The Book on Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Well

"You're going to love the way the author teaches you how to write. She's a master writing coach with a sense of humor and a gentle touch."

Price: $18.95

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Firehouse

Thirteen men from Engine 40, Ladder 35 firehouse initially responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; only one survived. Located near Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the firehouse was known for its rich tradition and strong leadership. This gripping book details the actions of the 13 men on that horrific day and the heartbreaking aftermath--the search for the bodies, the efforts of their families to deal with overwhelming grief, and the guilt and conflicting emotions of the surviving members of the firehouse. The book is also about the men themselves and the tight bond and sense of duty and honor that held them together. David Halberstam does a masterful job of illustrating the inner workings of a firehouse, with its traditions, routines, and complex social structure that in many ways resembles a "vast extended second family--rich, warm, joyous, and supportive, but on occasion quite edgy as well, with all the inevitable tensions brought on by so many forceful men living so closely together over so long a period of time." He also explains why so many men choose this life despite the high risk, relatively low pay, and physical and emotional demands of the job.

Halberstam and his family live three and a half blocks from Engine 40, Ladder 35, and he writes of these 13 men in such a loving and precise way that he could be describing members of his own clan. Deeply felt and emotional, Firehouse is a tribute to these decent, honorable, and heroic men and a celebration of their selflessness not only as firefighters but also as husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, and friends. --Shawn Carkonen

Price: $22.95

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The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley Books for Writers Series)

This book is for the beginning creative nonfiction writer--one who needs to be told that writers are an eccentric lot; one who has never heard of the Yaddo artists' colony. Still, Lee Gutkind, the author of several books of creative nonfiction and the founder/editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, has some interesting things to tell us about this genre of writing, which strives to communicate real-life stories dramatically. The most important quality that a creative nonfiction writer can have, writes Gutkind, is passion: "A passion for the written word; a passion for the search and discovery of knowledge; and a passion for ... understand[ing] intimately how things in this world work." Gutkind offers instruction on finding story ideas, focusing one's work, keeping story files, fact checking, and interviewing; he tells us what to expect from editors and agents; and he teaches us how to know when we're ready to start writing (when you can "think of nothing more to ask or to learn"). Perhaps the best tidbit here is Gutkind's emphasis on delving deeply into one's subject matter without inserting oneself into the situation. "While immersing myself in a writing project," he says, "I routinely like to compare myself to a rather undistinguished and utilitarian end table in a living room or office. It is a fixture. You walk in and out of your living room dozens of times a day. You see the table, you expect to see the table, but you do not say, 'Well, there is the table, hello table.'" Appendices include a sample book proposal and readings.

Price: $16.95

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W.E.B. Du Bois : Writings : The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles (Library of America)

Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor, and political activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. Here are his essential writings, spanning a long, restless life dedicated to the struggle for racial justice. "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade" recounts how Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until taught by bloody civil war the consequences of moral cowardice; the essays in "The Souls of Black Folk" celebrate the strength and pride of black America, pay tribute to black music and religion, assess the career of Booker T. Washington, remember the death of an infant son; the autobiography "Dusk of Dawn" moves from a Massachusetts boyhood to the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. and emerging Pan-African consciousness. Essays and speeches from 1890 to 1958--angry and satiric, proud and mournful--show Du Bois at his freshest and most trenchant.

Price: $40.00

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How Reading Changed My Life

A recurring theme throughout Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is the comforting premise that readers are never alone. "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but never really a stranger. My real, true world." Later, she quotes editor Hazel Rochman: "Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere." Indeed, Quindlen's essays are full of the names of "friends," real or fictional--Anne of Green Gables and Heidi; Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, to name just a few--who have comforted, inspired, educated, and delighted her throughout her life. In four short essays Quindlen shares her thoughts on the act of reading itself ("It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light"); analyzes the difference between how men and women read ("there are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers"); and cheerfully defends middlebrow literature:

Most of those so-called middlebrow readers would have readily admitted that the Iliad set a standard that could not be matched by What Makes Sammy Run? or Exodus. But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated and that some of them are not addressed by Homer.

The Canon, censorship, and the future of publishing, not to mention that of reading itself, are all subjects Quindlen addresses with intelligence and optimism in a book that may not change your life, but will no doubt remind you of other books that did. --Alix Wilber

Price: $10.00

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Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams

On September 28, 1960-a day that will live forever in the hearts of fans-Red Sox slugger Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for his last at-bat in Fenway Park. Seizing the occasion, he belted a solo home run- a storybook ending to a storied career. In the stands that afternoon was 28-year-old John Updike, inspired by the moment to make his lone venture into the field of sports reporting. More than just a matchless account of that fabled final game, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a brilliant evocation of Williams' competitive spirit, an intensity of dedication that still "crowds the throat with joy."
Now, on the 50th anniversary of the dramatic exit of baseball's greatest hitter, The Library of America presents a commemorative edition of Hub Fans, prepared by the author just months before his death. To the classic final version of the essay, long out-of- print, Updike added an autobiographical preface and a substantial new afterword. Here is a baseball book for the ages, a fan's notes of the very highest order.

Price: $15.00

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Customize Your News Headlines and Track What Matters with Xygnal

Where do you go to read the news? Are you able to customize your news source and filter out the topics that interest you and the ones that don’t? More than likely you can’t filter anything, which is why Xygnal is a breath of fresh air. Many people start their day by reading the top news headlines, but often don’t care about many of the headlines. With Xygnal, you can customize the news based on topics that you’re interested in; no need to wade through all of the irrelevant topics or articles that you may have no interest in.

Xygnal is currently in an early beta stage and has just one website that works on any device or browser; there are no downloads or updates required.

This section shows you the top news headlines and the trending topics within those headlines. While you can’t view the whole story on the site, you will be able to see an excerpt and link to original source. Additionally, you can also see how long ago the story was posted (in minutes, hours, days) and you can click to see related articles.

Xygnal offers 3 options for each article: you can save it (to later view under Saved), share it (on Facebook, Twitter, Google+), and/or track topics within the article.

The tracking features gives you the option to track any topics or keywords within the article. So if you are reading an article about social media and it’s also talking about Facebook and Google, you can track Facebook and/or Google so that you can keep up with other articles that are related to those topics.

When you click on a topic to track, you can choose to track it for a day, week, month, or you can ban the topic (by clicking on the red crossed out icon show above).

When you go to the “Tracked” section, you’ll be able to see all of the topics trending in your tracked topics along with articles related to those topics. The tracking feature is a great way to filter out the topics that you’re most interested in.

This section is where all of your saved articles go. They will stay here until you remove them. As you begin to save articles, you’ll also be able to see the most popular topics within those saved articles.

The search feature does just as expected: it lets you search for any topic and then view articles based on those topics. Again, you’ll have the same options as above (view related articles, save, share, track topics).

There’s not much to offer in the settings just yet. You can edit the topics you’re tracking or banning, check your email address, and delete your account. That’s about it.

Remember, Xygnal is in early beta so there is still a lot features being added and changes being made.

I’m not very fond of the design, but I love the concept and can definitely see myself using Xygnal as my main news source on a daily basis. It’s nice that users can customize the news to their liking by tracking and banning topics. This way, you only see articles based on the topics that matter to you, instead of having to sift through it all just to find what you’re interested in.

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Flames of Arab Spring Flickering In China?

Although it’s way too early too early to hope for the same kind of upheaval and shaking up of the regime in China that occurred in parts of the Arab world, some news reports allowed out from that country draw some interesting comparisons.

Here’s one. Internet activist “Huaguoshanzongshuji” recently said that his research had been erased from the popular Chinese microblogging Weibo site after he did some work on Chinese government officials wearing luxury watches. Although the work was erased from the site, the official Chinese Xinhua news agency said the fight against corruption there should follow this online method. As long as any facts proving the corruption are censored, it would seem.

