When you work for yourself as a full time blogger or online entrepreneur it is not about how many hours you work but it is how effective you work. You can work 24 hour days, but if it doesn’t earn you any income then it is absolutely pointless. It is important therefore to focus on using your time as effectively as possible.

One of the questions many bloggers ask is whether or not they should spend their time actively promoting their blog, or if they should just focus on writing good content. In this post I plan to flesh out exactly why you should do what and I will explain exactly what I have chosen to do and why. I have been blogging for 3 years and I have made a lot of mistakes and learned from them, so I feel that my advice is worth reading.

You Need Good Content

There is no escaping this fact. No matter what way you look at it you need good content. Most of your money is to be made not from people visiting your blog once, but from people continually reading your blog. It is through people continually reading your blog that you can build a subscriber list with Aweber, and it is through people constantly reading your blog that you can sell affiliate products or your own products.

Without good content you can do everything in your power to bring people to your blog, but they will leave as quickly as they came. Good content is the foundation of any blog.

This blog has been in existance since March 2008. It started off as FoolsWealth.com, then changed to Smarterwealth.net and it is now RyanMcLean.net. In the last 14 months I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to promote my blog through a variety of different methods. I used advertising, blog commenting, forum posting, article markteting and many other methods. But one thing I forgot to do was create great content. I was so focused on getting people to my blog that I never thought of my blog as the main marketing tool.

Your content is your main marketing tool. It will bring people to your blog (via Search Engines), it will keep people coming back to your blog and it will even get people to promote your blog for you. Without quality content you are missing the most important factor to building traffic to your blog.

Take me for example. I spent 14 months trying to build traffic to my blog and I wasn’t writing good content. After 14 months I was only getting 30 visitors per day to my blog. That is alright if your blog has been going for 4 weeks, but not 14 months. Since I have started focusing on writing good content my stats have changed quite a bit. I will be writing a post tomorrow on exactly how it has effected my stats and whether or not focusing on writing good content actually works.

A Website Without Traffic Doesn’t Exist

In order to successfully build your blog you need to have good content, but you also need to have some traffic. You could have the best blog in the world, but if no one ever visited it then it would be as if your blog didn’t exist.

“It takes a gathering to build a crowd” is a great saying that relates very well to blogging. Blogs grow exponentially. The more visitors you have the more people will talk about your blog, link to your blog and promote your blog and thus the more readers you will gain. Once you have more readers you will have more people to talk about your blog, link to your blog and promote your blog bringing in even more readers…and so forth.

So in order to begin growing your blog it is important that you have some traffic and this is why many bloggers see promotion as one of the main things they can do. I will list a variety of ways to promote your blog at the bottom of this post.

So what is more important? I have stated that you have to have good content otherwise you will never build readership, and I have also stated that good content isn’t going to grow your blog if you have no traffic at all. So what should you do. Should you focus on writing good content or focus on building traffic and readership.

In The Beginning

In the beginning and throughout your blogs development the most important thing you can ever do is create good content. If you have just started a blog then spend your time focusing on creating 10-20 really good blog posts, that way when readers come to your blog there will be something good for them to read.

Once you have a good foundation of solid blog posts it is important that you spend some time and energy promoting your blog. I found that one of the best ways to do this when you are starting is to comment on other blogs in your niche. Find the largest blogs in your niche and read and comment on their posts. Try and be one of the first people to comment, because then your comment will appear higher and you will get more traffic.

Another good thing to do is to write guest posts. Almost all bloggers (even the large ones) love getting guest posts and don’t get enough guest posts. I wish I got more people wanting to guest post on my blog. Guest posts gives the blog owner a break and gives you a chance to put yourself in front of a large audience. More on this below.

So in the beginning when you are first starting your blog you definately want to be focusing on writing good content. You should never ever sacrifice good content for promotion. What you should do though is spend a little bit of time each week promoting your blog via other people’s blogs. This will help you get your first few readers who can then help you grow your blog exponentially. Getting your first readers will always be the hardest part, but after that you will find blog growth much easier.

