Stop Wasting Money: How to Get the Most Out of Your Blogging Education

Posted on May 6, 2013 Written by 43 Comments

Over the last couple of years, I have consumed a lot of educational materials – free downloads, ebooks, paid courses, webinars, etc. Chances are, you have too. While it’s OK to toss free downloads to the wayside as far as your wallet is concerned, it’s not OK if you do this with the stuff you pay for. You want to get the most out of your ebooks and courses, otherwise it’s like chucking money in the garbage on a regular basis. And who wants to do that!

wasting-money

Photo Credit: Tax Credits on Flickr

Here are my top 12 tips for making sure you get the most bang for your buck when purchasing conference passes, courses, and ebooks for your blogging education.

PS. Some of the courses mentioned throughout this post will have affiliate links. They are all courses I have taken myself and have found valuable for my blog and my business. You have been warned as per FTC regulations.

1. Take actionable notes as you are reading or listening.

Notice I didn’t say take notes, but take actionable notes. Instead of just writing down a tip, write down how you will apply that tip to your blog. For example, while taking the Bestseller in a Weekend course, instead of writing a note about how to come up with great ebook titles, I wrote down several ebook titles that I would like to write. Chances are, you are going to be most inspired to take action as you are reading or listening to course material, so take advantage of that moment of inspiration.

 

Enter to Win 1 of 3 Lifetime Memberships to ElegantThemes

Posted on April 10, 2013 Written by 79 Comments

Are you in the market for new WordPress themes? If so, then you will want to enter to win one of three lifetime memberships to ElegantThemes.

elegantthemes-giveaway

What is Included?

You will receive lifetime access to all of ElegantThemes designs, plugins, updates, support, and photoshop files.

elegantthemes-membership-options

You can see my review of ElegantThemes that shows you previews of 75 of their themes all on one page so you can get a taste.

 

Are Spammers on Your Mailing List Costing You Money?

Posted on April 1, 2013 Written by 40 Comments

A few weeks ago, I noticed that Aweber charged me a little more than usual. It had been awhile since I had worked on my mailing list, and I pleasantly thought that I had a growth in subscribers.

Unfortunately, that was not the case.

When I logged in to Aweber to start a mailing list for my new freelance blogging site, I was surprised to see this.

aweber-list-stats

Over half of my list was unsubscribed!

If I had just recently sent an offensive email to my list, I would have understood. But I at the time of this discovery, I hadn’t used it in months. Sad, I know, but that’s not the point of this post.

So I used the Search Subscribers features to see just those who unsubscribed.

aweber-search-subscribers-unsubscribed

And I found this…

 

How to Increase Twitter Engagement with Nestivity

Posted on March 18, 2013 Written by

This week, I had the privilege of taking a new Twitter tool for a spin. Nestivity (currently in beta) takes your Twitter engagement to a whole new level by encouraging people to engage in conversations and making those conversations easy to follow by placing them in a threaded discussion form.

nestivity-discussion

Benefits for Bloggers

While the tool was developed with brands and businesses in mind, there are lots of benefits for bloggers as well.

1. Engage more with your followers. We all know that frequent engagement with your followers strengthens your relationship with them. Use this tool to really start talking to your Twitter community vs. broadcasting at them.

2. Connect with influencers. Anyone with a significant amount of followers is hard to chat with on Twitter because your tweet is getting lost in a sea of mentions and retweets. Nestivity lets you have discussions with popular Twitter users in an uncluttered environment where they are more likely to notice you.

3. Promote your blog posts with discussions on Twitter. Invite people to come and talk about your latest blog posts on Twitter. This should lead to more retweets of your content.

4. Build your Twitter following. As followers of those who are participating in your discussion start chiming in, you’ll have the chance to meet new people and grow your Twitter following.

5. Increase your Klout. Not that anyone cares about Klout scores (wink wink), but participating in regular discussions on Twitter will help boost your Klout rankings due to the increase in mentions of your @username in discussions.

 

Google Reader Alternatives: 3 Web Based RSS Readers to Manage Your Subscriptions

Posted on March 13, 2013 Written by

If you follow my writing, you probably know how much I love Google Reader. As you can imagine, this stopped me in my tracks.

google-reader-closing-july-1-2013

That’s right. On July 1st, Google Reader says goodbye. The Learn More takes you to a page that tells you what you can export using their Google Takeout tool, but nothing in the way of alternatives.

Now there is three and a half months to find a suitable alternative.

A Little About How I Use(d) Google Reader

I follow a lot of blogs and various RSS feeds. 242 subscriptions to be exact.

how-i-use-google-reader

Each time I subscribe to a blog, I organize them by topic (Blogging, Freelance, Social Media, SEO, etc.). Then I rename each subscription with the blog’s main Twitter handle. This way, when I want to tweet a post I like, I don’t have to search for their @username. Plus, when I’m ready to periodically purge my RSS feeds, I can look at the Twitter handles and figure out quickly whether I have engaged with them or not.

I also use(d) the search in Google Reader for curating content. It made it easy to find posts on a specific topic so I could create lists like 79 Link Building Resources for 2012.

How to Export Your Google Reader RSS Feeds & Subscriptions

The first thing you will want to do is export your RSS subscriptions in Google Reader. To do this, you can go to Google Takeout and click the Create Archive button.

google-takeout-export-google-reader-rss-subscriptions

You will then get to download a zip file of your Google Reader subscriptions.

google-takeout-complete-download-file

In this zip file, you will find your subscriptions.xml which you can use to import your RSS feeds from Google Reader to other services.

My Favorite Google Reader Alternatives

Now that you know handle RSS feeds, here are the alternatives I am considering. I migrate from laptop to desktop to mobile, so I am only choosing web-based options. There are others if you want to install them to your computer like Feeddemon for Windows and Reeder for Mac. The following are my web-based favorites so far.

 

«Older Posts