Closer to home, it looks like Microsoft is getting ready to step up to the plate with Windows 8, or at least they’re getting closer. The latest version of Explorer, IE 10, was released this week for Windows 8 testers only. The new Metro interface that won’t be available until some time in 2012 will be what the releases describe as ‘touch only.’ Although you will still be able to use a mouse and keyboard, many industry insiders are already talking about a time that’s approaching when the touch screen will be as familiar as the built in web cam is today. Let’s hope the whole thing doesn’t fall into that all too familiar Vista Rabbit Hole.

There might not be an imminent internet based uprising happening in China just yet, but a version of the Quiet Revolution is taking place in the halls of academia across the world.  A recent report from the New York Times states that many librarians in hallowed halls of learning are refusing to renew their subscriptions to expensive academic publications since they have found they can get compatible information on the internet for free. In the world of academia, the worth of a published article is measured in the number of times it is cited and the Internet offers few restrictions except for the obligation to cite the work.

Back to China for the last bit here. A consulting firm there has just reported that Internet based companies have been flourishing in the second quarter. A list of 37 internet based firms there saw their profits rise 38.7 percent year on year. The company that reported the numbers, China Venture, is hoping the surge will carry over into bigger numbers on the American stock exchange.

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Quixey – The Ultimate App Search Engine

 

If you’re someone like me who is always searching for apps on all types of devices and systems, then you’ll Quixey. It’s a search engine that lets you find apps across all platforms based on what you want to do. How does it find these apps? Well it scrapes blogs, review sites, forums, and social media to learn about new apps, find out what they do, and how people can use them. What types of apps are displayed? You’ll be able to find apps for smartphones, browsers, desktops, and the Web.

Just like any ordinary search engine, Quixey has a search bar where you type in the answer the the question, “What do you want to do?” Obviously, the more specific you are with your search query, the better results you’ll get. On the home page you can also see the most recent searches right under the search bar.

So if I were to type in “share m blog posts” as my query, I get 200+ apps available for Android, BlackBerry, Chrome, Facebook, Firefox, IE, iPad, iPhone, LinkedIn, Mac, Symbian, Web, WebOS, Windows, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. You can see how many apps are available for each platform and click on whichever platform you’re most interested in to see just those types of apps.

You can also specify whether you want to see just free apps or all. There is a section for advanced search, which lets you filter your results based on the source of the app. Lastly, you can see related searches, which might help you find more specific apps or other related types of apps that you might be interested in trying out.

Quixey also lets you register for an account. I’m sure you’re wondering why this might be necessary and it’s really not unless you want to use the API or create a developer’s account, so that you can publish your own apps to the site.

I think Quixey is one that will stay on my “most visited” list in Chrome because there are so many apps that I’d like to find and try out! I’m always looking for new apps to do one thing or another and this tool really makes it easier to find the perfect tool to suit my needs

I also like how there is a short description next to each that tells you how the app can be used. No long descriptions or pages of text, just the important information and a link to the actual app.

I definitely see Quixey as a keeper, how about you?

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FREE Is The Future of Business

Right now I am reading a book by Chris Anderson called “Free – The Future of A Radical Price”.  You can find this on iTunes for FREE.  You can also search Google and find it pretty quick. Chris Anderson is Wired magazine’s editor in chief and gives us a glimpse of why the cost of doing business online is falling closer and closer to zero.  I really like how this has helped me with everything I am doing online.  The best way to get people online is to give them something free.  You see this on all the top blogs you read, top sites you visit and pretty much everywhere online.

In Free, Anderson breaks down the priceless economy into six broad categories, demonstrating how to make money in each:

- “Freemium”: Free Web software and services, and some content, to users of the basic version. (Think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro.)

- Advertising: Free content, services, and software to an audience that advertisers will pay to reach.

- Cross-subsidies: Give away any product that entices customers to pay for something else. Example: It’s a free second-gen Wii! But only if you buy the deluxe version of Rock Band.

- Zero marginal cost: Anything that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone, like online music.

- Labor exchange: Performing tasks to gain access to “free” sites and services.

- Gift economy: From Freecycle (free secondhand goods) to Wikipedia, money isn’t the only motivator.

Always give Away Something FREE

Your readers want to know that you care about them, so why not give them something free.  Not only does this show your reader that you’re giving them something free that has taken you a lot of time and effort, you also show them that you care about them.  This will inspire trust. This will give you more credibility.  This will break down the barrier that is between you and their information to re-market to them.

How Does Free Work?

Free breaks down the barrier between you and your readers.  If you are selling an eBook and you charge even $.01 you may get a small percentage of readers to purchase your product. But if you give it away for free you will quickly see that your numbers will increase, you’ll get more subscribers, and your blog will be more popular. People love something free, they don’t even think about it.  It makes it so they don’t have to think about the decision; it’s free, why not?

What Do I Give Away For Free?

Give away anything and everything. Just kidding, don’t get yourself into trouble.  I would personally go with what Zac Johnson, John Chow, and many others have done in the blogging space and give away an eBook.  An eBook is a great way to gain your readers trust while getting them to subscribe to your blog.  Use a service like aWeber to keep track and distribute your eBook.  It will keep track of your readers and let you email market to them in the future.  This will allow you to make money off your readers in the long run and keep them coming back to your blog consistently.  Make sure when you’re giving away something free that you don’t give away crap.  Giving away something free that is horrible will cause a bad taste in your readerships mouth.  Bad press travels much more quickly then good press.  If you put something crappy together and give it away for free it will damage your reputation.

I encourage all of you to read Chris Anderson’s book “Free – The Future of A Radical Price”  It will change your world and help you to understand free a lot more than you think.  It will help you realize how Google can give away 99.999% of it’s products for FREE and still make Billions Profit each year.  Please let me know below if you have read the book or have any questions.  I would love to help you out with and Blogging Tips that I have!

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Key Concepts in Blog Marketing Strategy

Blog marketing has emerged as a great way to promote online businesses. While new concepts on blog marketing are evolving every day, there are few strategies that have been time tested and proven worthy. Here are a few clear and pragmatic concepts that will boost up your online blog marketing.

Using the right blog templates that match your theme is important to create an impressive blog. Similar to the way the marketing brochure templates help in creating effective marketing collateral, website blog templates can make the task of designing your blog much easier.

It is a well known fact that blogging evolved out of personal interest in expressing self, business blogging on the other hand is concerned with growth of the company and exploring the mindset of customers. This is why customer centric contents have always made business blogging very successful. In business blogging data collection and profile creation can help the marketers promote their businesses strategically. The close study of these data can provide you with vital clues on various levels such as the need of consumers, keywords they use, and the type of promotion that attracts them.

It is important to develop a unique selling proposition for your blog. Focus on the key benefits of the content and address it in such a manner that customer issues are dealt with. Although it is essential to be specific and concise, exhibiting proof on your points is the key to grab attention of the readers. Clarity on the primary topic of your blog will enable your blog to stand out of the crowd amidst heavy competition.

Visibility of your blog is important and keywords relevant to your core business should be well researched in order to attain visibility for targeted keywords. Search engines like Google and seo tools like word tracker can be of great help in identifying the right keywords and phrases to optimize your blog. While keyword inclusions can be great for search engines, you also need to focus on the lingual patterns of the social media communities to attract attention.

As far as textual content is concerned it begins with the title of the post. Inclusion of keywords is essential in the title. A thought provoking title is a good way to start with. “How to” articles have always proved to be one of the most searched ones. While addressing the target audience of mixed group, insertion of images or diagrams could serve better. Keyword density is yet another important factor that you should keep in mind while planning your content. For instance, if you plan to use the keyword brochure finance, make sure that the phrase is present in the text in the required density.