Establishing Your Web Presence

One of the important things to do when you are a blogger is to establish your web presence. You want to establish yourself as a guru in your area of expertise and one of the ways to do this is to get your face out there. Get in the forums and start commenting on blogs so that wherever people go they will see your ugly face. This helps you to establish your web presence and to get people talking about you and your blog. 

When my blog was starting i used to comment on about 30 blogs in my niche daily. Whenever anyone went to one of these blogs they would see my face. No matter what blog they went to I would be there. This really helped establish my blog in the early day and got people talking about me, which is exactly what I wanted. But it also took a lot of focus away from me writing quality blog posts, so that was not a good thing and pretty much lost me all the web presence I had created by putting my face everywhere.

You need to find the fine line between promotion and writing good content in order to build your web presence effectively.

Getting Other People To Promote You Is Always The Better Option

Promoting yourself will work, but it will never work as well as when other people promote you. 

People will listen to people they trust. That is the way the world works. If a salesman comes to your door and trys to sell you a knife, telling you how incredible it is, you will immediately send him on his way no matter how good the knife is. You don’t trust him because you know he has an ulterior motive and that is to make money from selling you the knives. The same goes with promoting your own website. People know you have an ulterior motive to build traffic and readership and make money. Thus they don’t trust you or listen to you.

However, if your best friend came to you and told you about these really great knives then you would definately hear them out. It is likely that you would also buy the knives based on your friends recommendation. It is like this when other people promote your website.

Other people already have readers to their blog, people who trust them and listen to them. When they talk about you and say how good you are it is like a friend telling them about something. They trust the persons judgement and thus the response is different. This is why it is always better to get other people to promote you.

You can pay other people to promote you by selling a product and giving a commission, but if you have a blog and are giving away free content it is harder to pay people to talk about your blog. The best way to get other people to talk about your blog is by having great content.

I read quite a few blog, and when something I read from those blogs helps me write a blog post of my own I will link to their post. A lot of bloggers do “Link Love” posts where they link to great posts they read throughout the week. If you can write great content then you are seriously increasing the chances of people talking to their friends and readers about your website.

No one wants to talk about a crappy blog. There are thousands of blogs out there that product crappy content, but what people do want to talk about is good content.

So you can focus on promoting yourself (which can be hard), or you can focus on creating great content and getting other people to promote you.

Here is an encouraging story:

Recently in Australia Coca-Cola released a product called Vitamin Water (I don’t know if you have it elsewhere also). Vitamin Water has become so popular that it actually outsells Coke, however, there was no major advertising done for Vitamin Water. No TV ads, no billboard ads, only localized advertising at the retail outlets Vitamin Water was sold at. They did this because they wanted people to own the brand, and they wanted people to tell their friends about it. Because they knew that word of mouth is the best type of advertising out there. If you can get people to spread your message for you then your blog will grow like wildfire. The only way to do that is to create amazing content.

Smart Ways To Quickly Boost Your Promotion

I have been talking a lot about how you should focus on creating great content, but I am sure that a lot of people will want to know how to promote their blog in it’s early days. As I mentioned earlier a blog needs a gathering to grow a crowd so you will need to do some promotion to build that gathering. Below I have listed a variety of ways you can promote your blog and gain readers.

• Search Engines – Search Engine traffic comes naturally from writing blog posts. People search for something and then hopefully your blog posts shows up in the search results and people click on it and come to your website. This does not happen a lot in the early days, and gets more effective with time. But to build this up you need to do keyword research and optimize your blog for search engines. A lot of blog themes get in the way of Google finding your content through to code and thus it is extremely hard to rank well. The best theme I have found for search engine rankings is Thesis.
• Stumble Upon – You can drive a lot of traffic to your blog in its early days through Stumble Upon. Simply stumble each of your posts and do your best to get people to stumble yours. Go into forums and offer to stumble other people’s blog posts if they agree to stumble yours.
• Promote Other People – One of the great way to get people to promote you is to promote them. Link to smaller blogs in your niche and it is highly likely that they will link back to you.
• Get a Product – Products give you the leverage of money. People will promote your product because they can take a commission from sales. So do your best to create a product (even a really cheap one) as quickly as possible.
• Forums – Forum signatures are a great way to get traffic to your website or blog. Go into any forum in your niche and start commenting like crazy. Leave helpful and useful comments to get the best traffic.
• Blog Commenting – Leave comments on other blogs in your niche. The bigger the blog the more traffic you are likely to receive. I did this when I first started my blog and I was quickly receiving 150 visitors per day from commenting on 20 blogs.
• Mastermind Groups – Get a mastermind group together where you all agree to stumble each other blogs, to link to each other and help each other out. This is a great way to grow your blog just that extra bit faster in the early days.
• Twitter – Use twitter to your advantage by auto-tweeting your blog posts. Building a twitter following is easier than building a blog following, but the great thing is you can use twitter to drive traffic to your blog. So start tweeting.

