5 Tips for Energizing Your Blog
Today’s post is going to be a little different. Recently, the good folks at BlogEnergizer.com offered interested bloggers 
an exclusive interview as part of a contest they’re running. Knowing their reputation for solid, quality, highly usable content, of course, I said yes! Here is the resulting interview with team leader, Lynette Chandler. I hope you find lots of good information in it just as I have. And as I mentioned, this is part of a contest, so don’t forget to go here and vote for me because the interview with the most votes will win some cool prizes!
Although I learned of Blog Energizer a long time ago and often used the free service, I hesitated for a long time to sign up for premium membership because I thought if I promoted where I got some of my goodies from too heavily people would just go to your site instead of mine for future info. What do you say to people with those types of reservations who are on the fence about premium membership?
This is a very good question and I see where we do have some branding challenges. Let’s backtrack a little bit to explain our membership levels. The basic membership is free. Anyone interested only needs to subscribe at http://blogenergizer.com and that’s it. Basic members will receive notifications when we find good stuff they can share on their blogs, when anyone is looking for a guest blogger, when people are seeking blogs to guest blog at and so on. This usually happens once a week. You don’t have to share everything because not everything we find is relevant to your blog or audience. When you do choose to share the things we find, you can certainly link to the offer without any credit to us. Sometimes for downloadable items we do host those and ask you to use our link. That’s just makes it easy for you to put it up on your blog. But you are certainly free to download it and re-upload to your blog so that it looks like they come from you. There are certain cases where the original author of the resource does not allow that in that case we tell you where you should send your readers to.
But the bottom line is, unlike many other site who want you to credit them, whatever goodies we find, we don’t require you to tell others where you got them from. We are here to make blogging easier for you. Think of us like an assistant who looks out for good stuff for you and your blog.
Next, there’s Premium membership. Premium members still get and enjoy the notifications we send out to basic members but on top of that they get 90 blogging prompts every month in three major topics. Business, Health and Fitness and Home and Family. These are idea starters so before you start the month, you can look through this list and begin to fill your blog based on the suggestions in the prompts. Where applicable, we also suggest ways you can monetize certain posts.
You don’t have to blog every single suggestion in the prompts but it certainly helps you start the month right and keeps you going for the times when you are really stuck what to blog about. There is no need to refer to us or to tell people where you get your blogging ideas from. You can claim it all – although if you want to share with others how you come up with wonderful topics to write about we appreciate it 
On top of that, Premium members are also highly encouraged to create goodies for our basic members to share. This is so very important to help your blog grow. For example, if you write a super useful short report and submit it to us, we will let basic members know and encourage everyone to put it up on their blog for their readers. When this happens, you spread the name of your blog, your products and services. You can certainly do it on your own but the point is, with your Premium membership, there’s leverage and that goes a long way.
There’s also other benefits of Premium membership. For example, whenever you need a guest author, we will let others know, if you want to guest blog for others, we will notify the members – this is very popular. One Premium member put out a notice that she is looking for blogs to comment on and got tons of responses. This cut down her time to search for blogs but also when she makes her rounds to comment, she’s planting the seed for her site. Very creative use of her account.
You recommend using a blogging calendar – and even offer a template through the Blog Energizer blog. What’s the most effective way to use it to spark blog post ideas and to generally keep things moving along smoothly (and regularly) on your blog?
I believe everybody has their own rhythm but if you’re kinda new or really stuck, the calendar is always a good place to start. There’s always something going on in the month or week or day you can turn into a blog post. For example, did you know August is What Will Be Your Legacy Month? There are so many ways you can use that and it can fit into almost any topic whether you are blogging for business audiences, health, family, biking, homeschooling, weight loss anything.
For me, the best way to keep things going is to establish a routine. At the end of each month maybe you can sit down with the calendar and see what events and happenings that are relevant to your blog that you can use. Then pencil those in your list or better yet – write a draft and set a date on that draft in your blog. You’ll find just by doing that alone, you’ll have at least one item to write about a week. You really only need 4 for the month. Doing this often births other related topics – put them down on your list. Now, when you look at this list, you may find you have more than enough for the month.
