Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I saw this coming years ago and thankfully I made adjustments back then too.

If you watched my video on Conversion Blogging and the blog posts leading up to the release of the video, you know I was advocating a move away from the Page View Slave (PVS) model of blogging for money.

The PVS model relies on the raw number of page views you can deliver to advertisers in order to increase or maintain a level of income from blogging. Following the PVS model you set yourself up for hard work literally forever, plus you tend to put all your eggs in one basket, relying on traffic from Google to keep the page views up and in some cases, trading that traffic right back to Google in the form of AdSense click income.

Blog Networks In Turmoil

Today I had a chance, after supporting the new Blog Mastermind students and taking some time off, to catch up on the activities in the blogosphere.

One particular thread caught my attention, starting at Problogger with Darren’s short post on Talking Blog Networks, linking through to a post by Jeremy Wright, CEO of blog network b5media, on his feedback about the challenges of running a blog network and ending with Wendy Piersall’s thoughts on what the closure of a high profile blog network means to people in this industry.

I’ve never been a blog network owner per se, but I’ve owned multiple blogs and at one stage considered launching my own network after successfully branching into a second blog. Needless to say, I know the challenges you face coordinating bloggers, hiring good ones and monetizing the sites by selling the page views. It’s not easy for one person to do and I was stretching myself at times when trying to do it for just two blogs, so I can only imagine what Jeremy goes through at b5 with hundreds of blogs even with the support of a company team around him.

This is why years ago I decided to focus on long term asset creation and look for a means to get leveraged outcomes from what I do with blogs without wholly relying on the creative talents of other bloggers. I’ve never had intentions of trapping myself to a desk running a huge company as a busy CEO either, so I look for ways to keep things small, yet exponentially profitable, without giving up time and lifestyle freedoms.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made good money being in charge of blogs that I didn’t personally write to (leveraging other people’s talents, but always in a win-win relationship), but the job is taxing - people managing is always taxing. If that’s a role you are prepared to fulfill, perhaps for a short term period, you can make it work, just be aware of what you are signing yourself up to if you decide the blog network model is something you will pursue.

Is The Advertising Model Broken?

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It’s a sad fact, but most people do not make much money from their blogs even if they work very hard.

Tomorrow I have a video that I hope will change that and if you can spare some time to watch the video, I hope I can help you too.

The video is 32 minutes long and explains the system of blogging I’ve used for the past two years to make at least $10,000 per month from my blog - up to as much as $35,000 in my best months! It did however take me almost two years of not-so-successful blogging to figure the system out.

It’s not a complicated system and best of all, you don’t need to have a ridiculous amount of traffic going to your blog each day to make it work. You need some traffic of course, but this system can run profitably off as little as a few hundred daily visitors.

The system is about leveraging the traffic you do get for big results, rather than struggling to monetize the few page views you get each day when you are not an A-List blogger.

Thousands of people already use this style of Internet marketing to great success - unfortunately most bloggers do not.

I’ll have the link to the video for you tomorrow. For now, I need you to do some homework before watching the video.

Your Homework

If you are tired of making peanuts from your blog and sick of watching others have success while you struggle, it’s time to pay attention and make changes.

If you don’t earn a good living online today, yet you have been working towards that goal for months or years, you are probably doing something WRONG.

It’s time to stop repeating the things don’t work and stop thinking all those negative thoughts about how your projects fail, and make some changes to how you think and what actions you take each day.

It’s only through change that you can improve yourself and start getting the results you desire.

That’s enough motivational speak for now.

What I want you to do, if you have decided to come with me on this journey towards creating your own profitable blogging system, is read these two primer articles if you have not done so already -

Life Portability: Mixing Travel, Business and Pleasure In One Seamless Lifestyle

Pay special attention in this article to the part were I talk about blogging as a “Page View Slave”. If you don’t know what that is, you must read this article and understand the mistake you are probably making right now.

After reading that article, take a look at this one -

Why Don’t Bloggers Understand Email Marketing?

This article was only published last week, however you may not have read it. It’s critical you do read this article because it offers the perfect pre-training for the video presentation I have for you tomorrow.

It’s Time To Make Changes

I want to make a difference to how you think about building an Internet business using your blog.

I want to raise your awareness and make you see where the real potential is for significant success, if you can just make a few changes to how you go about blogging and marketing online presently.

Read those two articles, understand the background details, and tomorrow watch the video I release to complete the big picture.

This is not hard, but it does require you take a few minutes out of your day and absorb what I have to say and then, as always, begin the actions necessary to reap rewards from what you learn.

I’ll speak to you tomorrow.

Yaro

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If you are ready to join my affiliate program, you can do so here -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/affiliates/signup/

Back in December 07 I closed the doors to Blog Mastermind. The reason I did so was to upgrade the back-end system that delivered the course and the affiliate program. I’m pleased to say the upgrade is done.