In Conclusion

In conclusion the most important thing you can do for your blog is create quality content. Without quality content your blog will never grow. But it can be beneficial to do some promotion of your blog, as long as promoting your blog does not get in the way of you creating quality content for your blog.

Tomorrow I will share with you the stats that I have collected from the last two weeks where I have been focusing really hard on creating quality content. So check out the blog tomorrow to read about the real life stats and how this really works in real life.

As I have mentioned above I have once spent a lot of time trying to promote my blog, and forgetting to spend time producing good content. For this very reason I believe that my blog is nowhere as big as it could have been if I just purely focused on creating awesome content. For the last 1-2 weeks I have stopped promoting my blog altogether and have focused solely on creating good content. Tomorrow I am going to reveal to you exactly what this has done for my blog stats and whether or not it has helped me grow my blog.

Seesaw image by Renee May, Billboard photo by Aikara,

Click here to check out Thesis now

I recently got a comment from one of my readers who said it was strange that I was advertising the blog theme “Thesis” on my blog when I am running a completely different theme. So I wanted to take some time to explain why I am advertising Thesis on my blog and why I want thesis as the theme for my blogs. If you are considering a new theme for your blog then I recommend reading this post as I explain why this theme could help you become a richer full time blogger.

Easily Customizable

This is the very first thing that got me thinking that Thesis could be the best theme for me. The problem with every other theme that I have had is that it is extremely difficult to customize. I am not a coding expert, in fact on a scale from 1-10 I would probably rate myself a 2. Whenever I have gotten themes in the past I have been frustrated because I have been unable to easily edit the width of the sidebar, the location of the sidebar, the width of the blog etc. 

With Thesis they have inbuilt options where you can automatically change the location and width of the sidebars and you can easily change your blog from being one column, to two columns, to 3 columns without touching a piece of code. This will be great for me as I have a variety of sites that all need different looks. Some will do better with a left sidebar, some will do better with a right sidebar. The customization allows me to test and tweak what works so I can achieve the best result.

I often do things on impulse, I will buy something on impulse and I will change my theme on impulse. With thesis I don’t have to find $100 every time I want to change my theme. I can just do some quick clicks and my theme can change from a right sidebar to a left sidebar instantly. No cost, no hassle and more time to get onto building my blog and putting out great content.

With Thesis theme it is also easy to customize your look. You can change colors and backgrounds, you can easily edit your header so that you can place advertising in there, or a signup form. You can get your site looking exactly the way you want it much easier than other premium themes would allow.

SEO Optimized

Thesis is one of the best themes for SEO optimization because it doesn’t have a lot of code getting in the way of Google finding your content. I have one niche site that gets traffic mainly from Search Engines and I am looking to build more in the future so SEO is very important to me. 

Search Engine traffic can bring in a lot of income as you know exactly what people are looking for and you can provide them with exactly what they need. Being able to rank well in the search engines is hard, and it becomes even harder when your wordpress theme gets in the way. Thesis theme doesn’t get in the way and will allow me to get the best possible rankings in Google. This means more traffic for me, and more income.

Clean Look

I love the clean look of Thesis. Sometimes I get frustrated with my current theme at RyanMcLean.net because there is so much going on. I love the simplicity and clean look that thesis provides. It would do great for any blog that wants to look professional without breaking the budget. That is me exactly (I pretty much have no budget) so this would be a fantastic offer.

I have also had a lot of people complain about the look of this website saying that they didn’t like it too much. I want people to like the look of my website so maybe I need to change.