SEO link building is crucial when it comes to indexing and ranking of web pages. Relevancy is the most important criteria to be noted while acquiring external links to your blog. Obtaining anchor text links with keyword or phrase relevant to your theme can improve the visibility of your blog in search engines as well as draw targeted traffic.

This guest post was written by James Smith from buytemplates.com.

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Guest Posting: Link Building VS Familiarity

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

I enjoy guest posting when I find the time as it allows me to write about subjects I can’t cover on my own websites. More importantly, it’s a great way of raising my profile, pushing traffic towards my websites and connecting with an audience that I have not had any dealings with as yet.

I’m sure you are all aware of the benefits of guest posting so I won’t speaking about that too much today. What I would like to do is compare the benefits of guest posting on a small selection of blogs and websites regularly against guest posting on new websites every week.

Obviously, it benefits you more to write on large traffic websites that have a large audience. That’s a no brainer. For the sake of argument though let’s assume that all websites you will be writing for will have the same traffic and give you and your website the same level of exposure.

So which do you think is better: Guest posting on a regular basis on 3 or 4 websites or writing a guest post every week for a new website (remember that we are assuming all websites have similar traffic levels etc)?

From a traffic point of view, guest posting on different URLs is better. It will increase your authority on search engines and raise awareness of you, your website or brand, as they will be exposed to a larger audience. The main objective with guest posting is primarily promoting yourself and your website so guest posting on a large number of websites is surely better, isn’t it?

My answer to that question would gear more towards yes. If I was employed by company to guest post online so that traffic was pushed to their new website then publishing 20 articles across 20 websites would likely bring more traffic than publishing them across 3 or 4 websites. However, there are benefits to guest posting regularly over a small number of websites and it’s something you should bear in mind when planning out your guest posting strategy.

Currently I guest post semi regularly for Blogging Tips, John Chow, ProBlogger and Noupe. I have guest posted on many other blogs over the last year or so but those are the websites I have published several articles on.

There are many reasons why I enjoy writing for a small selection of blogs:

I don’t waste a lot of time arranging guest posts

Arranging guest posts on new websites regularly can be time consuming. You need to email the owner, introduce yourself and explain why they should let you guest post. This process can involve a lot of back and fourths. Time is something I hold with high esteem when working online so I don’t take this added work lightly.

I have a good relationship with the owners and editors of the blogs I write for regularly. They are happy with the articles I write and publish them without modifying what I wrote. They are also very professional and quick to respond to my emails. When I want to write an article I email them with a suggestion, they usually email back quickly saying that they are happy with the article topic and then I email them the article. The process is painless.

I know the audience

When you write for a new blog you need to spend some time reading older articles on the site to get a feel for the type of content they publish and the type of content that gets a response. I have been a subscriber for the blogs I guest post regularly on for a long time so I know what type of article is suitable and what isn’t.

The audiance knows me

Guest posting isn’t all about getting a link back to your website at the end of an article. You need to connect with the readers of the blog you are writing for. By doing so they will be much more likely to visit your own blog and much more likely to subscribe.

One of the best ways of connecting with readers is by building familiarity. By posting on a regular basis they will get to know the type of person you are, the type of articles you write and find out more about the websites you run. A one off guest post can be a hit or a miss but if you write regularly for a blog you will be able to engage with readers. They might not agree with your viewpoint on one subject but they may on another.

I’ve not yet directly compared the benefits of guest posting on many websites against posting on a select few. Perhaps the best solution for those of you who do guest post a lot is to guest post on a small selection of blogs regularly in addition to guest posting on new blogs every now and then. Traffic is something that you will be able to monitor accurately though it would be interesting to see if you get more comments or tweets on the articles that are published on your ‘regular blogs’.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Good luck,
Kevin

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Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life

You are what you think...
Everything you do in life is determined by the quality of your thinking. If you aren't thinking clearly, you're at the mercy of everyone else-from dishonest politicians to aggressive, stop-at-nothing ad agencies. Unfortunately, many people never give any thought to how they think. No wonder they're susceptible to the frustration, pain, ineffectiveness, and financial loss that result directly from poorly considered thinking. Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life-as a professional, as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and even as a lover.

Price: $40.99

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Complete Hindi with Two Audio CDs: A Teach Yourself Guide (Teach Yourself Language)

It's easy to teach yourself Hindi!

Complete Hindi: A Teach Yourself Guide provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Hindi, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Hindi with confidence.

Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society. The accompanying audio CDs contain all dialogues that appear in the course book, recorded by native speakers.

Features:

One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started

Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience

Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress

Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the basics of the language

Price: $40.00

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Global Issues, Local Arguments: Readings for Writing (2nd Edition)

Global Issues, Local Arguments: Readings for Writing features high-interest arguments on significant global issues and emphasizes their connection to our lives–all the while developing critical thinking, rhetorical, analysis, synthesis, argumentation, and research skills.

Price: $71.60

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Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions

Anyone who has ever entrusted a troubling secret to a journal, or mourned a broken heart with a friend, knows the feeling of relief that expressing painful emotions can bring. This book presents astonishing evidence that personal self-disclosure is not only good for our emotional health, but boosts our physical health as well. In controlled clinical research funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, psychologists James W. Pennebaker sheds new light on the powerful mind/body connection. Dr Pennebaker asks ordinary people to discuss their most difficult memories - including traumatic experiences they have never revealed to a soul - and traces the medical effects of this disclosure. The book interweaves the resulting data with insightful case studies on secret-keeping, confession and the hidden price of silence. Filled with information and encouragement, Opening Up explains: Why suppressing inner problems takes a devastating toll on health How long-buried trauma affects the immune system How writing about your problems can improve your health Why it's never too late to heal old emotional wounds When self-disclosure may be risky - and how to know whom to trust This book would appeal to readers interested in understanding the relationship between emotional and physical health, and in minimizing the harmful effects of stress. Written for a general audience, the book also contains much of value to practitioners and students of psychology and psychotherapy.

Price: $18.00

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Forever, Erma: Best-Loved Writing From America's Favorite Humorist

Erma Bombeck occupied a seat of honor in the homes of millions of Americans. Hers was inevitably the column you read aloud at the breakfast table, the piece you tore out on the bus to send to your mother, or the clipping you stuck on the fridge as a chuckling reminder of our modern lives' sublime ridiculousness. Bombeck had an eye for our common experience and a knack for throwing it into touching relief; we laughed because we saw ourselves in her work. She died last April, and this collection--the profits of which benefit her favorite charities--pulls together some of her best loved columns. The columns span Bombeck's career and the book includes tributes delivered at her memorial service.

Price: $16.99

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Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Price: $13.99

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Thomas Paine : Collected Writings : Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters (Library of America)

Paine was the impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, and this volume brings together his best-known works--"Common Sense," "The American Crisis," "Rights of Man," "The Age of Reason," along with a selection of letters, articles and pamphlets that emphasizes Paine's American years.

Price: $35.00

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A Fresh Look at Writing

In an era when teachers struggle for quality time with their students, Donald Graves introduces a text that creates lifetime writers as well as responsible learners--a text that focuses on teaching that lasts.

A Fresh Look at Writing is Graves's most comprehensive book yet. In it, he expands on many of his earlier approaches, examining portfolios, record keeping, methods for teaching conventions, spelling, and a rich range of genre including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He demonstrates how to bring writing into your own life and experience the joys of the craft along with the students.

"Actions," glossed objectives appearing throughout the book, provide new ways to understand yourself and reach your students. With them, Graves helps you profit from your own history as learner, listen to children more effectively, discover their potential, yet expect more from them.

