Creating a Successful Blog Post – From Idea to Promotion

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Some people think blogging is as simple as thinking up a great idea, punching out a couple hundred words, publishing it, tweeting about it, and then being done with it. Others think blogging is a complex activity that is reserved for those who have some kind of gift. The reality is, it is something in between. It’s about ideas, processes, and strategy. It’s about being passionate about a particular topic. It’s about the synergy of taking what is in your head and translating it to make sense to the masses.
So how do you create a blog post? And not just any blog post, but a successful one? It’s about having a plan, from idea to promotion and everything in between. Here is my blog post process in stages.

The Idea Stage

Ideas hit me all the time – they happen offline when I’m at a conference (for example I will have a TON of ideas during Blog World sessions guaranteed), driving, shopping, or even playing with my dog. They happen online while I’m perusing Google Reader subscriptions, reading other people’s posts, making blog comments, or watching my Twitter list feeds whizz on by.
To make your idea stage as beneficial as possible, you have to make sure that you don’t lose any of those great ideas, whether they are ones that you want to start writing about the moment they pop into your head to ones that you might not actually tackle for another couple of weeks, maybe even months. So whenever you get a great idea, keep track of it – write it on a sticky, send yourself an email, record it by voice on your iPhone… whatever it takes to make sure the idea doesn’t get lost somewhere in your mind never to resurface again.
The key to making your idea stage manageable (especially if you have a lot of rogue ideas that come into your mind all of the time) is to take all of those ideas and get them into one place. My personal favorite tool as you might guess from my previous posts here on affiliate marketing organization and measuring blog growth) is a Google Docs spreadsheet. This spreadsheet has four simple columns:

• Category – mine usually blogging, social media, SEO, photography, or business.
• Site – for some titles, I usually try to fit it to one my own blogs or ones I regularly contribute to.
• Title – the great headline idea.
• Notes – miscellaneous information that will help me when I get to actually writing the post.

The beauty of this spreadsheet is that I now have over 70 ideas ready to go when I need them, and I can easily use the filters to look at them by subject or by the site I need to write for. That little bank of ideas has come in handy, especially for blog contests. I have won two so far using topic ideas I had thought about over six months before the contest. I like to think that I was subconsciously saving them for something special, and my mind knew that the contests were the right time to unleash them.

The Writing Stage

Now, the time has come where I need to take one of my roaming ideas and make it into a real, live blog post. This part is usually a fluid process for me – sometimes I start by just writing out everything, then organizing it into logical sections after the fact. Other times I will start with a clear outline of header points and then fill in the information as applicable. I like to leave things a bit unstructured during this stage because I like the possibility of having a new idea pop up in the middle which either takes the post in a new direction or gets added to my idea list for another post.
One thing I have found is key during the writing stage is to not let any distractions get in the way, and one of the biggest distractions I have found is obsessing about grammar and spelling. Of course, this lack of obsession has led to little oopses here and there in my posts, but I find that when I stop because Microsoft Word has highlighted a bunch of misspellings, I lose my writing rhythm – my mojo, so to speak. So I write in WordPad which doesn’t do any kind of checks, then copy the post into Microsoft Word for the editing portion.

The SEO Stage

Notice I didn’t think about search optimization until now. People (especially SEO’s) may disagree with this, but I find that if you’re not thinking about optimization, you’re fully focused on producing content that people will love to read. If you’re focused on how many keywords you can stuff in your header tags, the title, and throughout the content, you take away from the reader’s experience.
This is why I wait until after the post is complete to work on some optimization. I take that title I generated during the idea process and look at it to see what kind of keyword phrases would go best. In a recent post on my site, the post was about (and originally titled) comparing DIYthemes’ Thesis Framework to StudioPress’ Genesis Framework. Now I could have spent the first chunk of my time figuring out better titles, meta descriptions, keywords, etc. and then wrote the post, but I chose to write the post instead.
Once the post was done, I went over to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and started popping in variations of Thesis, Genesis, premium WordPress themes, and so on. And thus was born Thesis vs Genesis – Comparing Premium WordPress Themes. From there, I formulated the meta description, other keywords, trickled through the headers for a bit of tweaking, and voila. Now my post that was constructed purely for reader satisfaction was also made to be SEO friendly.