Focus On Content

One of the things that I am doing at the moment with my blog is putting a very strong focus on blogging. I have removed a lot of advertising and I am trying to make my blog as simple and clutter-free as possible. With the Thesis theme you can easily put a solid focus on the content of your blog by decreasing the size of the sidebars and increasing the width of your content space. If I do in fact get enough money so that I can get a hold of the Thesis Theme then I will definately do this, because I want to put as much focus as possible on my content for the time being so I can build up a readership and increase my traffic.

I am beginning to write great content (I think), but if the layout of my blog gets in the way of people reading the content I will lose readers and that is not something that I want to have happen on my blog.

Affiliate Program

We all love making a buck or two, and one of the best ways for bloggers to make money is to sell their blog theme. Often people will visit your theme, like your blog and want to use it for their own blog. With Thesis theme you can recommend the theme to your readers and then take a commission for every sale you make. You never have to deal with customer support or coding bugs because the team at Thesis do all that for you. All you have to do is recommend your own theme and then earn some money from it.

Free Updates

When you get the Thesis theme you will automatically get any free updates that are done to the theme. I recently bought a program called MacSpeech about 6 months ago, which is a voice to text program. I got an email just a few weeks ago saying they have brought out an updated version and that I can upgrade for just $80. I don’t want to have to pay everytime they bring out an upgrade. The great thing about Thesis is that everytime they bring out an update it is completely free.

As far as I am aware, even if you tweak your theme the updates will not effect the look of your theme. This is great for me because I want to do some alterations to make it more me and I don’t want to lose these changes when an update happens.

Support

The current theme I am using is a child theme of Hybrid (which is a free theme) and because I got this customized and because it is a free theme there is not much support when I am having problems. I am pretty much on my own when something goes wrong.

One of the reasons I am excited to get Thesis (when I can afford it)

High On Quality, Low On Price

Wordpress themes are getting expensive these days. A custom theme can cost you upwards of $2,000 and there are a variety of premium themes that will cost you over $100. If you have been a long time reader of my site you may have remembered the old theme I had. It was called One Theme and cost me $100 but it was horrible and never did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was costly and impossible to use. Thesis is cheap (only $89 for one website or $169 for a developers license) and offers so much more than One Theme ever could. Click here to see the prices.

I am still undecided whether or not I will use the Thesis theme on RyanMcLean.net as I already have a completely customized theme made specifically for my site. But I will definately use it for my other websites. So I am saving up to buy a developers theme. But even if I can’t afford a developers theme I can buy the rights to one website and then upgrade to a developers theme later. This gives me more time to earn some more money to invest.

Buy Thesis Now

If you want to get the Thesis theme yourself (which I don’t see why you wouldn’t) you can check it out in more detail and purchase a copy by clicking here

Knowing exactly how to take control of your finances can be difficult. There are so many different things that you can do to reduce your debt and prepare yourself for the future. Often it is hard to know which road will give you the most freedom and the most financial security.

One of the age old questions in personal finance is whether or not it is better to reduce your debt or to build an emergency fund. This is a question me and my wife are seriously considering at the moment. We have around $19,500 worth of debt that we want to pay off as quickly as possible, and we are also trying to prepare for the future (children). There are many advantages of doing either, but we have to seriously consider both our short term and long term goals before we make the decision.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no right or wrong between choosing to reduce your debt or build an emergency fund, there is only what is right for you.

Before you make your decision on what to do it is a good idea to weigh up the positives and negatives of each different path. I will list all the advantages of each option (that I can think of) below. This will help me decide what to do and will also help you decide what you want to do. (more…)

As I have mentioned numerous times before I have been offering people the opportunity to pitch my readers their product on my blog in exchange for them writing some articles for me. This is a pitch from Dewayne, who wrote some great articles for me. Hope you enjoy the pitch.

A product specifically designed to add to the advantages of internet marketers, “The Affiliate’s Guide To Outsourcing” has proven to be very useful idea for entrepreneurs to succeed with their internet business. This great product comes with a vast amount of information on how to generate the required traffic for your niche, an e-book that contains all the knowledge you need to succeed with your internet business, and some very vital tips from people who have been in the industry for a considerable period of time.