Don’t just look at the calendar and strike off the irrelevant ones or take things at face value either. Ask yourself questions like how can this day/event be turned into something relevant? For example, you could use your whole experience with the calendar as a topic – maybe you write about how you can use a calendar to plan fun and meals with meaning behind it – maybe a dish passed down from your great-grandmother, something you consider to be her legacy.
You can do this weekly too if that works better. The thing is to jump start the blog so you don’t feel like its a drag. I’ve found once you get going, there’s momentum and when you gain momentum and have perhaps blocked out some time, write out as many posts as you can right in that moment and schedule them. Then as the weeks and days unfold, if you have additional things to write about, all that is a bonus.
What’s more important when you’re just starting out with a blog – optimizing for search engines or trying to build a following in other ways like blog commenting, joining forums and using social media?
I hesitate to put some activities above others because some things really need to be done at the same time. But of course that is not possible so the best bet is to cycle through them. The key things I do in no particular order are:
Create good content while you’re at this, you can also work in the search engine optimization thing. This also includes writing for autoresponders, emails and free downloadables.
Build that list and generate traffic – this is where you could work in things like taking the content created and approaching a popular blog and seeing if they want it for a guest post if not, I’ll approach other blogs or put it on a article directory. Re-purposing content into audio or video. Answering questions on forums and pointing people to helpful resources which hopefully I have written on my blog and do the same on Twitter too. I’ve searched for questions people asked and answered them.
It is a lot of little little activities but it helps to build a list of common tasks. Then every week you pick out a couple from each ‘category’ to attack.
What are the best sites to learn blogging, internet marketing and basic “techy” stuff from?
Well of course I am biased and would not do our company justice if I do not suggest Blogging Starter Pack (http://bloggingstarterpack.com) and Tech Based Marketing (http://techbasedmarketing.com) those two will over the beginning blogging blocks and more technical stuff. As far as beginning Internet Marketing goes I have a couple of favorites which I’ll list here.
SuccessChef.com
SelfStartersWeeklyTips.com
MomMasterminds.com
InternetMarketingSweetie.com
There is so much knowledge out there to sort through on the internet that it can be overwhelming when trying to become a professional blogger or internet marketer. What would you say is the fastest way for a beginner to monetize their blog and begin to see some results for all their efforts?
Such an excellent question. Before I go further, let me give a little background. If you’ve followed us before you’d probably have heard me talking it took me a long time to turn things around. In that light, I’m probably not the right person to share tips on quick profits because everything we do we worked very hard and long for it.
I am certainly not saying you can’t make it in a fraction of the time we did. In fact, if you are willing to stick it out and work it even when things are hard and there seems like no reward, you probably will. It took us a longer time to get the ball chugging along because I many mistakes, among which, I wasn’t willing to listen to those more experienced. So right there is a big lesson for anyone.
No matter what you are promoting – your own or affiliates products, put your offer out there regularly. If you don’t offer the product, people won’t buy or take actions that will lead them to a sale.
Have your own products? Take down all those affiliate ads and banners and replace them with your own. There is a time and place for affiliate promotion. Give your own products prominence.
For both affiliate and your own products, find angles to write about them regularly and putting them in front of your audience. Lead people to subscribe to your list and work on adding your offers there too.
Of course you don’t want your blog to turn into a pitch farm so you have to balance all that out with great content. It is rather an art. Let me suggest you follow a blog Contentrix.com and when I say follow, not just read the content. Though they do provide great information. Rather look at the way the content is being used to feature their products or affiliate products. How the blog post circles back to touch upon previous offers or leads people to take some kind of action. How the blog design works to feature their products and so on.
Make your offers regularly, tastefully and work on bringing in that traffic. These things go hand in hand.
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Before you go on your way, if you got something out of this interview, why not give Tisha a thumbs up by voting for her at http://blogenergizer.com/teip-vote/
From Biz Mommy, post 5 Tips for Energizing Your Blog
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