see whether or not I reached my goal of $2,500 in income for the month of February!

As a fan of Ben’s posts about TV’s lessons on blogging (and a subscriber to the Blogging Experiment RSS feed), I suggested in the comments for The Office: Lessons on Blogging that Ben tackle the series “Prison Break” next. His previous entries on “Heroes” and “The Sopranos” were entertaining and offered a different angle on blogging-about-blogging. Unfortunately Ben doesn’t watch “Prison Break” and since I have a slight obsession with the show, I offered to take a shot at the post myself.

Careful Planning is Necessary

The first season of “Prison Break” was about former-engineer turned prison-inmate Michael Scofield and his elaborate plan to break his innocent brother out of jail. Scofield is an extremely smart man, and he knew that getting thrown in prison with the purpose of breaking out wasn’t going to be as simple as holding up a liquor store. He researched criminal charges and punishments to plan out what crime would get him placed in the same prison as his brother. The bank robbery he attempted while firing his weapon into the air landed him in Fox River State Penitentiary with his brother. In the planning stages, he acquired the blueprints to the prison and designed an elaborate tattoo with the blueprints hidden in the artwork. Every intricate detail in his full upper body tattoo was a clue to their escape. Street names, names of tools he would need, even a guide to the weak points in a wall were all hidden in the devils and religious images in his tattoo. Rather than jumping into what could be the most dangerous task of his life blindly, his every move was carefully planned out and backed up with research.

Just like Michael planned to break out of prison, you should be making plans for your blog. The blogging world is such an instant gratification kind of place that a lot of bloggers forget to make future plans for their blog. A blog strategy can be extremely useful for those times when you’re hit with writer’s block or a nasty cold. It can also help you capitalize on search trends by being prepared for major holidays and events. As a movie blogger, I plan out my calendar with the major awards shows, plus big movie-related holidays – horror for Halloween, romantic comedies for Valentine’s Day, and Christmas favorites for December. Preparing posts in advance and planning out a blogging calendar can make your writing time more productive and your blog more successful.

Be Ready to Think on the Fly

In addition to being prepared and doing his research, Michael has had to be able to think on his feet. More often than not his escape plans have gone terribly awry. Even worse, his plans are usually ripped to shreds leaving him just moments to create a new plan or risk being discovered by the guards. His plan in Season One had the inmates escaping with the help of a broken pipe in the infirmary, but they had to start from scratch when they discover on the night of their escape that the broken pipe had been replaced. This season Michael planned to escape from his new prison at 3:13pm – the precise time the sun hit the guard tower, temporarily blocking the guards’ view of the prison wall. After creating a diversion (a challenge for a fight to the death between himself and Whistler, the inmate he’s escaping with), Michael climbed out a window and down a rope ladder. Of course the clouds rolled in at the precise moment the potential escapees desperately needed the sunlight and they had to cancel the plans, climb back up the rope ladder, and think of a good reason why the two of them shouldn’t be fighting to the death in front of all the other inmates.

While your blog decisions won’t lead to a fight to the death (at least, I hope not), you will have times when you’ll have to react quickly. While a blogging calendar can help you be prepared for the future, you also have to be nimble enough to write about issues and events that are happening right now. Jumping on top of an event or news item in your niche can drive some serious search traffic to your blog. When we live-blogged an event surrounding the viral marketing for the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight, we had an influx of visitors who were searching for the answers to the internet scavenger hunt. If the event is big enough, the traffic can linger. That post has been one of our top ten posts for three months. One way to truly capitalize on these situations is to have a link to your RSS feed at the end of every post, or at least prominently featured on your blog’s home page. New visitors can turn into subscribers with just one click.

Network with a Purpose

Scofield knew he had to connect with the right people in order for his escape plan to work. He had to trust his cell mate Sucre in order to escape through a hole behind the toilet. He needed to get close to prison physician Dr. Tancredi to have access to the infirmary window that was closest to the escape route. Finally he had to convince the warden to trust him so that he would have an opportunity to launch the escape. He also had to avoid or carefully manage the people who could make trouble for him – Abruzzi the mafia man, T-Bag the untrustworthy sex offender (as if that’s not an understatement), and Haywire the schizophrenic. Throughout the seasons the people who Michael could trust and the people he had to be careful around changed considerably, but the concept remains the same. When Michael interacted with people in prison, he had a specific purpose for the relationship. Whether that purpose was friendship and teamwork or careful avoidance depended on what would best benefit his escape plan.