The Publishing Stage

Wait, isn’t writing and optimizing the post the same as publishing? Nah. I consider some crucial elements during the publishing stage to happen after the writing, editing, and optimizing is done, but before you actually press the publish (or schedule) button.
One thing you want to do during the publishing stage is ensure your post has some kind of call to action. Think about what you want people to do once they’ve read the post – do you want them to purchase a product with your affiliate link, leave a comment, share it on Twitter, read about your services, and/or buy your eBook. If you want people to do something, you need to make sure your post has links to the affiliate products, a question at the end asking people for their opinions, a social sharing button (or a ClicktoTweet link for sites you have no control over their sharing buttons), a lead-in that leads the reader to want your services, and/or a reason that people should logically continue on to check out your eBook.
After establishing your calls to action, you want to ensure that, at the very least, people don’t just leave your post once they’ve finished reading. The way to ensure this is by having some good internal links throughout your content and at the end of the post in the form of Related Posts (WordPress makes a great plugin for related posts too). Internal links might get readers attention as their going along – hopefully they will open them in a new tab and save them for continued reading, and related posts might take them somewhere else on your site right as they might have been considering moving on to another site.
Other great reasons to add internal links include getting a link back from sites that steal your content (because hey, it’s going to happen – might as well get some value out of it right) and getting a handy trackback alert to sites stealing your content since they’ll be inadvertently linking back to your posts. I’ve found many a thieving websites using this tactic.
Last but not least during the publishing stage is deciding when to actually publish your post. Did you write an amazing post on a Saturday? Then you definitely don’t want to hit the publish button – think about a day during the week that will likely bring you more traffic (I prefer Mondays and Tuesdays for the best posts) and schedule it then. Also consider, for those of you in Triberr or those who have a lot of people automatically tweeting your posts when it goes live, the time you are planning to publish. You want all of those tweets to be seen by your target audience as opposed to going out at 2:30 in the morning when your time zone is fast asleep. I have found 9 AM EST best getting the most social sharing and 12 AM PST best for getting the most comments. More commenters are insomniacs I guess.

The Promotion Stage

This, I must admit, is probably my favorite part of blogging. While awesome content is the only thing that will make you go viral, awesome content will never actually go viral if no one sees it. So unless the world comes to your blog on a daily basis without any incentive, you’re probably going to have to go tell the world about your post through blog post promotion.
I have different “levels” of post promotion processes. I don’t think you bring out the big guns for every post you publish – unless you only publish once a week and every post is 100% gold certified awesome. I, for example, have several posts a week that go live between my site and the others I write for. Although you may your heart into every post, you know which ones are killer awesome and which ones are averagely awesome.
For averagely awesome posts, my post promotion process includes:

• Tweeting the post from my account, usually just once between 7 AM PST and 11 AM PST.
• Sharing it on Facebook, LinkedIn, OR Google+, but not all three.

For awesome posts (once a week), my post promotion process includes all of the above plus:

• Sharing it on two out of three networks between Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
• Sharing it with my followers on StumbleUpon (not a quick process as I have almost a thousand and I have found that you have to share in small groups in order for the share to actually work correctly and send to everyone).
• Give it an extra tweet, later in the evening or the next day that it goes live.
• Inclusion in my writing portfolio.
• Inclusion in my custom RSS feed for Triberr, Blog Engage, and other social site submission.

For killer awesome posts, my post promotion process includes all of the above plus:

• Sharing it on all three networks between Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
• Sharing it in groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Multiple tweets with re-worked titles over the course of the next week.
• Blog commenting promotion.
• Direct messaging some partners in social media to see if they’ll help spread the word.

Promotion can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, and then some over the course of the next few days. If you’re entering a blogging contest, you have to step that up ten-fold to ensure you have the most social votes possible to win. And of course, your social promotion isn’t going anywhere if you haven’t built up a good audience, so you have to lay a good foundation before you can have a successful blog post promotion execution.