I’m in Toronto now. I haven’t quite found where I am going to live (I’m with family at the moment), but I have settled back into a working routine and my focus is opening the doors to Blog Mastermind to take a new group of eager blogging students on board.

The course will open to new students again in a few weeks. I’ll let you know the exact date very soon.

What I can invite you to join today is the new affiliate system if you are interested in making money by promoting my program to your readers.

Make Money Promoting The Blog Mastermind Training Program

Blog Mastermind has been closed since December 10th 2007, so it’s nearly 6 months since anyone was allowed in.

There is serious pent-up demand for the program, so much so that I’ve already had a bunch of people ask how they can join Blog Mastermind and I’ve told them they have to wait.

This represents a great opportunity for affiliates who have an audience who are interested in blogging, making money online and Internet business. If this is you, then put aside some time in the next few weeks leading up to early June to participate in my relaunch by writing a few blog posts and mailing to your email list if you have one.

The program pays out 50% recurring commission on monthly membership fees. Our retention rate is very good because I’ve had a year to refine the training and add new materials. It’s a solid six month course and there really isn’t any blog specific training system out there like it today, taught by someone who went from no-one online to become a professional blogger.

I’ve got some great resources you can promote with, including the highly acclaimed Blog Profits Blueprint, as well as some new content just for this relaunch.

All the promo banners, links, blog articles and other resources are in the affiliate area you gain access to after you join and there are copy-and-paste options to make things easy for you.

I’ve also got something extra planned for this launch - prizes! I’m running a competition including prizes for the top 10 affiliates. Do I hear MacBook Air anyone?

All of the details regarding everything I’ve mentioned are available after you join my affiliate program. To apply, just fill out the form on this page and follow the instructions -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/affiliates/signup/

Message For My Existing Affiliates

The new affiliate system completely replaces the old one, so even if you are already an affiliate of mine you must sign up and create a new account with the new system. You also have to replace your old link with the new one you receive after you sign-up so we can track your new sales.

I look forward to working with you!

Yaro Starak
Blog Mastermind Mentor

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I was blown away by the responses to my article on How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

So far we have over 100 comments to the post, and these are real heartfelt comments too.

It seems a lot of you are sitting at home in silence, struggling with all kinds of internal turmoil, trying to make this whole Internet business and blogging thing work.

I realize it’s a challenge for everyone to keep on carrying on in the face of slow growth and little financial reward. We’ve all been there.

As human beings, most things in life worth achieving are difficult and slow to attain, but of course, that’s part of why we do it. If it was easy, then it wouldn’t have as much value. The same goes for building a great blog or a great business.

The Day I Knew I Would Make It

There’s one moment - one ingredient - I believe that is the only indication you need to know if your blog can be a success.

It’s not traffic or links. It’s not making your first affiliate sale, or signing up your first sponsor. It’s not about making your first dollar in any way.

See if you can guess the ingredient from my story…

What Is The Magic Ingredient?

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There’s something I’ve come to realize about most of my fellow bloggers - you guys and girls are not great at marketing.

Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business people.

Some look at marketing as advertising and their current perception of advertising is akin to lying. With that attitude in place, no self respecting blogger wants to learn how to lie in order to promote their blog. This may be an inaccurate assumption about marketing, but let’s face facts, most people don’t know what marketing is and their world view of the advertising industry is framed on their experience with television commercials, magazine advertisements and billboards.

Some might say I’m a good marketer, but I want to be honest with you - if I had a choice, I’d rather sit down and just write to my blog and not worry about how I’m going to “get my message out there”. I’m lucky because I have some momentum here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, so in a lot of ways I can just publish content and my traffic will grow, but chances are for you, if you build it, readers won’t just show up and read your blog because it’s there.

…or will they?

The Long Road To Blog Traffic

You’ve possibly read the varying arguments about targeting the Long Tail for traffic as a blogger. Some argue that you can’t leverage the long tail for traffic in the same way that a business like Amazon does for profit selling goods.

This is true, in some respects. Amazon, iTunes and companies and services like them, have massive scale and can reach the entire long tail of a product catalog and thus truly leverage the full breadth of the tail.

Bloggers cannot realistically do this since it would mean writing content to hit every single topic and keyword phrase in a niche - effectively millions of articles.

Any blogger who has managed to stick to writing regular content for at least three months - and it really kicks in after about six to eight months - knows about the gift you receive from Google. If you check your traffic statistics regularly, the traffic coming from Google and in lessor respects from the other search engines, will increase if you stick to regular content production long enough.

Thanks to search engines, bloggers who specialize in writing voluminous amounts of content but with poor marketing skills or a lack of motivation to do much more than put creative thought out on their blog, can still succeed - it’s just a bit slower this way.

One Visitor At A Time

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