The same holds true for the blog world. You comment on other blogs, email other bloggers in your niche, and participate in social networking sites, but do you ever think about why you do these things? You should have a purpose for every blog interaction you conduct. Your comments on other blogs should not only add value to the conversation, but they should be a tiny representation of you and your blog. You have a chance to say something – not just leave a comment, but truly say something – every time you comment on other blogs. Don’t waste it and become one of those people to avoid – no one likes an abusive commenter or a fellow blogger that simply copies others’ content. Similarly, when connecting with other bloggers directly, don’t waste their time. If Michael Scofield had wasted John Abruzzi’s time, he might have lost his life instead of just his pinky toe. You need to bring something to the relationship, not just further your own agenda. For tips on networking with other bloggers, check out ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s series of posts on blogging relationships and Ben’s posts on striking up a conversation and not wasting your networking time.

Nothing is Impossible

After watching three seasons of “Prison Break,” you’ll know that you can plan a jail escape through a series of elaborate tattoos; you can fake the murder of the vice president’s brother; and you’ll know it’s possible to have a show called “Prison Break” continue after the characters have already broken out of prison, escaped from the United States, and been thrown back into prison in Panama. Like “Heroes,” “Prison Break” seems to be the most interesting when it’s at its most unbelievable points. Impossible escapes become possible with just a metal screw, some tattoos, and a little help from new friends.

The same goes for your blog. Nothing is impossible. It sounds cheesy and self-help-like to say, but there really is nothing you can’t accomplish if you work at it. Ben is a perfect example – he set out to earn a full-time income in 365 days of blogging. Last month he made almost $600 with 245 days left. You have to work on your blogging before anything will happen, but things will happen. You don’t need an elaborate tattoo and you certainly don’t have to rob a bank, but you do have to write – a lot. Write until you think you can’t write anymore, and then leave some comments on another blog. And then write some more.

I’d like to thank the Blogging Experiment readers for sharing in my “Prison Break” obsession, and I’d like to thank Ben for the opportunity to write a guest post for one of my favorite blog post series. If you enjoyed this post, come share my other obsessions (like Kate Beckinsale, movie soundtracks, and casting rumors) over at MovieSnobs.net.

This cartoon was submitted by Pops of ToonRefugee.com (AKA my old man). His “toon blog” covers topics ranging from sports, politics, SEO, and even everybody’s favorite panda killer, John Chow. Make sure you subscribe to his feed so you don’t miss out on any of his future cartoons.

Having the right posting schedule can really give you the edge over your competitors and will especially benefit you. Having a bad posting schedule will only hinder your progress towards the success of your blog, having a good one will only accelerate it.

In this post I’m going to be discussing how to keep the perfect posting schedule.

Publish Pillar Articles on Weekdays

The time you spend on writing pillar articles deserves to be awarded. You can justify the time spent by publishing your top posts on weekdays. I can almost certainly guarantee you that the days on which you receive the most amount of traffic will be weekdays. So obviously, it’ll be better for you if you publish those pillar posts on weekdays. The benefit is that almost all of your regular readers and visitors will see it.

Not a Rule of Thumb

However, this is not a rule of thumb. You must have noticed that these days people tend to post those speedlinking posts on Sundays. Almost 90% of the blogosphere is filled with these types of posts on the weekends. Here’s where you have an opportunity to stand out. Why not stand out from the crowd by publishing a great article on a Sunday? If you do so, your content will have a higher chance to be seen by people. The drawback is that a lesser amount of people will see it.

So, what to do?

I’d say you mostly stick to publishing your best posts on weekdays. However, once in a month or so post a pillar article on weekends. See how posting pillars on weekends does for you; look at your stats. If you see that your best articles receive more coverage on weekends rather than on weekdays, then good for you, you can publish pillar posts on weekends. However, if it doesn’t work out, then revert back to posting your great stuff on weekdays. In the end you’ll have to experiment a little to achieve the perfect posting schedule.