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How Much Should You Charge For Advertising On Your Blog

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So you have decided to sell ads directly to sponsors on your website or blog.
Great idea.
I’ve made money using this method since the early 2000s. It started off as a trickle – my first ad sale was direct to a small business for $50 a month for one banner on my card game website. From that point forward I’ve grown my income from direct ad sales to the point that I’ve made as much as $5,000 a month from it, and at least $1,000 a month from direct ad sales for ten years straight.

That makes direct ad sales my most consistent income stream, and by far the longest serving income stream I have had online.
During my website investing heyday, I had several websites in several niches, all making money from ads. More recently this blog has been my main source of sponsorship revenue, though I have made money in niches like miniature motorcycles, rap music, small business, and Magic cards.
Of course let’s not forget virtually every mainstream media website, news site, top blogs, youtube, google search – virtually every website you can think of with a sizable audience uses advertising, it is a proven money maker. As long as you have an audience companies want to reach, you have the potential to make money selling ads.

The Ad Management Software I Use

Before I tell you how I came up with a pricing formula, I need to mention the software tool I use to manage ads on this site. It’s a tool I came up with and created with some friends, so naturally I recommend you use it to.

It’s called CrankyAds and can handle rotation, statistic tracking and sales of all your advertising inventory, including banner ads, text link ads and video ads using YouTube videos. It’s simple to install, easy to manage and automates the ad selling process. It’s also free.
Go try it here if you haven’t already – www.crankyads.com

My Ad Pricing Formula Revealed

For as long as I have been a teacher of how to make money with blogs – over 5 years now – I’ve been asked the question over and over again…
How much should I charge for advertising on my blog?
I actually came up with a very simple formula, one that I tell people when presenting on stage and during coaching calls.
This formula has to be considered only a guide. It does not apply the same way to every niche, but I will explain why in a moment. Here it is -

You can charge X dollars per month, per ad, with X being equal to your daily visitors count divided by ten.

So if you get 500 visitors per day, you can expect to make $50 per banner ad.
There are many conditions that can change this calculation. Here are some of them…

• Where you place the ad in your site design can increase or decrease how much you charge. Using the adsense heatmap as a guide, you can determine what areas of your site are the most valuable. For example, if you have 1,000 visitors a day coming to your site, you might charge $200 a month for a banner in your left sidebar, but only $100 a month for the header above the navigation bar.
• What niche your site is in really makes a difference. Some niches will never sell a single ad no matter how much traffic you get (avoid these!), where others can sell out of ads with as low as 100 visitors a day. This ties in to the next point…
• The visitor value of a lead to your sponsor really matters. A person looking to buy a house is worth several thousand dollars to a mortgage broker or real estate agent, hence they can spend more to reach these people. If however your sponsor sells a $10 ebook, they need a certain number of clicks and sales from ads on your site to make it even just worth their while.
• Your ability to reach advertisers who have the highest lead value for your traffic will dictate how much you can charge. My formula is a starting point, but if your sponsor is making $10,000 a month off of your $100 ad, clearly you have some room to negotiate.
• How responsive your audience is really counts. Many niches suffer from serious banner blindness – in fact as a whole I would say most Internet users don’t “see” most banners because they know they are ads (and hence ignore them). To break through the blindness and get a response, you need a very well targeted ad. This is all the more reason to find the right sponsor that matches what your audience is interested in.
• How much sway you have and trust your audience has in you also counts. An individual expert who is respected and listened to, will transfer this trust to the ads on their site. That’s often why “thought leader” blogs can sell so many ads – sponsors want the kudos and referential trust from being associated with that blog and person.
• Once you break milestone traffic numbers like 100,000, 250,000 and a million pageviews a month marks (not unique visitors) you qualify for the “big leagues”. By this I mean you can start landing some big contracts from brand buyers – companies that want brand awareness more so than just raw clicks. At this level you will benefit from working with an ad agency – EJ author and sports blogger Mitch has written about this here – How To Make Money With CPM Advertising On Your Blog

