Category Archives: Internet Marketing

I just downloaded the free Become a Blogger Roadmap report and I’m definitely excited by the content! In my last post Roadmap to Become a Blogger: Download the Free Report I talked about the free ebook report written by internet marketer and professional blogger Yaro Starak and his business partner Gideon Shalwick so I figured let’s dig into the free report and write an in-depth review with my own thoughts and opinions built in. My recommendation is to download the free Become a Blogger Roadmap, give it a read, and read my review to get another take on the report.

Yaro starts off the free report by talking about his history as a blogger. He’s been a professional blogger since 2000 yet he feels 2004 is when he made his biggest income leap. Before blogging he was earning $30,000-$50,000 a year in eBay selling, a proof-reading business for students and as a manager for a content website. In 2004 he started a blog and went on from that to start his membership sites, including Become a Blogger. He now earns $40,000 a MONTH, with his best month being more than $80,000 USD. His income allowed him to purchase a 3 bedroom townhome in Brisbane, Australia (which I have just found out he’s paid off) and a new car for $25,000 cash.

His online blogging lifestyle has allowed him to travel around the world and experience the freedom that comes with being financially independent. Blogging is a unique business because you can work anywhere around the world as long as you have a computer and an internet connection.

His blogging has allowed him to become known as an expert in his field, he’s networking with the top minds in the internet marketing industry and his reputation has helped him sell more products due to the trust his customers have for him.

Gideon Shalwick is his partner in Become a Blogger – they met when Gideon came up to Yaro at an internet marketing workshop and asked if Yaro would be in one of his interviews with an expert and asked him to come up to his bedroom to record with professional equipment, a green screen, pro microphones, etc. They kept in touch and after some time Yaro asked Gideon if he’d like to become involved in a project Yaro thought up called Become a Blogger – a series of free videos helping beginners start up their first blog.

After the 10 free Become a Blogger videos, they checked the response and the site has had more than 200-300 downloads of the videos per day. They dedided to take it a step further and release the Become a Blogger Roadmap report.

What Yaro realized was that most bloggers that try to start up blogs as a business fail at it. Yet, many blogs do succeed and there is a pattern and formula to those successes – it’s the X-Factor. The Become a Blogger videos, the Become a Blogger Roadmap, and the Become a Blogger Premium online course all comes together to teach X-Factor techniques to help any blog succeed.

Blogging is a powerful tool for profits, traffic, and attention – in its own right using blogging as a business model and for using blogging to help your pre-existing businesses reach a whole new audience and client base.

They discovered what they call milestones – these milestones are needed in order to become a successful blogger. The milestones are like steps up a ladder, you need to climb the first and then you’re able to climb the second. You might also think about these 5 milestones as The Roadmap to Become a Blogger. Let’s look at each one in detail…

Milestone 1: Discover Your Passion

All successful entrepreneurs are passionate about what they do – there’s a sparkle in their eyes. You need to have motivation springing up from inside of you in order to really excel at what you do. This is no different in blogging. You sometimes need to make unpopular choices, to stray from the rest of the crowd that may be content with the 9-5 grind. Yaro brings up an interesting stat which I’ve heard before that only 3% of the world’s population controls 90% of the world’s resources. You need to stand out from the crowd and you can do this through your passion. To find your passion ask yourself questions. What do you think are your natural talents? What things do you do that you just “flow” with? What things do other people tell you that you’re really good at naturally? What do you like reading about, learning about, and possibly writing about? Learning about yourself is an ongoing process so don’t feel too bad if you don’t a definite answer. At least get a general idea about your areas of interest.

Milestone 2: Discover The Need

In order to crack into your target market you need to know where you can give the most possible value in the area that most interests you – what you found out about in Milestone 1: Discover Your Passion. You find a problem that people have and then solve it for them, while asking for a fair fee in exchange for that product or service of value. Find a need or place of frustration in your area of interest that no one seems to be addressing adequately and fill that need. However, to make your efforts worthwhile, you need to find out if there’s enough people having this issue to make it worth your while. One way is just by immersing yourself in that area and finding out the needs that most people in that same area have and then make the solution to that need or want. A more modern way is to spend some time in internet discussion forums and take note when a lot of different people are complaining about something. Another way is by sending out online surveys to people in that area or getting involved in hobby groups or special interest groups related to that area and get a feel for what they say and complain about. The more complaints you hear the more opportunity available. Don’t get scared about launching into a topic that another blogger is writing about! As long as there’s a market there’s opportunity. Think about McDonalds & Burger King & Wendy’s or CVS & Walgreens or Walmart & K-Mart or Publix & Winn-Dixie.

Milestone 3: Test Your Market

In Become a Blogger Roadmap, Yaro suggests making 3 separate blogs for the 3 topics you’re most interested in. So that’s one blog each for these 3 topic areas – think of this as market testing. Once these 3 blogs are up, set up analytics software like Google Analytics or Mint and take notes as to which of these 3 blogs you’ve been devoting equal time to has been getting the most traffic. Make sure you’re posting something new to your blog every 2 days at least. Make sure to wait about 3 months to get an adequate view of the traffic going to each of your 3 blogs.