A Fresh Look at Writing is a true resource for professionals who want the latest ideas on the teaching of writing, as well as for preservice teachers about to step into the classroom for the first time.

The accompanying Professional's Guide assists those who want to build a writing or language arts course around the text. It features a detailed, week-by-week description of fourteen sessions, including guidelines for background preparation in writing; reading and working with children; classroom demonstration; and journal reflection. In addition, the guide shows how A Fresh Look at Writing can be used as a supplement to reading courses, research studies, summer courses, and workshops.

To learn more about Donald Graves, visit www.donaldgraves.org.

Price: $41.25

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There Are 3 Thing’s Wrong With This Head Line

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

This guest post is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash

As a blogger, you expect your readers to give you their valuable time that they could be spending elsewhere. If you’re going to ask that much of them, don’t they deserve your best effort in return?

When your posts are loaded with spelling and grammar mistakes, you’re telling your readers one or both of two things:

I can’t be bothered to learn the language I’ve chosen to communicate in.My content is so vital and compelling that its form is unimportant.

Democratization has its advantages, and alas, its drawbacks. 572 years ago, Johann Gutenberg was the only person on Earth who could have his words disseminated en masse. (And even he was but the messenger, merely spreading others’ divinely inspired works.) Today, anyone with a Return key and an opinion can search for an audience. Does that mean that you deserve one?

Look at the most popular blogs, the ones with critical acclaim, and/or a large readership. Technorati lists The Huffington Post, Hot Air, several members of the Gawker family, Mashable and TechCrunch among its top 20. Even the inane TMZ is on the list. Regardless of how you feel about left-wing politics, right-wing politics, general snarkiness, social media news, technology or the lives of celebrities, all the blogs on the list have something in common that also-ran blogs don’t.

Proper, comprehensible English, delivered in sentences that you don’t have to reread to make sense of. In 2011, with so much of the world’s knowledge available to any of us, it’s astounding that there exist bloggers who’ve advanced past adolescence yet still don’t know that plurals don’t take apostrophes.

When I decry this (I’m the kind of person who thinks that Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson deserve their own Nobel Prize category), I’m often met with the standard responses. These fall into three categories:

I didn’t have time.Who cares?(No response at all.)

In other words, correct English isn’t that important. My one-word response to that is: garbage.

Unlike most topics of debate, there’s no room for difference of opinion on this one. People on the other side of this issue are like those who defend flat earth theory or who argue that thiomersal causes autism. There’s no reasoning with them. To disagree here is to say that sloppiness and ignorance are of no consequence. That insulting your readers is fine. That the rules of discourse don’t apply to you.

If your defence is that you’re not some fancy-pants academic who obsesses over a set of archaic rules about how to communicate, maybe you should find something to do that doesn’t involve words.

One irony is that non-native English speakers are behind some of the most grammatically sound (and thus most readable) blogs out there. Take Aloysa of Aloysa’s Kitchen Sink. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear she’d been writing in and speaking English her whole life. English is her third language, after Lithuanian and Russian. I’d cite examples of the opposite, native English speakers who each write like a cat walking on a keyboard, but they’re easy to find. Besides, I made enough enemies with my last ProBlogger post.

My site, Control Your Cash, hosts the weekly Carnival of Wealth. It’s a blog carnival in which I showcase what are ostensibly the best and most thought-provoking personal finance articles of the prior seven days. I need about 30 entrants for the carnival to be of a decent length. If I limited entry to those who spell and punctuate correctly, even if they had nothing interesting to say about their subject of choice, I’d be lucky to run three posts a week. The carnival would be less of a carnival and more of a quiet evening playing chess at the library.

I’m not talking about being able to articulate the difference between the pluperfect progressive tense and the ablative case. I’m talking about, at a minimum, activating and using the spelling and grammar features that come with MS Word, or Apple Pages, or whichever word processor you create your magic with. If you don’t know that you need to do this, then you almost certainly do. No thought is so profound that it can’t benefit from the right presentation. If you can think it and type it out, then you can spend a few minutes making it readable before you decide to unleash it on the universe.

This isn’t about you. It almost never is. It’s about your customers, i.e. your readers. They’re literate enough to have navigated their way to your site, and deserve to be written to in a clear, syntactically correct manner. Otherwise, why should they care about what you have to say?

Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at greg@ControlYourCash.com.

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50% Discount Ends in 36 Hours on the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit

A few weeks ago here on ProBlogger we launched a product I’m really proud of—the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit written by the Web Marketing Ninja (the guy who has helped me shape my own blogging business model over the last few years).

The kit is essentially based around three things:

a comprehensive ebooka library of 21 templates, documents and examples to help you develop your own blogging business modela 70-minute bonus recording of a Q&A webinar that the Ninja, Chris Garrett, and myself did last week for buyers of the kit.

The kit is really about helping bloggers who want to get serious about turning their blog into a business to do just that. You can read the full details of what’s included and who it’s for here.

We launched the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit with a limited-time 50% discount (down from $99.99 to $49.99).

The kit has had some really positive reviews and feedback so we’ve left the discount open a little longer than we’d anticipated, but that discount ends in around 36 hours time (this Friday, US time).

So if you’re looking for some teaching from an experienced online marketer on how to make your blog profitable, grab your copy of the kit today.

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Make an App to Engage Your Blog’s Readers

This guest post is by Leah Goodman of AppsGeyser.

A few months ago, when I started working for AppsGeyser, a friend asked me if I could turn her blog into an app, to which I responded, “Yes.” Then she asked me the more important question: why would she want to do that?

There are loads of reasons. Here are just a few ways you can use an app to bring new readers to your blog and give more value to your current readers.

Copyright taka - Fotolia.com

Mobile users can read your blog on a mobile RSS reader, but reading a blog through an app means that they’re coming to your blog specifically. It’s a different level of engagement. They’re looking for this blog’s icon. They’re looking to interact with this blog each time. It’s not just one of a bunch of publications.

Regular readers will have your blog in their RSS feeds on their mobile devices, but new mobile readers are much more likely to find your blog by searching for apps than by searching the Web. Having an app gives bloggers a whole additional avenue for discovery.

Once people have downloaded the app, you can engage them in some really great ways, too. Provide unique content for app users, creating the sense that they’ve joined a “secret society,” just by downloading the app. Utilize the fact that it’s not just an RSS feed, and have them vote, fill out forms, and leave comments without having to use a different interface.

Last, but definitely not least, is the idea of push messaging. With an app, it’s easy to send messages to people who’ve downloaded your app—even if they’re not checked in.

Push messages are just like text messages to everyone who has the app installed. For a craft blogger, this might be the way to tell people that the project everyone’s been asking about is finally completed, and the instructions are up.  Are you a mommy blogger in her ninth month? Push messaging is a great way to instantly let everyone know it’s a girl! Financial blogger? This is the way to tell everyone the mortgage is finally paid off! The possibilities to connect more closely are right there, the moment a blog becomes an app.

There are a number of ways to make a blog into an app.

You can have an app developer create a custom app for you. This is the most expensive option, but it will give you an app that looks perfect, works beautifully, and gives you all the special features you want to offer your readers.You can use a service that turns an RSS feed into an app, such as Android Apps Maker or Mippin.Our recommendation (and yes, we’re slightly biased) is to use AppsGeyser, because it gives you the full power of your blog in an app.

Your blog app needs to be distributed in two main ways.

The first is on the blog itself. This is achieved by taking the app’s link information and adding it to the blog. It’s important to copy the QR code to make it easy for readers to download the app easily with just a click of their phone camera.

