Almost always, a product that promises step by step system will sell much better than others which are merely informational or conceptual.

The reason is obvious. People are looking for a faster, predictable, and easy way to get to where they want from where they are right now. A blogging system, for instance, marketers usually describes the product as something people could do and immediately get traffic and money flowing in, as if blogging is a kind of magic.

People fall into such things repeatedly. I admit it is hard to avoid these products. They are shiny objects that grab attention more than whatever you are doing right now. Inside every one of us, we still hope that there is such system.

“What if this new system is different?” Sometimes I still find myself asking this question. The only way to stop this thought is to avoid reading any offer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the latest buzz or hottest product in the market. Most of the time, you will not miss a bit. And a better product will be there when you need it.

Back to the blogging system. A system, as I mentioned above, gives hope. It is seen as a faster, easier and predictable way to produce results.

If you think about it, it just isn’t what you want. Faster, easier and predictable are just that. They mean average. Predictable business is never outstanding.

That might be good enough for some newbies. What’s more important to them is speed. However, there is still nothing as a shortcut.

You can follow blogging advice to avoid mistakes. Learning from others are in a way the shortcut to your own success. But that doesn’t mean you will not find roadblocks. Otherwise all people in the world will be successful and happy right now.

What separates the winners from losers is persistence. Winners keep going. They see roadblocks as part of the process. Successful bloggers either go around the blocks, or go through them. Stopping never is an option.

I didn’t mean that blogging e-books are useless. Often they contain some good advices that will help you at some point in the process. However, nothing is instant nor easy, especially if you don’t have any experience at all.

Gradual learning is necessary. But it isn’t as hard as you think either.

The faster you learn about this, the better. Spend less time on looking for more offers. There are a lot of ways to build a business online. You don’t need to know everything to do it. Chances are, you already know enough.

So, stop seeking and start doing, will you?

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In unfamiliar territory, you need a map, a GPS and other tools to help you navigate… and a plan to get you there. It just makes sense, if you want to make any progress, you should have a plan.

Right. Blogger needs a plan. But what’s a plan?

Business schools might teach you how to create comprehensive business plan, with tens, or even hundreds of pages. Including as part of it is projection for the next one, three, five and ten years.

In an ideal world, you have all sorted out and planned on paper. Then you do the first step. And another. And another. Nothing gets in the way. Everything goes smoothly.

But unfortunately that never is the case in real life–in any market. The world is of massive uncertainty.

You may think your next blog post is going to spread like viral, but only a few links flow back to your blog… Even those links are from blogs run by content scrapers who steal your content from RSS feed.

Plugins may stop working all of a sudden because of server side upgrades. You may accidentally delete some files during the upgrade process of your WordPress–or any blog software you happen to use.

Sh*t happens. You can’t be right at all times.

Stop making plans. I mean, if you insist on predicting the growth of your blog for the next five or ten years, forget it.

Instead write down on a piece of paper what you’d like to achieve for the next 12 months. Include strategy and action plans. Every week, assess your improvement. Have a concrete plan for the next week and take massive actions.

Learn as you go. Ask any blogger, they will tell you how different the original plan was compared to which direction the blog is heading forward. You will learn new things and find new (and better) directions.

So just get started anyway.

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If you read the paper, listen to the news, watch television, you will soon believe that the world is indeed in trouble. But it’s probably not what you think it is.

You see, media have an agenda. They want more people to watch, listen and read. And we all know that, dramatization is one precious technique that never fails.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there never is such thing as recession. But depends on your perspective, that might be true.

It’s a fact that people are spending more carefully, both for business and personal matter. Economy may slow down, but only in certain markets. Think of it as a declining market.

Almost few months I still read about a new movie that hits a new box office record. Concerts that were sold long before the show. New cars hit the road. Some people are buying new houses. They also go for a vacation, even more often, than ever before.

I also happen to know people who buy all sorts of products and services related to building and growing online business.

The market shifts in recession. People have less buying power. That may be true. But one thing for sure is that they never stop spending too.

Recession means it is time to innovate. Web publishers and information marketers have the advantage because more people will demand information. They perform more due diligence before buying.

Change your strategy. Strengthen your marketing muscles.

Recession or not, that what you should do. Recession doesn’t always mean that every business must be declining. So if you stop listening to news tonight and instead work on your business, you may walk out claiming that recession didn’t affect you in any sense.

That would be a proud accomplishment in anyone’s book.