Milestone 4: Focus Your Efforts

Lack of focus is probably the biggest reason most bloggers fail – this has been said by Yaro, as well as Rich Schefren and Eben Pagan, among others in the internet marketing world. So, this step might be a bit painful but must be done. Get rid of the under-performing blogs and focus all of your energy on the 1 blog that seems to have the most potential. Now you can focus all of your energy on making great content, bringing traffic and getting loyal readers – done in that exact order. For example, Yaro focused for 6 full months just building great pillar content before he even began making strides in implementing a monetization strategy – however, this may be a quicker process with you if you have the right strategy. Once you’ve chosen the blog you’re going to be focusing on, set up an auto-responder on your blog, something like Aweber in order to build an email list. Maybe start up an email course or newsletter where you give away some top-notch content related to the topic of your blog. Maybe a .pdf like Become a Blogger Roadmap or a 7 series email course. Put the opt-in form from the auto-responder service like Aweber into a easily seen place in your blog, perhaps up on top in your sidebar. Your email list will then become the main method to talk to your subscribers about products and services hitting the market – perhaps even your own.

Milestone 5: Start Making Money

Now’s when the profit comes rolling in. You can sign up for services like Google Adsense, Pepperjam Network, Commission Junction, LinkShare, etc to help you serve ads on your site and fill up space for banners and text link ads. As you get more traffic, you may want to look into private blog advertising where advertisers pay you a fixed rate to have their banner ads, text ads, or sponsor reviews on your site. Make sure you’ve fully realized Milestone 4 before you focus too much time on Milestone 5. For now, just choose one monetization strategy, like Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network, then once you have that mastered move on to another monetization strategy.

The State of Blogging Today

The reality is that blogging isn’t a rare concept – about 2 new blogs are created every 3 seconds, this means about 7.4 million blogs have entered the internet in the last 120 days. This means the market for new bloggers is getting saturated. In this day and age, you cannot get away with writing substandard content for your blog and just banking on the fact there are no other real blog players in your niche. You need to do something more, something extra, something above and beyond what “the other guys” are doing. The good thing is that most bloggers don’t know what this “extra” is or how to use it maximally.

Multimedia and Social Media Distribution: The X-Factor to Blogging Profits

The key to modern blogging – the X-Factor – is multimedia blogging. By utilizing multimedia blogging, you’ll be augmenting your blog content and taking advantage of social media distribution in the marketplace today. Multimedia means things like audio podcasts, video podcasts through providers like YouTube, and images. Social media distribution means online based communication tools that share and discuss information through the web.

An example of social media is comments – something that’s already built into blogs based on the WordPress platform, which both I and Yaro in his Become a Blogger Roadmap recommend. RSS feeds are another method of using social media. RSS feeds allow a user to subscribe to your blog using products like Google Reader and can read your blog without even having to visit your site – giving you yet another way to reach people that may not visit your blog everyday but will check their Google Reader daily. Yes, you can add advertisements to your RSS reader! Twitter is another way to utilize social media to reach a larger audience, in fact, make sure to follow me on twitter while you’re at it to get more business and marketing thoughts and ideas straight to you. The power of twitter is that others follow you and whenever you write a twitter message of a few lines, all your followers will get instant notification of your tweet. You can use twitter to automatically inform followers that you have a new blog post up (I use this in my own twitter profile), recommend an affiliate product, or link to a video you’ve put up on YouTube. Speaking of YouTube and video, you can even use services like UStream where you can actually have a 100% live show on the internet, which is an amazing opportunity for you to forge intimate relationships with your readership and give you an edge over your rival bloggers. If you’re using audio, set it up so that readers can subscribe to your audio podcasts via iTunes so that your new podcasts hit their iTunes and get downloaded immediately to their computer and iPhone and iPod Touch. Readers can also subscribe to your videos on YouTube so make sure to remind them to do so when you make your videos!

The advantage of using images and video in your blog is that it really sets you apart from other bloggers that don’t do this and makes your blog become real, it makes your blog come alive. It supports interactivity with your site which generally creates a much larger amount of repeat loyal readers.

The advantage of social media distribution is that it allows you various ways for users to grab your content. They can follow you on twitter, subscribe to your RSS feed, subscribe to your YouTube channel, and subscribe to your audio podcast via iTunes.

The reason why multimedia plus social media distribution is such a powerful combo is that it allows you to cut into niches that may be saturated but since you’re going above and beyond what other bloggers are doing it allows you to stand out and grab attention and traffic.

This concludes Part 1 of my review of Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick’s Become a Blogger Roadmap. Make sure to download their free report and stay tuned to read Part 2 of my review of their report, including methods to implement the X-Factor to generate more profits!