The second avenue of distribution is the Android Market. This is how new readers will find the app and, by extension, your blog. When adding the app to the Android Market, pay special attention to the app’s name and description. The name and description are what prospective readers will search when they are looking for new apps to download. Be especially careful about the name, as it’s a problem to change it later. You can change the description later if you’re not happy with it.

Don’t skimp on your icon and screenshots, either. We’ve put together a post on making an attractive icon without hiring a designer. An attractive-looking app is an important part of reaching a wider audience.

Does your blog have an app? How has it affected your readership? Share your experiences in the comments.

Leah Goodman is a Content and Community Manager at Abel Communications, managing the blog and community for AppsGeyser.com. She believes in a t-shirt economy and is an amateur juggler.

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Why Bloggers Should Pay Attention to the New Affiliate Tax Laws

This guest post is by Yasmine Mustafa of 123LinkIt.com.

The Business Insider recently reported that ten thousand affiliates were recently dropped from Amazon’s Affiliate Program with little warning.

How much income would you lose if you were no longer permitted to use the program?

This is an issue that bloggers in California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are currently facing. They were instantly cut from Amazon’s affiliate program due to a new affiliate tax law.

Update: Amazon dropped the ballot fight last week and cut a deal with California on the collection of sales tax. According to CNN Money, they have not stated whether or not they will reinstate their CA affiliates.

How did it happen? What can you do to avoid this law from passing in your state?

Online retailers such as Amazon that do not have a physical presence are not required to collect sales tax like brick-and-mortar businesses. Big companies like Wal-Mart who are taxed see this as an unfair advantage and are paying lobbyists to push what is now called the “Amazon tax” or the “affiliate nexus tax.”

In short, this affiliate tax states that online merchants can in fact be taxed if they have a “nexus” or connection within the state. Affiliate marketers are one of the groups of people viewed as a connection. As a result, state governors in the above-mentioned states are signing a law that taxes Amazon and other online vendors through its affiliates. They are now being treated as having a physical presence and are subject to pay taxes.

Amazon has reacted immediately. Wanting to avoid being subject to costly tax inquiries from the government, they are cutting connections to every state that passes the affiliate tax by terminating agreements with all affiliate marketers, leaving many bloggers with decreased incomes and some with no incomes from their blog. As long as there are states that do not tax its sales, Amazon has stated that it will continue to avoid affiliate marketing in the states that do. As of June 30, 2011, California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have been affected by the nexus tax.

The war is not lost and bloggers can make a difference in fighting back or preventing the affiliate tax law from passing in their state.

Visit the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) Tax Nexus site to further educate yourself and join one of their state-specific Google groups.Join PMA’s fight in the reversal of the tax currently underway in certain states. To learn more, visit PMA’s contribution page.Bloggers can write their state representative and explain how the legislation will harm their income. The best letters are concise and honest, and include supporting examples. About.com has a great structure on how to write letters to Congress that is worth checking out beforehand.

If you have been affected by the affiliate tax, there are other options consider.

Find other affiliate programs to join. Some of the most popular that can fulfill Amazon’s inventory include Barnes and Noble, Buy.com, Best Buy, Newegg, the Apple Store, Wal-Mart, Target, and Sears.Sign up for an affiliate tool that aggregates all the affiliate programs and automatically embeds affiliate links in your blog. These include 123LinkIt (Disclaimer: I am the Founder of 123LinkIt), Skimlinks and Viglink.Relocate. This is a drastic step but worthwhile if your revenue warrants it.

Will national standards for taxing online retailers be implemented?  How will all this affect bloggers and small businesses? Let us know in the comments!

Yasmine Mustafa is the Founder of 123LinkIt.com, a service that allows WordPress bloggers to earn affiliate revenue from product keywords in their content. It is currently the #1 downloaded affiliate plugin in WordPress.

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Bushido for Bloggers: What Samurais and Bloggers Have in Common

This guest post is by Aman Basanti of ageofmarketing.com.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure is the most famous text on bushido, the warrior code of the samuari. Written in an era when Japan was obsessed with warfare and martial prowess, the book offers instruction on how a samurai should live and die.

The most famous line in Hagakure is, “I have found that bushido means to die. It means that when one has to choose between life and death, one quickly chooses the side of death.”

Modern scholars find such a statement horrifying. The author’s obsession with death is disturbing. Even the Edo Confucians of the time condemned Tsunetomo’s morbid teaching.

But if you look past the shock and absurdity of the statement, there is logic and sensibility behind Tsunetomo’s advice. In fact, once you understand what the statement is really saying, you realize that Tsunetomo is not preaching obsession of death; he is preaching freedom from its obsession.

What Tsunetomo is saying is that being afraid of death attracts it. Fear of death paralyses the warrior in battle stopping him from thinking clearly and acting correctly. When you accept death, however, you neutralise its paralysing effects. You become apt at dealing with the stress of combat. You become better at mobilising your martial skill, therefore increasing your chance of survival.

It is a great paradox that by accepting death you increase your chances of surviving in battle.

But you are not a samurai. Why do Tsunetomo’s words matter to you?

Copyright Galina Barskaya - Fotolia.com

Whether it is dying in battle or failing as a blogger, fear of failure paralyses people. Like samurais in combat, would-be bloggers get so consumed by the fear of getting it wrong that it stops them from starting on their idea.

After the excitement of researching the idea, of thinking of the possibilities, of counting the potential dollars in your head, doubt starts to set in. Do I have the time to do this? Will the people I have to market to or network with like my products, ideas and style? Will I be able to make this blog successful in time to quit my job?

You put off the idea for a week, a month … before you know it, another six months have passed and you are not much closer to execution of your blog idea.

I certainly felt this way when I decided to start my blog. I wanted to get the design right. I wanted to get my strategy right. While some of the planning was important, much of it was just procrastination. I wanted to launch in November 2010, but I ended up launching in May 2011—six months behind schedule. In the end I stopped trying to get it perfect and took the plunge, and am glad for it. Improvement, like education, is a lifelong activity. You cannot wait till you know everything before you start.

Even after they get started, many bloggers do not give it their all. They do not work at it seriously enough. Why? Because that way they can still hold onto the mental comfort of, “I could have made it if I tried.” Just think of how many people you have met who will look at a successful person and say, “I could have been him or her if I tried as hard.”

Unfortunately, mental comforts do not put food on the table. They do not make you a celebrity. They do not win you interviews or awards. All they do is keep you ticking along until you are six feet under and not in a position to do anything.

If you are such an individual, Tsunetomo’s words could not be timelier. Accept failure. See it is as another aspect of life, as another season in the year, as another colour in the rainbow. Do not think of it as an end, but another starting point.

Don’t buy it? Then take a look at the list below. These are famous individuals who failed before they succeeded.

Abraham Lincoln went bankrupt running a general store. Had to surrender everything he had, including his horse and navigation gear. Then went on to become the President of America.Walt Disney went bankrupt after his first film studio failed. Then invented Mickey Mouse and started the juggernaut that we today know as Walt Disney.Henry Ford went bankrupt after starting his first car business, Detroit Automobile. Then founded Ford Motor Company and never looked back.

Failure is not the worst thing that could happen to you, it is mediocrity. Failure lets you move on, mediocrity just stalls you.

Is the fear of failure holding you back? Has it done so in the past? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Aman Basanti has written for a number of A-list blogs including ProBlogger, MarketingProfs and Business Insider. He shares his secrets to getting guest posts on A-list blogs in his new FREE e-book – Guest Posting Secrets: 25 Tips to Help You Get More Guest Posts. Visit Ageofmarketing.com/guest-posting-secrets to download it now for FREE (No opt-in required).

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7-point Checklist For Bloggers Who Want to Create a Profitable Blog

This guest post is by Peter G. James Sinclair of Motivational Memo.