Don’t Post SpeedLinking and Off Topic Posts on Weekdays!

This is one of the most common mistakes committed by bloggers. Many bloggers tend to post those speedlinking type and off topic posts on weekdays. This is perhaps the worst blunder you can commit as a blogger!

Unless it’s absolute breaking news, don’t publish off topic stuff on weekdays. Keep them for weekends. In regard to this issue, one advice to Ben though: try to post your reader sessions on Sundays, unless someone asked a pretty good question and the response would be very thorough. Here’s one post which Ben could’ve published on a Sunday instead:

What Time of the Day is the Best?

Enough talk about on which day you should publish posts. Let’s talk about at what time should you publish them.

The time of the day you publish your post matters as much as the day of the week you publish it. Here’s an absolute fact: post at what would be the ideal time for your visitor, not what would be the best suited time for you. You should embed that into your brain forever!

First try to determine where the majority of your readers come from. In almost all cases, the major bulk of a blog’s visitors come from the US. If this is true for you then either choose ET (Eastern Time) or CT (Central Time) and blog according to those times. This is where the Time Stamp feature is especially useful. I’m sure you all know Time Stamp, if you don’t then Ben will be glad to tell you.

Conclusion

Your posting schedule doesn’t need to be a hindrance. Follow what I’ve laid out above and I’m sure you will be able to achieve much more by having a near-perfect posting schedule.

What do you think?

Do you follow any of the above? If so, how has it helped you? Do you agree with me that posting schedule can be one of those things that help you in achieving more? I’d love to hear your views…

This post was guest blogged by Ruchir of TechnoMoney. He’s only in 10^th Grade but at his blog TechnoMoney he gives you tips about blogging, ways to make money online, ways to save money and anything related. Occasionally, you’ll also find him posting about computers and news about technology and the internet in general.

Blogging means different things to different people. For some it is is merely for entertainment, for others it is purely a business venture, but for most people (including me) blogging is about sharing your ‘expertise’ with others, meeting new people, and building relationships. With that in mind, here are what you will find to be quite straightforward steps you can follow to strike a conversation today and build a relationship tomorrow.

1. The Gift of Linking

The easiest way to get someone’s attention is to send them a link. A link to someone else’s content right away signals not only that you are paying attention to what they have to say but also that you respect their opinion enough to either respond to it (doesn’t matter if your response is positive or negative) or incorporate it into your content as evidence or background information.

Furthermore, whenever someone links to you, make it a point to acknowledge the link, thank the person, and keep in touch.

2. Joining the Discussion

Want to make yourself known and your presence felt? Why not participate in the discussions started by others that you are interested in (i.e. topics that are relevant to you/your niche)? Go to the sites you enjoy and have your say. Don’t forget to enter your site’s url in the comment information field so when people want to know who you are, they can head on over to your site and thank you or reciprocate.

Whenever someone comments on your content, respond the that person on the blog but also try to communicate off the blog (via email or instant messaging).

3. Get in Touch

We are all mortals and we all have to start somewhere. So what if Darren Rowse has 50,000 rss subscribers and you just have 50? Send him an email, talk to him, show your interest and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

4. Go Visiting

Don’t limit yourself to reading and writing, or even linking and commenting. Make the extra effort and offer to guest write on other blogs. Bloggers are always looking for fresh insight and new opinions, without which even the best blogs can become stale.

5. Welcome Guests

Just as important as offering to write on other people’s sites is inviting them to write on yours. Not only will your readers appreciate the change but the guest writers will appreciate the opportunity to connect with your audience.

6. Offer a Helping Hand

The easiest way to build a rapport with someone? Offer a helping hand. This can be in the form of any of the things mentioned above or something else that you’re good at. For me, it was often helping people reach the social media audience with their content.

There you have it. If you’re still wondering how Ben and I got to know each other and how I ended up writing for this and other blogs. Read the steps again and you’ll find that I just followed the steps you’ve just read.

As he mentioned, Muhammad Saleem has written for several high profile blogs and is, in my opinion, an authority on guest blogging and networking. He and also maintains his own blog, muhammadsaleem.com, which is a fast growing authority on social media. Make sure you’re subscribed.