Achieve Automation And Growth

Internet marketing is all about automation. With the proper knowledge, you can setup your website to automatically generate traffic for your business and expect higher conversion rates. This is very essential for you as an affiliate marketer. The idea is to spend the least amount of time on your website and yet generate the maximum revenue. This is exactly what “The Affiliate’s Guide To Outsourcing” has to do with.

It provides you with knowledge about how to utilize the right tools as an affiliate marketer to generate the maximum sales for any business. It teaches you to effectively use your website to result the best form of marketing, building credibility, trust and brand name, and of course higher sales for the product under consideration.

What Does It Offer?

This package offers you with great information as to how you can improve your internet business using outsourcing. It has excellent instructions for you to search for freelancers, how to evaluate their expertise and deal with them. Tips for price negotiations with the clients and the freelancers, and effective relationship building strategy form a great part of “The Affiliate’s Guide To Outsourcing”.

You are also made aware of the various drawbacks of outsourcing and how to cope with them. Outsourcing is a powerful resource and can help with the development and growth of your company beyond your expectations. However, without proper planning and supervision, outsourcing can result in serious trouble for your business. Your reputation, credibility and brand name may suffer hugely if this is not dealt with carefully. This product opens up great information on how you can effectively prevent such troubles to harm your business.

More On Offer

“The Affiliate’s Guide To Outsourcing” comes with three free bonus items that would have cost you otherwise: “Confessions of a Power Builder”, “Newbie Traffic Secrets” and another surprise toolkit that the producer of “The Affiliate’s Guide To Outsourcing”, Dewayne Blalock, hails to be of great importance.

Hence if you are looking to succeed with your internet marketing business, “The Affiliate’s Guide To Outsourcing” can be a great tool for you, considering the great tools and information it provides you, at an unbelievably low price of $47 for the whole package. This powerful product has proved to be very interesting for me and I believe that it is a great tool for any form of internet business.

Dewayne Blalock is a long time researcher of methods that internet marketers can use to make their business more efficient and profitable. Visit his website now to receive his Free Blog For Profits article series as well as a 10-part article series that is guaranteed to help you create your first award-winning Niche Website: The Affiliates Guide To Outsourcing

It has been forever since I have done a blog update to let everyone know where I am at with my traffic and my income. I haven’t done these in a long time because I couldn’t be bothered. I was doing so many different things to try and make money that blogging about my income was not something that I really thought about much.

However, I would love to be able to look back in 2 years from now, or even 5 years from now, and see how my blog has grown, and more importantly, how my online income has grown.

So at the end of each month (or the beginning of the next month) I will be doing a regular blog/income update to let everyone know where I am at, and to document my journey in history.

Blog Traffic

1,326 Visitors (Average 43 Visitors per Day)

3,032 Pageviews (Average 98 Pageviews per Day)

2.29 Pages Per Visit

Peak Day – 137 Visitors (29th May)

My blog traffic was fairly low this month. For the entirety of this year I have let the quality of my blog content slip considerably. I have been blogging inconsistently and when I do blog it has not been of the highest quality. On the 23rd of May I made the decision that I would begin focusing on creating killer content for my blog and nothing else. Because of this decision I saw traffic increase in the last days of May. So I expect traffic in June to be considerably larger than it was in May.

Income + Costs

Problogger Workbook Sale – $7.98

Article Costs – -$8.66

Total Income: - $0.68

This month’s income was extremely low. There are a few reasons that my income has been so low this month.

• I was in New Zealand for 2 weeks of the month
• I have stopped all freelance writing to focus on my blog
• I have stopped selling private ads and paid reviews on my blog

Usually I would easily do 4-5 paid reviews per month on the blog. These pay between $25-$50 each so that is a big slab of income that I am sacrificing at the moment. The reason I am doing this is to increase the quality of articles on my blog, and also I cannot be bothered doing the reviews. Truthfully I got sick of them.

In May I stopped doing a lot of work that was bringing in the majority of my income. This is why I had a negative month. I am now focusing solely on this blog and another blog that I own. I expect June to be a slow month also in terms of income, but I do expect it to be positive. In June I will just be focusing on the blog and preparing myself.