Before I aggressively started to build my Motivational Memo blog at the beginning of this year I had already owned a web design company for over seven years.

During that time I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly in web design, and now that I have entered the blogging industry I continue to see the same mistakes being made by many bloggers.

So use this quick checklist to analyze your own blog.

Have you clearly identified your audience?What’s in it for the client when they come to your blog?Do you have a call to action?Is your blog outstanding? What do you do differently from others?Do you sell the right things—most profitable and easiest to deliver?What are the best things you are doing in your niche?Have you a clear purpose for each web page?What action do you want your visitors to take?Do you provide quality information?Are you building a list?Are you selling a product or service?Are you gathering referrals?Are you building a relationship with your readers?Have you built credibility and authority in your niche?Have you promoted your success through a Press, Awards, or Featured-in page?Do you realize that you are building an asset that you can sell?Do you know that you need more than one website if you want to make money from blogging?Do you write headlines that are benefit driven?Does your writing stand out amongst the crowd?Do you provide proof either through testimonials, comments, featured articles, endorsements, and statistics—in text, audio, and video format?Is your call to action clear?Does your offer provide great value?Does every page have a benefit-laden headline?Do you demonstrate how you stand out in your niche?Do you use proof of claims you make about products/services?Do you provide one call to action with clear instructions per web page above the fold?Do you make no-brainer offers even for opt-in?Are you enthusiastic without hype, but rather provide enthusiasm with substance?Do you write the way you speak?Do you avoid jargon?Do you use a double-readership path—provide headlines and sub headlines that make it easy for readers to skim your piece before reading the entire article?Is your domain name clever, quirky, or meaningless?Have you used your business name, unless you are well known? Have you used your personal name, unless you are well recognized?Have you used a .net where there’s a .com site available?Have you used the Google Keyword tool to identify some of the keywords people are searching for on the Internet in your niche?Have you chosen a domain name that grabs your attention through clear communication?Do you use white writing on black or colored background that makes it hard for people to read?Do you have a cluttered or confusing layout?Is your top banner large or complex and slow to load?Do you use big blocks of text?Do you write text in all-capitals?Do you provide captions (where appropriate) on photos that are keyword rich and benefit-driven?Do you use too many fonts, colors, and sizes?Is your blog quick to load?Do you have a clean, simple, narrow banner at the top of your blog that creates the right feeling on your site?Do you break up text with sub headings, bullet points, and photos?Do you have a white background and use colored headlines and black text?

For blogs to make money, there is usually an attached web page that will promote products, courses, etc. So you might need to analyze these pages as well.

Do you provide an obvious way to buy online?Do you use a secure payment processor?Do you provide a number of ways for people to purchase—credit card, ClickBank, PayPal, or even for some an printable form, depending on your demographics?Do you provide a money-back guarantee?Do you allow for payments in customers’ local currencies?Is your offer obvious, providing clear instruction for buying above the fold?Do you use a recognized payment processer?Is your opt-in above the fold?Do you provide an incentive for visitors to provide their name and email?Do you ask for too much information?Do you have our opt-in on your sales pages, and did you know that if you do this you could reduce sales by up to 75%?Do you communicate regularly with those who opt-in to your blog or newsletter, and did you know that responsiveness will halve after each three months of no communication?Do you get at least a 25% opt-in result?Do you offer something customers desperately want in return for their name and email?Do you make it easy and obvious to opt in above the fold—a single opt in requiring minimal details?Do you use an automated way to follow up?Do you make offers to your list—your own products/services or others in return for an affiliate commission?Do you give twice as much as you ask by providing good value?Do you believe in the concept of “build it and they will come”?Do you only using one or two marketing methods?Do you only use online-to-online marketing?Do you outsource the marketing or manage the outsourcing properly?Do you test, monitor, and fine-tune?Do you use out of date marketing methods or only use the latest craze in marketing?Do you use multiple marketing methods—free and paid, tried and tested, and new?Do you use offline-to-online marketing?Do you understand your marketing strategy well enough to train others to help you?Do you collect stats on results weekly, or per campaign?Are you marketing to your existing list—email, social media, sms, hard mail, etc.?Do you use SEO, Google Adwords, Google Places?Do you use paid traffic, Facebook PPC, banner ads?Do you build or buy lists in your niche or even pursue joint ventures?Have you ever thought of buying an offline list and developing an online list?Do you write guest articles for other blogs in your niche and even other niches?Do you submit articles to directories?Have you used offline free publicity?Do you seek out referrals?Do you interact regularly through social media—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn?Do you run competitions?Do you give things away to your database?Do you conduct surveys?Do you partner with online thought leaders in your niche?Do you help your readers to engage one with another?

So there you have it. Tick off all the things that you are doing well, and then begin to implement all the things that you could do better. You will be amazed at the results.

Peter G. James Sinclair is in the ‘heart to heart’ resuscitation business and inspires, motivates and equips others to be all that they’ve been created to become. Receive your free copy of his latest eBook Personal Success Blueprint at http://www.selfdevelopmentmastermind.com and add him on Twitter @PeterGJSinclair—today!

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Behind the Scenes: How a ProBlogger Product Sales Page is Made

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

I tweeted a couple of days ago how wonderfully evolutionary sales page copy can be as it passes between the different people who are working on it. At the time, I likened it to Chinese whispers with a happy ending.

It’s a tweet that culminated from the copywriting process for Darren’s brand new book on DPS, Click! How to take Gorgeous Photos of your Kids. The book’s sales page presented some interesting challenges for me and reminded me of some important lessons that I thought would be good to share with you all.

This is how the sales page for Click! came into being.

All of Darren’s sales page start with a semi-workshop, usually with Darren, Jasmin, and myself. We’re not at this stage thinking about the specific words we’ll use—we’re thinking about the core message we’re hoping to convey and how we’ll present it. We weigh up the core benefits of the product and pick which one we’re going to lead with. It normally starts with a bit of a brain dump and ends with us exploring more specific personas—the ones for which we created the product in the first place.

With Click!, we started with a simple audience definition: “those who wanted to take photos of kids,” but soon realized that it needed to run a little deeper than that. We came up with four target personas: moms, dads, grandparents, and pro photographers. Whilst the book is perfect for all of them, the key benefits of buying the book were distinctly different for each group. We discussed options to create a page that conveyed a message to all, but settled for focusing on moms. We felt they were more likely to respond emotionally to the sales page.

Often the hardest part in the copywriting process is to draw a line in the sand and put an initial draft into play. It can be quite daunting but among the team at ProBlogger we have a Georgina, and that always gets us off to a good start.

From a short brief from Jasmine, Georgina provided the first draft. This was always going to be a tricky one for her, as there was a strong emotional entanglement in the messages (Moms and capturing the memories of their kids), and that meant we’d need to tread a fine line between making an emotional connection and looking shallow. I think Georgina did a great job, and we could have run with this version right out of the box, however Darren and I always like to take things a little further.

I just realized something as I’m writing this post: I’ve known Georgina for over five years. She’s used to me pulling apart her copy. But all’s fair—she’s changed as many of my words in the past with her editorial hat on. So the deliberation stage usually takes place with Darren and myself shooting it our over Skype. Sometimes we’re only tweaking things here and there; other times we’re making wholesale changes. A couple of hours later, we end up with a second version of the sales copy loaded up on Darren’s blog.

With Click! I decided to re-write the whole first section, as I felt we could be a little stronger in our messaging, and a little shorter in words. I spent some time and came up with a version that Darren incorporated into the final sales page. There were a couple of things I wasn’t 100% sure about, and I was keen to see what would happen in the next phase—the field test.