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I admit this is a bit unusual, but it is nevertheless important to think about.

In one way, you own your blog. I mean that it is your possession. You do whatever you like about it. That’s undeniable.

But at the same time, from the viewpoint of a site as a community, there are two facets to ponder.

I bet you have read it numerous times. Listen to your readers. Engage with them. They give feedback that is worth listening to. Sometimes.

Just because the minority of the readers say you must keep your blog post shorter doesn’t mean you have to. People would like to have good information. And if that information is relevant to them, they will read book-length post.

So, user feedback is not always good. You should learn how to filter a legitimate feedback representing your audience or complaints from occasional readers who are not even your target market.

Another thing is your personality. Don’t let other people’s opinions overshadow your voice. After all, that’s why people come to your blog and stay.

Let’s explore another facet of your blog. People in general are always looking for a site which they could “own.”

Let me elaborate. As you probably already know, web users are scanners. They don’t read. They try to absorb as much information as possible, like a sponge, from web pages. The only reason why this is so because they are looking for a place to stay.

They will keep scanning until they found it. I bet you have a site that you visit everyday. A blog perhaps, that you read regularly. One that you peruse word by word. Leave comments every time you have something to say.

You spend like hours and hours in a discussion board. You are part of the community. You feel like owning the site. When some strangers misbehave in the forum, many people help resolve it; notify the administrator or warn the offensive party.

They feel incomplete unless they spend at least half an hour per day on the site. When the site was unavailable for a day, the regulars miss it.

That’s what you want to build on your blog. Good content, rich community. If your readers want to own your blog, let them. How could they “own” it?

One obvious way is to welcome feedback. Let people report a bug, no matter how small it is. They want it to appear the way they like because they want to be part of it.

Put up a picture or two with comments from your readers. That builds a warm and cozy feeling about your site or blog as a community. And yes, use avatars in the comment area.

There are ways to make people feel like home without you giving up ownership. I’ll write a post about some of the tactics later. For now, start thinking about how you could make your site or blog better towards “user ownership.”

Have a few ideas? Don’t hesitate to leave your comments below.

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Isn’t it exciting just to imagine getting 100 visitors per day from each of the traffic “channels?” With 10 different channels, you get 1,000 visitors. Converting your traffic to sales at 1 percent means 10 sales per day.

At $97 a pop, you make close to $1,000. From one site. Rinse and repeat, and you’re packing your way to the beach and stay there forever.

This story sells. Explore ClickBank, especially the Money & Employment and Marketing & Ads categories. You’ll see a pattern. A story that eventually leads to financial freedom. A house and a luxury car.

Now please get this. People are making a killing online. Internet is a platform and media of which each business should take advantage of. It is even affordable to anyone without huge budget.

Blog is a good example. If you have a few bucks, you can start a blog on your own domain–with your own brand and everything.

But when it comes to blog promotion, it is exactly like picking your fighting weapon. If you haven’t yet mastered the sword, don’t try to pick a spear and use it at the same time. That will get you no where.

Instead, use a sword until it becomes a second nature. By then, you have enough fighting skills that you can pick up a spear and cut the learning curve in half or less.

While using a traffic strategy, you are also building your content over time. When it is time to pick another one, now you have all the content you could leverage. Things will be much easier.

“How does the outcome compare?” I hear you ask.

Good question. When you focus, you are more likely to get traffic faster. That’s because you exhaust all the tactics in one strategy before you expand.

In article marketing, for instance, you could write 2 articles a day and get a few visitors. But have you tried 20 articles per day? How will that affect your traffic level? How quicker could you churn out articles one month from now?

I’ve also talked about not being able to grow a tree in a day. You can’t force your site to the first page in Google overnight. It takes time to achieve that.

But you can always diversify your inbound links. Find more places to contribute and get more backlinks. Most people fail to take enough action. That’s why focusing on a strategy is important.

You’ll know it when you get a hold of something and ready to pick another weapon.

Read the blog promotion page to get my own traffic strategies that drive, as of this writing, at least 100,000 visitors to my network of blogs every month without fail.

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It doesn’t matter if you only spend half an hour. Heck, don’t feel guilty even if you only write two paragraphs during that time, or even two sentences.

What you want to start is a ritual. Everybody started at zero.

The only thing you want to do is write. Come up with an idea and write.

Develop the flow. Try not to edit anything, even grammar and typos when typing. Those come during the editing session.

Create a structure. At first, your writing may be all over the place. That is expected, but try a different approach. Create a structure, the points, or numbered list first before writing.