Highlights of May

The highlight of May was that I got to go to Hobbiton (where they filmed Lord of The Rings). Another great thing that happened was that I realised that focusing on trying to make money was actually losing me money. So it was a complete paradigm shift which was awesome.

What Lies Ahead

I know that there will be 3 weeks in July where I will be away from the internet and unable to blog. Therefore I am going to use the month of June to continue to generate quality blog posts, and to spend some time building up extra blog posts so that I will still be posting daily even when I am away from my blog. One of the important things you need to do to build a blog is to be consistent so I plan on doing that in June.

For my income I will be using Bidvertiser in June to try and generate some cashflow. Bidvertiser is great because you can get paid instantly by Paypal with a limit of just $10. So I am going to give this a go in June to see if I can make any money. I do not think I will be creating any paid products at least until August (if then).

So there is a lot in store for the future as I continue to grow this blog and continue to generate more and more income online. I for one am looking forward to it.

I talked recently about building momentum in your business and one of the things I talked about in that post was outsourcing. No man (or woman) can do everything by themselves and grow their business exponentially. There will come a time in your business where you will be required to hire someone and outsource jobs in order for you to move forward. 

Eventually there are a lot of things that I would love to outsource for my business. I have made a list of them explaining what I want outsourced and why I would love to have them outsourced. One day I want to hire someone to do all of these things for me. I will hire an Australian that I can work with in an office and pay a wage to do these things for me. But for now I have no cash flow so I can only dream about it.

(more…)

I have read the 4 Hour Work Week before, however, when I read books I have the tendency to read them so fast that I never take any action and thus all the information I have learned is rendered useless. Information is of no use to you if you never have the opportunity to actually apply it in your life and see how it works for you.

I want to work through the 4 Hour Work Week on my blog for a number of reasons

1. I want to take it slowly and apply the knowledge I learn from each chapter as I go

2. I want to provide readers of my blog with some helpful information from the book. So even those who do not by the book can still get a lot out of it.

3. I want you to know exactly what is in the book so if you ever plan on spending your hard earned money on this book you know exactly what you are getting.

(more…)

Waiting for the big red ball to roll your way is not a great plan to get rich. So many people spend their lives betting thousands of dollars on lotto in a hope that one day their numbers will come up and their lives will be easy. I know because I work in a Newsagency/Chemist and I sell lotto to people. I am not a big fan of lotto myself, nor am I am big gambler because I believe that winning the lotto is not a good way to get rich.

I want to provide you with the reasons I think trying to win the lotto is a waste of your money and a bad decision. Then you can decide for yourself what you think about it.

(more…)

Last month Darren Rowse from Problogger ran a series on his website titled ‘31 Days to Build a Better Blog”. Me, and 13,000+ other people got involved and worked our best to improve our blogs in just 31 days. I can honestly say that it was one of the best series of blogging for money that has ever been done. Now Darren has released the 31 Days To Build a Better Blog Workbook, that allows you to work through each of the activities at your own pace.

The workbook is a really great learning tool as each day and each lesson has an associated action that you are requested to take. So at the end of 31 days you don’t just walk away with a head full of knowledge, you walk away with skills (from having done the tasks) and you also walk away with a better and more successful blog. Having a more successful blog means more money (and that is very important to a lot of people because money means freedom).

When I started blogging ProBlogger was the place I went for all of my blogging for money tips, and today (more than 3 years later) nothing has changed. ProBlogger has only gotten better and this product is no different. 

The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook is targeted at all bloggers no matter what stages of blogging you are at

It targets:

• Beginner bloggers who are trying to get their blogs of the ground
• More mature bloggers who blog’s growth has flat lined
• Bloggers who has lost the passion for blogging and need some inspiration

The cost of this Workbook is $19.95, which is an exceptional price seeing as it comes from the ProBlogger himself. Darren is known as one of the best bloggers in the world, if not THE best blogger in the world and all of his articles are 110% quality and this product is no exception.

You can work through this product at your own pace, go fast or go slow, it is up to you. I know that I am focusing all of my efforts now on building a better blog because that is what I love to do. My readership has more than tripled in the last week (not bad stats are they). Why don’t you start building a better blog today?

Get 31 Days To A Better Blog Workbook Now