There is nothing scientific about our field tests. Depending on the product, we’ll usually pick a few connections from our networks, and get them to honestly tell us what they think of the sales page content. Formal tests would follow a more structured approach, with a little more thought put around specific questions, but we’re usually running out of time, and with true blogger spirit, do what we can with what we’ve got.

With Click! It was pretty easy to contact all the moms we knew that were online at the time. But that was where the easy part ended! The response we got was interesting. The couple of phrases I wasn’t sure about basically horrified every mom who saw them. It was back to the drawing board, pronto. Whilst I’d never call writing fun, all I can say is I’m glad we knew before we email a couple of hundred thousand people! Motivated by some of the suggested alternatives, we set about creating a second revision.

Nine times out of ten we never get to this, however, in the case of Click! the moms had spoken, and we’d made some pretty extensive changes from their feedback—and hoped we were right. So we re-tested the copy. A few nervous minutes later, the feedback was much better and we had a sales page ready to ship.

Once we’re happy, all our sales pages go through some pre-flight checks. A final pass at the copy to make sure as many typos are corrected as possible. Then we check and double-check that all the order buttons work, and the images are in place. Once that’s done it’s off to launch we go…

Whilst the lead-up is quite extensive, it’s the result that matters. In the first nine hours of launch conversion rate of the sales page was around 10%—there’s nothing wrong with that!

There are a few important lessons that we can take from this latest sales page evolution:

I’m not a mom, and I don’t have any kids, so I need to be mindful that I’m writing a sales page for someone completely different from me. Seeing things from others’ perspectives is the key to writing sales pages that will convert more people than just yourself. If you’re ever unsure, seek feedback from others.

Within the first version of this sales page, we included one sentence that struck the wrong chord with the reviews. There are over 500 words in this page, yet five seemingly innocent words could turn buyers away in droves. If there’s anything that can show you the power of copy, this is it.

Suffice it to say my initial revisions did more harm than good. But the second revision turned things around sharply. You need to be careful not make changes for their own sake, and if you do, make sure you take a step forward rather than backward.

So there you have the life and times of a team ProBlogger sales page. And we haven’t even started the A/B testing yet!

Stay tuned for more posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja — author of The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer for a major web brand.

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How Tumblr Helped Put My Site on Top

This guest post is by Ryan Shell of Fashables.

I won’t even begin to act like I’m some sort of SEO ninja, because I’m not. What I do know is that a particular post on one of my sites has ranked in the top three spots on Google, with a majority of that time spent at number one and outranking a major clothing brand.

Tumblr played a huge part in making that happen, and I’d like to share my almost accidental findings.

Break dancing (Image courtesy PhotosbyRy.com)

I’m a marketer by day, but one of my many side projects is running a men’s and women’s fashion blog called Fashables. I attended a Dockers event on April 7 for the launch of one of a new line of pants, the Alpha Khakis.

After the event, I went home, wrote a new post and scheduled it to be published the following day. The post was well optimized for the phrase “Dockers Alpha Khakis” and search engines have since sent my site a good amount of traffic for those keywords.

One of the reasons why I’ve received the traffic is because of keyword optimization, but another huge part of the SEO puzzle is what happened with Tumblr, and that’s the real story here.

This could get confusing, so keep I mind that Dockers Alpha Khakis is the primary post in question.

A recurring feature on the site is a street style fashion post that is published twice a week. One of the photos previously published is the one you see to the right—it’s of a young girl taking part in a break-dancing circle at Union Square in New York City.

One of Fashables readers evidently liked the photo enough to share it on Tumblr. Now, this is where the accident happened.

When they shared the photo on Tumblr they, for a reason unknown to me, linked the photo to the Dockers Alpha Khakis post on Fashables.

Once the photo hit Tumblr, it got reblogged and reblogged—maybe 40 or so times in total. Each reblog provided another link back to the Dockers Alpha Khakis post on Fashables and increasing the post’s Google juice.

Before long, I started noticing that searches for “Dockers Alpha Khakis” were sending a decent amount of traffic to Fashables.

In fact, for quite some time my post was coming up number one in Google searches and outranking the main Dockers website. This was a huge deal: my little fashion blog was outranking a major brand’s website. This had my inner nerd awfully excited, which made my mind curious about how these findings could be used, on purpose, in the future.

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about ways things were done or ideas about outcomes, but at the end of the day, you need to know how they can impact you.

For this Tumblr example, my immediate thinking is that this could alter the way bloggers, or anyone wanting to promote a specific webpage, run contests.

Currently a lot of people who do giveaways focus on email entries, comment entries, Facebook entries, and Twitter entries. The time may now have come for Tumblr to be part of that game. If you want a high search engine rank for Widget X, using Tumblr to have a link reblogged time and time again will add significant influence to a specific page and its keywords.

Keep in mind that the photo that was posted to Tumblr from Fashables had only one link that connected it to the Dockers post. To be clear, there wasn’t a mention of the product or keyword in the original Tumblr post, so this method can be used without appearing overly spammy or self promotional.

In the end, I didn’t plan on ranking so high for “Dockers Alpha Khakis,” but I certainly welcome the traffic that has been driven to Fashables from search engines. Do you think this tactic could work for you?

Ryan Shell is a marketer by day, and he runs the fashion blog Fashables by night. Connect with him on Twitter at @RyanShell. And if you like fashion, make sure you connect with @Fashables.

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How I Started Making $3,000 a Month Blogging About Travel

This guest post is by Marcello Arrambide of wanderingtrader.com.

It has been about one full year since I started blogging about travel, and I have started to generate $3,000 or more a month via my travel blogs.

My very first post was published on May, 4th, 2010, and it was nothing but grammar mistakes and partaking in an activity that I really don’t enjoy: writing. I’m telling you this because even though I am a horrible writer, English os not my first language, and I need other people to proofread my work, I’m proof that you really don’t have to be the best at something in order to do make money via your blog. I have started to make at least $3,000 a month via my main travel blog, wanderingtrader.com.

Initially, I started my blog to capture traffic for a day trading business that I was running. I wanted to get more people interested in day trading and, well, get more sales. What it turned into was my own personal travel blog about my passion for travel, and tips about day trading and travel. My whole blogging strategy is based on exposure; you might have read my post about focusing on quantity of traffic instead of quality when you first start out.

There are a million posts on ProBlogger about making money blogging online and frankly almost everyone online makes money the same way. It seems there aren’t very many new ways that bloggers can make money from blogs. Darren wrote a great post on how bloggers make money from blogs if you are interested in learning your different options.

Instead of talking about ways to make money blogging I’m going to share how I managed to start making $3,000 a month via my travel blog in less than a year. I consider it ten months, really, since I took two months off when I got extremely frustrated by a small change in my blog design that crippled the traffic to my main blog. The list below is what I started focusing on, in order of importance.

There are some instances where you find advertisers, but for the most part advertisers find you.

Once you have the right criteria you are eligible for a range of money making options with your blog. The most important thing is getting your name out there. You want to try to focus on guest posts, SEO, and getting on every single blog list that’s related to your niche. The more people who see your blog, the more likely it’ll be that advertisers will find you as well. Below are some examples of the travel-related lists that my blogs are listed on on.

By working on exposure, authority will come naturally. You want to be careful how quickly you build your authority online, because you can’t become an expert in your niche if you only launched your website yesterday.

Creating solid authority for yourself, and advertisers will know that you have a website that is both legitimate and powerful in the niche you’re covering. If you achieve enough exposure, and have good authority, then you may be considered for things like a press trip. That’s a bonus that might be restricted to the travel niche, but you get the idea.

How we measure authority is something of a debatable issue, since most of the lists on the web have some kind of limitation. Either way, when I have asked people specifically about this they have repeatedly given me the same information:

As I explained earlier, there was a time when I got extremely frustrated and just gave up. A redesign to my blog caused me to take a giant hit from Google, and I was extremely annoyed. I just gave up!