Writing any topic from scratch can be hard. Expounding one to two paragraphs on every point independently is easy. Before you know, you already have a complete article in front of you.

Practice. That’s how I was able to write 20 articles per day in as little as 3 hours. And did it for 3 consecutive months without fail.

I write less articles nowadays, but I still do my ritual every day for e-course and my product content.

That works. You may not believe me. But name a writer or copywriter. Dan Kennedy. John Carlton. Clayton Makepeace. Gary Bencivenga.

All of them still write every day to keep themselves sharp. Even the retired Gary still read and write copy every day.

The secret to writing faster is to write more. I couldn’t give you a secret of top copywriter, because I am not one, but if you are just getting started, make it a habit to write. It is going to help you become more productive as a blogger and info marketer.

Accept no excuse. Set a time during the day when you do nothing but write. Do it for a month and see how much difference you’ll make. I believe you wouldn’t want to look back.

Here’s more about blog content, if you are interested about how to develop a structure for your writing and quickly create content. If you are struggling with getting people to click and read your article, you will get boilerplate for titles too.

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“When you go to a great hotel, sometimes you’ll look in the desk drawer and you’ll see some really nice, high-quality stationary, with the hotel’s name in gold leaf across the top,” Cialdini says. “But when I was at the Mandarin Oriental, I pulled out this stationary and my name was at the top. They had given me a gift that wasn’t designed to promote the hotel. It didn’t have their name on it — it had my name on it. I’ve never stopped recommending that hotel to anyone traveling to Hong Kong.”

What does this quote have to do with blogging? I’ll explain later but…

First, I don’t claim this is the only way to make money online.

When a prospect uses Google, for example, and she is indeed ready to buy a product, you may get the sale if you are the one who provides a quick link to the product page. In fact, a lot of people made a fortune online a few years ago with this simple method.

If you want to build a business, something that could last longer than a sale or two, you want to approach it differently.

Let’s talk about it from the perspective of an information provider / marketer.

Instead of focusing on taking or getting, you should think of building relationships.

Give away what is perceived as valuable by your audience. It doesn’t have to be something costly. You can write a 8- to 10-page report that addresses a core problem your readers try to solve, and give it away.

It may contain your most important technique. One that works wonder every time people try.

The question is, “why gives it away?”

And usually the follow up questions are…

“Shouldn’t you charge for it? What are you going to sell if you give your best technique away?”

The strategic thinking behind this will be a topic of a different series of posts — you want to subscribe to make sure you don’t miss them.

But in concise, you want to give away the idea and sell the system. Furthermore, you may extend it to give people quick result, but sell the details.

Engage the audience so they come back for more, so they could not resist buying your products.

Even if you sell ad spaces, you want to give away valuable information so the advertisers want in some ways to attach their brands with your site, so the readers want to stick with your site long enough to see and click the ads, and so they want to come back for more content and click on more ads.

The side effect is very powerful. There is more than one principle working here, but one that stands out, Robert Cialdini calls it reciprocity.

He says, “The tendency among humans is that we want to give back to those who have given to us.”

It is one of the six principles that make persuasion work. If you give away valuable content, you are with or without knowingly use persuasive technique to win people’s heart.

If you want your audience to never stop talking and recommending about your product or service, give them something that produces result, something they want.

It is the key to building feed subscribers.

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Since the first day you decide to blog, you are faced with endless challenges to produce more and better content, promote what you’ve produced and also keep everything running smoothly.

It is obvious that we bloggers need to prioritize. But it is easier said than done. You may jump from one time management system to another. Or switch perspectives too. Now rather than trying to manage time, you try to manage actions.

Does that help? Sure, but it doesn’t solve everything. You still find yourself falling off the bandwagon every so often. It may be easy to jump back on, but is the bandwagon even heading in the right direction?

After more than 7 years of blogging, of which 4 of them as a professional blogger, I discovered and refined the process. Doing this, you could only see your blog growing every day.

Here are the activities you must include in your blogging:

1. Content production. Blogging is about writing — or recording if your are using audio or video — and publishing new and good content. Good is subjective, but it always means what the readers want to consume.
2. Blog promotion. Even if it is as easy as writing one short article for submitting into article directories, you should always do one thing to get the word out about your blog.
3. Administrative tasks. Check email, update your blog software, organize your blog ideas, reply to comments and so on.