It’s About Targeting, Supply and Demand

At the end of the day, what you charge advertisers is a supply and demand relationship, mixed in with your ability to get exposure to the right advertisers. You can charge as much as you want, as long as you deliver value to the advertiser. They will keep paying you as long as they earn a return, they have a budget and they don’t get more for less somewhere else (if they have budget constraints).
Some niches enjoy companies with massive ad budgets. Cars is one prime example. Car companies spend money advertising to the general consumer. That’s why you will see car ads on YouTube, on a news site, syndicated on content sites in all kinds of different niches – and of course, on car sites too.
General consumables like electronics, computers, movies, books, and food related products and businesses (McDonalds and Coke ads are everywhere!) are other examples of mass-appeal advertisers who don’t care so much about the niche your site is in, they just want a spread across the general population, because the general population is their audience. Other niches will need a much more targeted sponsor.
In your case, you need to look at what type of person reads your site, why they are there and then think about the sponsors who would best service your people.
With my Magic card game website I approached Magic card retailers, both online and offline, to sponsor my site. One in ten of the contacts I made agreed to sponsor my site, and within a few months I had three paying sponsors and my first significant and consistent online income stream.

You Don’t Know Until You Test

One thing I have learned running EJ in particular, is the importance of testing price to find a balance that works.
I do this by looking at how many ads I have sold and then adjusting accordingly. If I haven’t sold many in a month or two, I will lower the price. If the ads sell out quickly, I increase the price. Bear in mind I do this sort of testing because I have enough of a consistent audience coming to EJ, some of whom want to sponsor my site, that I can test. If you don’t have interested parties coming in regularly, you will have to go out there and find sponsors (more on this in a future article).
For example, when I first started offering the very popular 125×125 box banner ads in my right sidebar, I started at a $200 pricing point. At the time I was pretty much applying my formula, as EJ had about 2,000 visitors a day according to Google Analytics.
At that price point after a couple of months I was sold out or almost sold out most of the time. My traffic increased so I increased the price to $250 a month, which worked well, although I do go through peaks and troughs in terms of how many ads sell – anywhere from four to ten of the available ten spots I have. Once I sold out of all ten spots, I increased the cost to $300, however over time some sponsors dropped out and no new ones came back on board, so I dropped it back to $250 (well $249 to be exact), which seems to be the sweet spot.
I also have to factor in that I charge Australian dollars, which at the moment with the Aussie being strong, doesn’t help my ad sales given most of my sponsors are American. If the Aussie dollar drops, it is the other way around.
The great thing about CrankyAds is I can just log in to my WordPress admin panel and change prices any time, which is exactly what I do to test pricing. I recommend you change prices once every month or two – only if you need to of course. If you are happy with how much you are making, then don’t mess with it.

Alternative Pricing

One feature I have used to great benefit over the years, which we just recently made available in CrankyAds, is the ability to offer alternative pricing.
The way I use alternative pricing is to offer discounts for people paying in advance. Pay for six months worth of ads and you get a one month discount. Pay for 12 months and you get two months free.
These are just two examples, you can pretty much do what you like. Obviously the benefit here is to lock sponsors in long term (this is good for you, and also good for your sponsor because if your traffic increases over time, which it will, they still pay the same price and don’t lose their ad spot), you get cash upfront and your sponsor saves money. It’s win-win, especially with the right sponsor.

Start With My Formula

To keep things really simple I recommend you start with my formula –

Your daily unique visitor count, divided by ten, as a base monthly fee per ad.

From there, test. Go out and find sponsors. Make sure your site has an Advertise page and Advertise Here banners running (both things CrankyAds does for you) so people who visit your site are aware of your sponsorship opportunities.
For further intelligence on what price to charge, take a look at sites like yours and see how much they charge for advertising and how much traffic they state they have to justify the price. Make sure you see that they have some paying sponsors before you assume their prices are relevant.
Don’t under price your ads. You might be surprised how much advertisers are willing to spend and if you don’t ask, you won’t know.
One last tip – If you think you can only charge $10 per month per ad, it’s probably best you wait and build up your traffic before you go after direct sponsors. Use affiliate ads in your ad zones for now (CrankyAds can run your affiliate ads for you too).
There’s no greater statement that your site can’t deliver much results to sponsors than charging next to nothing for ads. Do you think your potential sponsor believes you can deliver any result if you charge $10 per month? That’s a great way to demonstrate low perceived value. Raise the price, or wait until you can deliver more results.

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