If I didn’t take that two- or three-month break, I might have been on my way to making double what I make now. The tactics I’ve outlined so far helped me in the very first month that I started to make money with the blog. I’ve now nearly doubled my income using the strategies I’ll share below.

When you get started blogging, you have to understand that you are the new kid on the block. There are people I know personally who have been blogging for five to ten years, and I call these people the Rat Pack. They’re the cool kids on the block that you want to get to know and work with.

How did you feel when you met that new kid in your class back in school? The way for them to succeed was to avoid being pushy or asking for too much. They had to be part of the community.

I made the new-kid mistake of approaching people the wrong way, and asking for things I shouldn’t have. Luckily I had a few bloggers point me in the right direction, and that allowed me to get to where I am today. Be engaging, but not demanding. Be interested, but not needy. It’s all about being part of the community and not trying to force your way into the cool kids’ group.

By interacting with the Rat Pack, you’ll open yourself to an extensive group of people who already know how things work and can share best practices. Since these people already have exposure, that may allow you to take a shortcut when you are ready to start making money with your blog. By talking to other bloggers in the field, I went from zero advertisers to having a list of over 60. Use the tools above for exposure and authority to find the Rat Pack in your niche.

I’m busy, the guy at Mcdonald’s is busy, your kids are busy. I get it, you’re busy. When I first started blogging I was running a day trading business, traveling around the world, day trading, and running my blog. How did I handle all of this? I hired help. I found what now is a team of employees overseas that I pay to do a lot of the admin and back-office work for me.

The old adage is really true: it takes money to make money. While you may not have hundreds or thousands of dollars to invest in getting someone to help you, you may be able to afford, say, $100 a month. Understand that your time is money. By outsourcing mundane tasks—even if it’s just a few hours’ work a week—you will free up your time to do more important things, like creating quality content and thinking of better ways to make money with your blog.

The one goal I had for my blog was to break even. Any business or blog that you create should at least break even. You’re not going to be doing something for very long if you keep losing money. I pay a team of two people a total of $510 a month for roughly 45-50 hours a week of work. Just imagine the things I can accomplish during that timeframe!

After you have successfully started making money with one site, you can continue on to other ventures to increase your income and your online empire.

Think about expanding to other niches online. My main niche is travel which is absolutely massive. I now am branching out to my other passion, which is day trading. I have started an Online Day Trading Academy to help others, and now I can blog about day trading and travel across two sites, which will significantly increase my exposure online.

What about you? Are you making money from your blog yet? Which of these strategies do you use?

Day Trading from 8 different countries Marcello Arrambide has begun to chronicle his travels around the world on his Wandering Trader Travel Blogs site. He has traveled to over 40 countries in his lifetime and is currently exploring South America. You can find out more about Marcello on his Facebook Page or RSS.

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Action! Can Our Hollywood Experiment Help You Make Money Blogging?

This is a guest post by Joke and Biagio of JokeAndBiagio.com

Setting: a busy production office in Hollywood, California. Joke stares at her husband Biagio in disbelief.

Joke: You bought another book from Darren Rowse?

Biagio: Well, uh, no…this one’s actually by the Web Marketing Ninja…

Her face goes blank.

Joke: Did you just say…Ninja?

ProBlogger, Joke and Biagio

That kind of back-and-forth’s been typical ever since we tip-toed into blogging in 2009.

Sure, it’s always fun to think about monetizing the blog or read about ways to get big traffic.

But realistically, our blog for filmmakers who want to break into Hollywood has been more of a fun distraction than a tool to make us money.

Maybe you’ve felt the same about your own blog? Wondered if banging away on your laptop at 2am would have any (positive) effect on your business? Questioned if the “standard” ways to make money blogging were right for you?

We’ve had those doubts over the past few years.

An idea struck. A new approach to cashing in on our blog that seemed obvious and frightening all at once.

In fact, just saying it out loud freaked out our friends and colleagues.

But we really believe this idea is a win-win scenario for both our readers and our company. It’s a concept that just might work for you, too.

More on that in a minute. First, some background…

As working producers and directors in Los Angeles, blogging was not high on our “to do” checklist for Hollywood success. But we had a personal reason for writing: to create the film and TV blog we wished existed when we were starting out.

You know, back when we were banging our heads against Hollywood’s closed doors, trying to get noticed by anyone in “the game.”

Two-hundred posts and 2500 Twitter followers later, we found ourselves with a small but engaged group of readers who wanted to succeed in film and TV.

And no idea how we were going to monetize our blog.

Other than a few affiliate banners and the occasional Adword, we never embraced “selling” to a community largely made up of struggling artists (an accurate description of us just a few years ago.)

And, since blogging will never be our main income stream (we make a decent living in film and TV) the thought of turning our filmmaking blog into a six-figure sensation seemed pretty silly.

While the notion of being “top bloggers” was romantic, were we really going to:

create e-books?promote affiliate programs?find joint venture partners?

Or were we gonna’ keep chasing Oscars?® and Emmys?®?

Then, the crazy idea came along.

The number one rule of a blog is to provide value, right?

We asked ourselves, “What’s the ultimate value we can provide to our readers? What do they want more than anything?”

In our hearts, we knew the answer: the same thing we wanted while living in our shoe-box, one-bedroom apartment not so long ago.

Access to Hollywood.

So after spending two years educating our readers on what it takes to make it in this business, we’re now opening the same doors that were closed to us for so long.

We’ve invited them to pitch TV shows to us.

When we do sell a project with an aspiring filmmaker (like we just did with our upcoming documentary series Caged on MTV) that person will be paid to work on the show, receive a producer credit, and take a giant leap forward in their careers.

Plus, selling just one series with a reader will instantly make us “six-figure bloggers.”

As a bonus for both us and our readers, anyone who submits a show must join our newsletter. We send out tips and tricks on turning ideas into concrete Hollywood pitches, as well as up-to-the-second info about the kinds of shows we think we can sell at any given moment.

When the day comes that we do take a little time off from making film and TV, that list will prove invaluable should we want to write a book or put up speaking events on working in Hollywood.

How about you? Have you spent years educating your readers on a particular topic? Why not tap into the pool of experts you’ve created?

Most bloggers see readers as potential customers. Maybe it’s time to see them as potential partners instead. Are you:

An independent software developer kicking out posts on the Objective-C language? How about taking pitches from up-and-coming coders on new iPhone apps?Blogging how-to posts about the furniture you craft by hand? Why not expand your line by accepting product concepts from your most accomplished readers?Writing about designing and selling great widgets? Let your fans bring you valuable ideas for better widgets.

Just think: one great idea from a reader could be worth a lot more than your commission on that “weird old trick” affiliate product you’ve been eyeing.

Of course, we had to have our lawyer draw up a proper submission agreement, and anyone wishing to pitch TV show ideas to us will have to go through a formal process. Before you open yourself up to pitches, make sure you’re not open to potential lawsuits. Consult your lawyer.

Biagio: Not bad, right?

Joke nods. Her expression…a glimmer of hope?

Joke: Does this mean you’ll stop shopping at ProBlogger now?

Biagio: Well, uh, no…

Joke sighs.

Joke: Better sell some more shows quick!

Joke and Biagio are a married filmmaking team (Joke’s the wife, Biagio’s the hubby.) Their goal is to help aspiring filmmakers and TV producers break in to Hollywood by providing real-world filmmaking advice and taking TV show pitches from talented, hard-working dreamers. Their current film Dying to do Letterman has been invited by the International Documentary Association to qualify for 2012 Academy Award® Consideration, and they have numerous unscripted TV shows to their credit. Keep in touch with them on Facebook and Twitter.

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