Blogging Tips

Want to learn more about blogging strategies and how to? Then be sure to check out the latest posts in blogging tips!

Don’t Let Hackers Crash Your Blogging Party

by Robert Regehr on May 2, 2012 · 30 comments

This is a guest post by Robert Regehr.

Are you a full-time blogger earning a living from your Wordpress blogs or an aspiring Problogger with your first taste of the freedom that comes from blogging? There’s a ton of really good advice out there on getting up and running from bloggers like Darren Rowse and Yaro Stark. However, there’s shockingly little on protecting your blogging nest egg. If you rely on income from blogging to support your family you need to secure your Wordpress installations immediately. Here are five actionable steps you can take today to ensure hackers won’t disrupt the income stream you’ve worked so hard to build from blogging.

What’s All The Fuss About? I’ve Never Been Hacked

The default Wordpress install is about as secure as a wet paper bag, especially if you make a habit of blogging from your favorite coffee shop. You’ve put a lot of hard work into enjoying the rewards that come from blogging. The last thing you want is some script kiddie or hacker taking over your site; it’d be like someone breaking into your home and robbing you blind.

I’m sure you’re very careful when shopping or banking on the Internet; would you ever consider logging into online banking or shopping without looking for the “https” in the URL? If you’re like me and blog with a white chocolate mocha on free Wi-Fi, you’re pretty much shouting your username and passwords to anyone within earshot. Public access points in coffee shops and cafes are far from secure and you never know who’s sitting across from you with a packet sniffer watching your every move.

Fortunately there are steps you can take to secure Wordpress and protect yourself. I’m not just talking about using stronger passwords but actual bank level security for your site. If you’re serious about earning a living from your blogs you simply cannot ignore security when it comes to protecting your online assets.

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Why Bloggers Need to Build a Subscriber List

by Christine Brady on April 25, 2012 · 64 comments

This is a guest post by Christine Brady of Insightful Mommy.

If you have been blogging for any length of time, you have no doubt heard the phrase list building or building a list of subscribers. But what does building a list of subscribers have to do with blogging you may be wondering…

As bloggers, your focus is much like mine – creating great content to share with our readers, staying active on social media, connecting and promoting your blog. But every one of the daily task that we work hard on are all subject to finding your audience.

And unfortunately, your audience may not always follow your blog or follow you on social media. Some may have your blog loaded in their RSS, but what about the readers that don’t?

You need a way to reach them. This is where building a list of subscribers becomes a vital part of your online business strategy.

Let’s face it – list building is all the rage in the Internet Marketing arena. There are Internet Marketers out there who run their businesses solely based on their list on subscribers. Some don’t even have a blog or a Twitter account, but they have a subscriber list that they care for and nurture.

That is an incredible business model – and one that we bloggers are in a great position to pick up on. Bloggers are actually in an even better spot as we have mastered great content and know how to connect with our audience.

The idea of building a subscriber list is not complicated as it may seem.

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6 Tools That Help Bloggers Manage and Monitor Their Online Reputation

by Per on April 11, 2012 · 23 comments

This is a guest post by Per Schmitz.

Nowadays there’s a lot of personal information publicly available on the web. We all have an “online persona” which is directly related to the way people see and judge us as individuals.

Unfortunately managing your online reputation is everything but an easy task.

There are many social media channels where people can spread unbased opinions about others, tag inappropiate photos, and otherwise mess with your reputation. As a blogger, your name stands for the quality and authenticity of your posts, apart from your personal and professional interest in having a “clean and positive” online reputation.

As Google says: “Your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you – whether it is a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update.”

If you want to influence the way people see you online, it’s important to understand that there are two basic techniques for managing your online reputation.

  • Constantly monitor what people are saying about you and respond instantly when necessary.
  • Actively develop your reputation by creating “positive” content. Create a hub such as a personal landing page where people can easily find everything about you in a simple and compact format.

With those two techniques in mind, here are six simple, yet effective tools that might help you along the way to monitor what people are saying about you as well as actively develop and influence your online reputation.

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6 High-Converting Areas To Add An Email Sign-Up Form & Build Your List

by Ricardo Bueno on April 4, 2012 · 48 comments

This is a guest post by Ricardo Bueno.

mail box

We all want more email subscribers. The question is, how do you get them?

Aside from creating high quality, compelling content, you need to promote your email sign-up form so readers know where to go to sign up.

The easier you make it to sign up, the more likely readers are to subscribe. This means, doing the following:

  • Displaying your email sign up forms prominently on your site.
  • Designing your form so that it stands out (compelling headline & contrasting color scheme).
  • Using social proof to persuade readers to subscribe.
  • Making it easy to subscribe (the fewer the fields, the better).

A good email sign-up form will possess each of those qualities.

Once you’ve done that, all that’s left to do is promote your email sign-up form so first-time site visitors and readers know where to subscribe. Here’s a list of high-converting places to add your email sign-up form on your website…

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Blogging Your Way to Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales with Danny Iny

by Danny on March 28, 2012 · 55 comments

This is an interview with Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing. He’s returned to Kikolani to talk to us about how he wrote 80+ guest posts on major blogs in less than a year, earned the nickname “The Freddy Krueger of Blogging”, and skyrocketed Firepole Marketing to success with his Write Like Freddy blog writing training program (aff link).

1. A lot of the readers here at Kikolani would love to get more traffic, subscribers, and sales (as you say), but don’t know where to start. What are they missing?

Well, in my experience, most people are missing one of two things.

The first thing is that Content is King. The truth is that a lot of people make things much more complicated than they have to be; “traffic” becomes this mysterious thing that you try to “drive” to your blog. Every day we stumble onto a new “strategy”, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, SEO, Pinterest, or whatever. We never completely understand how this “strategy” is supposed to “drive” the “traffic”, other than having a vague sense that there’s a lot of traffic on this or that platform, and that somehow you might be able to siphon some of that traffic off to your site.

The truth is a lot simpler than that. Forget about “driving traffic”, and recognize that you’re dealing with people. Real live human beings, just like you. That’s where inbound and content marketing come into the picture. Human beings respond to content, because it’s a way for you to share a glimpse of who you are and what you’re about, while teaching something valuable. That’s how you build a real relationship, and that’s why content creation in general, and good writing in particular, are so critical to succeeding with a blog-based business.

Now, a lot of bloggers actually do get that, but they miss the second thing…

The second thing is that the King can get awfully lonely. See, we’ve all been fed this myth about how things go viral online. I tell three friends, they each tell three friends, and those friends each tell three friends, and pretty soon my server crashes from all the traffic, right? Except that in real life, that’s not how it happens; I tell three friends, and of those friends, one doesn’t listen, the second one isn’t all that impressed, and the third one mentions it to one friend who does nothing.

The network model for things to go viral can still work, but it’s a lot harder than people like to pretend, and it depends on a certain critical mass that most blogs just don’t have. Which means that if you want to build awareness and exposure, you can’t count on the traffic coming to you; you need to put your content where people are already going, and that usually means guest posting on other, bigger blogs.

So in a nutshell, that’s what people are missing: good content, and a guest posting strategy.

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