Depends on many things, each point above may take longer than others but your primary focus should be on content production and promotion. This is not to say that administrative tasks are not important because they indeed matter, but both content production and promotion are the engine and fuel that make your blog run.

When it comes to content promotion, make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself with too many strategies to do at once. I suggest picking one strategy and then try to get the most out of it.

If it is guest blogging, your blog promotion activities should involve networking or talking to at least one blogger each day. Also write quality posts and offer other bloggers to publish them.

Your success depends on your execution. That’s why not everyone is a successful blogger, even if they follow the same advice, read the same book, start a blog in the same niche, have the same experience and background.

That may be an oversimplistic version but it should cover everything necessary to get your blog rolling. If you could integrate them as routines, that could be even better because you ensure to get things done and moving forward every day.

So spend time planning your day, will you?

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Bloggers were people who like to write journals, but take it a step further to digitize those journals. Because they can. They were able to create quick tool that allowed them to click a few buttons and make the content instantly available online.

After all, most of them are techies. They hated it when they had to repeatedly edit a template, add content, update the links and menu, fire up FTP program, find the right directory, and upload the file. Imagine how cumbersome these were if you had to do it five times a day. Everyday.

Blogger as we knew a few years ago was quite different. She was a professional who researched what she was about to write. She produced high quality content for public consumption. She built followers and fans. She used a blog as a launching pad for a book deal. She sold virtual real estate on her blog to interested parties so they could place blocks of ads there.

Blogging, again since a few years ago, has become a business. If you think about it, it becomes another word for web publishing — with a twist in different places. You could think about these twists as development in the web publishing industry.

Nowadays, bloggers are much different than before. They are now more social than ever.

Rather than waiting for the readers to comment, they could now solicit feedback in real time. They could throw questions out and wait for answers in seconds. They interact with others in real time conversations.

Becoming a successful blogger, in my opinion, needs continuous effort to grow. A blogger should not be too attached with a medium, an activity, a profession or a strategy.

You should only aim for the end result. That may turn you into a non blogger — as others would say it — but that doesn’t matter at all.

I always remind people that a blog — WordPress — is just a tool. A powerful one that allows you to automate and build a diverse type of web sites. If that no longer makes you and me a blogger, I don’t care.

In fact, the audience doesn’t care at all. They only want to know what you could do to help them with their problems. They only want your site to be loaded with useful content. Not any type of content, but high quality substance that relates to them well as if you create it just for them.

If they could get back to you, comment, and interact with you, those may hook them and make them come back for more.

Stick to the underlying principles. Deliver what people want. Be a leader. Use the right tool to engage and empower users to build your brand and/or make buying decision.

See how this strategy changes your business, as it has already changed mine.

Comments? Or do you have any experience that is different? Could you say it better? Share anything in the comments area below.

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I should know it for sure because I’m in this exact position for more than a decade.

Back then, when 1.2GB was a lot, and MP3 technology just got invented, soon I ripped all my audio CDs and saved them in digital format. Soon I needed to upgrade to 4.3 gigabytes hard drive. It went on and on.

The next purchase was 8.4GB, and then 20GB, 40GB, 80GB, 160GB, 250GB, and 500GB.

Every time a larger capacity was released in the market, I would acquire one or a few. The funny thing was that they all cost about the same, except the latter ones. The prices of hard drives have gone down in the past few years.

I never consider buying 1TB storage for now. I have given up my obsession of storing everything.

Technology usage has gone to a stage that could be counter productive for me.

I learned it the hard way that what I thought I might need some day was not worth storing 98 percent of the time. Often I could just fire up a browser and perform quick search to fetch the data at anytime.

While larger capacity hard drives are useful in some applications, smaller hard drives are mostly beneficial if you don’t work extensively with large multimedia files.

It may even prevent you from stuffing everything you could find online and scattering them all over the place on your virtual storage space. For me, and I finally got it, that is more the sign of laziness.

When you want to avoid making decisions, you create a temporary storage space and dump everything in it. That piles up your frustrations that will soon explode in the future.

A 250GB drive is often more than enough to save a few educational programs you are committed to, your favorite music, all your working project files, and then some.

And if you really need that much space, buy an external drive. Move all data that you are not working with right now, or soon in the future, out of your sight. They may still be on your list of stuff to “read / review” but once they are not there, you are free from all kinds of distractions.

Limited disk space also forces you to make decision to purge things on a continual basis, which leads to a more efficient workflow and increased productivity.

So, be cheap and limit your access to larger hard drive. Agree?

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