Reporter vs Expert - Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting

June 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment

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There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something - experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts - there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry - the Internet marketing industry - not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche - Internet marketing - and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things - email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it - making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) - your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion - your stories - and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Make Money Online, Resources

Work At Home Job Sites

April 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I keep finding links to companies that hire home based workers and write them on a piece of paper or in my resource notebook and lose it before I can pass it along to someone that can actually use it.

Since this really doesn’t benefit anyone and there are so many people that are desperate to find a position in such a company as a home based worker I’m starting my list here, where I know I can easily find and update it.

Bookmark this list and I’ll continue to update as I find more links. Please note that I am not responsible for these sites, they are just links that I found that other people have recommended into one consolidated list. Read more

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Make Money Online

Review of Getting Paid for Blogging

March 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I have a confession… it’s the mom’s guilty conscious thing… and this isn’t about one of those bad parenting moments when you say something without thinking first and wonder if you just hurt your kids self esteem for the rest of their lives…or the fact that I dropped my hairdryer on the baby yesterday while she was innocently sitting in her bouncy seat (yes, it was at least off but I still feel awful). I only feel slightly not as guilty when every other parent around me fesses up to their “accidental” moments.

This is about the fact that I occasionally take money to write a post on this blog. GASP! It’s a method of adding an additional revenue stream to a business, and a large majority of blogs include Affiliate Links.

For anyone that is not familiar with Internet Marketing or Making Money Online an Affiliate link is a link in a post/article/banner for a company/product and if a reader clicks thru and buys it or signs up for something you get a percentage of $ kick backed to your account. It’s very straightforward and it’s actually a fool proof way to make money online that costs a person nothing except the time of promoting the link and can be fully automated.

I signed up with two different companies when I started to look into the process of getting paid to blog. Linkworth and PayU2Blog. Here is the scoop:

A summary of LinkWorth: You sign up for a free account and submit your blog to be reviewed to see if it is an acceptable blog. If you have a Blog that is full of random spam affiliate links, don’t bother trying to get accepted, they do have good standards of quality blogs… after all, I got accepted.. sorry couldn’t resist.

Once you are approved and classified, you will get emails from companies that think your blog is a fit for their company and offer you X amount of money to write about them within a certain time frame and meeting their requirements of word count, keywords and outgoing links.

Here is what I like most about LinkWorth, YOU get to APPROVE or DECLINE the offer! The ball is really in your court. What I do is visit the site, poke around and I think it’s worthy I will accept it. If I think it’s crap, I decline it. Yes, I hate to decline the money for something that will be about 10 minutes of work, but I don’t want my readers to have to sift through junk because you’ll get irritated (just like I do on other sites) and won’t come back and in reality, my readers are more important then a quick buck.

Now, once you approved the assignment and write up your wonderful review or post you publish it. You have several options to let them know it’s been posted, you can login and do it manually, have an html option or what I think is the easiest, use a WordPress LinkWorth Plugin that does it automatically. Perfect. The LinkWorth team will then review the post and approve/deny the post.

My first assignment I was denied three times… I missed one certain keyword that needed to be created into an anchor text link, I fixed it and re-submitted and was approved. Within a few hours, the money was deposited into my PayPal account and I was at the mall the next day getting the kids new sneakers… just kidding, but really it is deposited into your PayPal account very quickly.

NOW, PayU2Blog is another story. I am actually very disappointed with this site and more so because I saw so many other bloggers endorse it and thought highly of it. If anyone reads this and had different results, I would love your comments posted below and I would be willing to re-examine.

First, PayU2Blog was almost the same as LinkWorth regarding the Free Sign Up process and approval period. However, the biggest difference is you MUST complete every assignment that is put into your cue. You don’t have the option to pick and choose what you consider is high quality- or average quality for that matter.

They also don’t send you an email notification to let you know you have an assignment. You need to manually put a tickler on your calender to enter every week or two and see what you have waiting. They state every two weeks, but I waited two weeks, logged in and I had 8 assignments in my cue and 4 were already past the “post deadline”.

This is where I found that out of all 8 of my assignments, ALL of them are what I would consider spam businesses. You know, the ones that you delete from your email account about Drug Rehab centers and DeTox and well, you get the idea. The first thought in my mind is, OK, I’m the “Mother of Four- Goddess of Chaos” talking about being a work at home mom, small business and kids….. and they want me to post 300 words on a Drug Rehab??? I DON’T THINK SO. Don’t get me wrong, a drug rehab is very important, and I’m sure somewhere in this world there is a Work At Home Mom over the edge that has some issues and may need this service.. was it my post about struggling to wait until 5 oclock to have my glass of wine and unwind after a day of hell???

But again, as I posted in the above, I can’t write about that here, it’s totally irrelevant. I did contact Customer Service, since I signed the agreement during sign up saying I will complete every assignment in a professional manner, I felt I had an obligation to not just ignore this. I kindly asked what the process is for giving out these assignments and if there was anyway to filter or even know if I’m going to get crap after crap because then I’m not interested. Another black mark, I never heard back…. hmmm..

I do feel guilty, because I maybe I shouldn’t have been so naive about “posting every assignment” but it really just didn’t dawn on me that I would actually be asked to promote spam like companies.

In summary, you have to know that I love to review products/businesses/services and I mention a ton of them here because anyone who knows me, knows I’m well…. “opinionated”, some of them will be giving me money, most of them not. I just share what works or does not work for me so maybe it will help save someone else time or money or good food for thought.

I do promise that I will not promote anything that I personally do not agree with or find value. I have high standards and will keep those standards, and that’s my rambling confession for now.

Like my Post? Maybe you would like to Buy Mama A Java! It will help to keep me reading, writing and scooping out the info

Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Make Money Online, Work at Home MOM

Key to Affiliate Marketing Success

March 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.
There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.
Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.
Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…

Like my Post? Maybe you would like to Buy Mama A Java! It will help to keep me reading, writing and scooping out the info

Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Make Money Online

Follow Up to “Do You Squidoo”

February 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I’m obsessed by how many creative people there are on Squidoo. If you haven’t checked it out yet… WHY NOT? This is so easy, it’s free and it’s such a great community of people.

If you missed my earlier post on my own Squidoo Lens creation please check it out here

Here is a program that is super cheap, I mean under $10.00 and can help you get started with your own Squidoo Lens.

Then of course, as always, there are experts in the Squidoo Lens that help you actually make money from this FREE venue. I registered a few weeks ago with the Squidoo Queen, while the Squidoo Queen is around $20.00, I signed up and have been receiving the autoresponder messages and they really contain a great deal of useful information that you can apply off the bat. So I did buy the Squidoo Queen and found it well worth the price.

It’s worth a check out, even if it’s just the free emails, you will by no doubt get some hints of the trade!

Like my Post? Maybe you would like to Buy Mama A Java! It will help to keep me reading, writing and scooping out the info

Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Make Money Online, Squidoo

Need Quick Cash??

February 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Got your attention didn’t I???

We all NEED some quick cash some time. Here is the deal- check this out- I’ll be honest, I’m trying out this system now so either take your own leap and give it a whirl or check back and see what my review is.