At first glance, this strikes some bloggers as strange.  I mean, bloggers blog, right?  And blogging means writing.

Yes… and no.  Yes, the majority of a blogger’s time is spent writing. But the writing needs to come from a place of authority; a place of experience.

Consulting is where this begins.

3 Reasons To Consider Consulting

1. Consulting Forms the Basis of Your Message  

I think Albert Einstein said it best:

“Nothing happens until something moves.”

Movement implies an event has taken place.  Nothing is learned unless you experience something.  Nothing builds experience better than rolling up your sleeves and getting to work.

For the blogger, hopefully that has occurred. I mean, who can write endlessly about a topic unless they’ve had experience doing it?  

Doing it for others is what consulting is all about.  The experience gained through performing your service for paying clients forms the very basis of your expertise and authority.

2. Consulting Sharpens Your Message

Your blog is about one thing, really.  If you can’t boil down your blog’s focus and core philosophy to just one idea, there is still much work to be done.

If you know what your blog’s one-thing is, then the experience gained in performing this one-thing is like your own professional laboratory.  It’s where you form your hypothesis and test your methods.  

It’s where you evaluate client feedback and results. These ultimately impact your message by sharpening the razor’s edge of your message and discarding the rest. 

3. Consulting Brings In Revenue

No matter how much we blog on a topic the fact is there are some in our readership that won’t do what we urge them to.

There are both doers and pay-others-to-be-doers among us.

 The pay-others-to-be-doers are your potential consulting clients.  They take longer to ‘sell,’ but they can represent a significant percentage of revenue for your blogging business if you market your services in the right way.

How much revenue? That depends on your service you offer.  My consulting service for crafting referral-generating case studies for blogs and websites runs nearly a $1,000. Chris Garrett’s Flagship Content production services brings in between $1,700 and $3,900 a pop.

Summary

Consulting can be a blogger’s best friend. It helps you build authority of experience, a sharper overall message and a healthier revenue stream.

What About You?

Do you have experience consulting with clients?  Care to share what worked and what didn’t? I’d love to hear your comments.

He toiled day and night and after  about a year or so, his RSS readers numbered in the thousands. He was sought after by big name blogs for interviews and his days were spent making the rounds to all the big events in the blogosphere. 

The paradox is, of course, how his time was consumed by his notoriety. 

The Paradox of Consulting

This example is similar to what happens when you front-load your business with consulting.  While consulting is usually a necessary component of most small businesses, it can quickly consume all your time.

Consulting is a time eater.  It’s also represents a self-imposed income limit because if you’re not consulting, you’re not earning.

Consulting limits your income because there are only so many hours per week you can work and bill that time to clients.  Let’s say your consulting rate is $75 per hour. If you’re lucky enough to bill 10 hours per day for 5 days each week. 

A quick sum reveals a maximum income of $3,750. At first glance, that’s nothing to sneeze at.  But a closer look reveals the truth. 

The Consultant’s Snare

Not many people can bill for 50 hours per week. Depending on your industry, consultants average about 20 billable hours per week.  There is easily 10 hours per week lost to general office work, marketing, preparation, etc. Include out of town travel or daily commuting and your time pool shrinks further.

Billing 20 hours per week knocks your income (pre-tax) to $1,500. Still, a good income in many circles…you need to ask yourself this question.  

Is this the maximum I wish to make for the rest of my life?

The Safe Haven Clause

In Dan Brown’s novel-turned-film, The Da Vinci Code, protagonist Prof. Robert Langdon is being pursued by unknown enemies and find himself in danger of capture in the vault of a Swiss Bank in Paris.  

The Banker tells him that his is one of the oldest accounts on file and includes a safe haven clause…in effect…a clause in the fine print guaranteeing him a safe escape should the very situation presenting itself ever arise.

Langdon and his French police cohort escape from the bank in thesafe haven of an armored transport car.

Consulting’s Safe Haven

The solution to the consultant’s problem of being time-poor and idea-rich is diversification of her business structure.  Here at BlogAsReligion, we refer to this as the Holy Trinity.

Besides consulting, which is necessary and useful because it keeps us sharp and hones the skill required for operating a blog-religion in our field, training and leverage are the forms of diversification to consider.

Recall that the Holy Trinity of Blog-Religions includes consulting, training and leverage.  

By supplementing your consulting with training (really just group consulting), you leverage your time and a dramatic rise in income results.

Let’s say you hold a training session and charge each person $75 to attend. 10 people enroll in your training session and pay in advance.  For the same amount of time you will spend conducting your training session, you’ve managed to multiply your consulting income ten-fold.

You’ve earned $1,500 for a 2-hour workshop as opposed to the $150 you would have earned consulting at your $75 per hour rate with a single client.

While training sessions take time to prepare, once the initial organization is complete the workshop is self-contained for repeat sessions for as long as you are able to attract clients to fill the seats.  

With the availablity of free conference calling vendors, having your clients attend a training session via phone from their home or office is easier than ever.

What About You?

Is your consulting consuming your schedule?  How have you dealt with this paradox?  

If you enjoyed this post, please post of comment and let us know how you’ve dealt with the limitation of consulting or how you feel about the ‘safe haven’ that training affords.

 I look forward to your comments.

They’d walk up to a perfect stranger and tell them to walk, no…RUN..RIGHT NOW…to a WiFi spot and surf over to your blog.

They comment on every post.

They can’t wait for your next product or service to be released and often are the first to buy when you put up a pre-release sales page.

Who are these wonderful people who think you’re the best thing to come down the proverbial pike since 9-grain bread?

You can’t buy customers like this!

They’re your blog’s evangelists and they’re your dream come true.

Why evangelists are your most precious resource

Evangelists are your dream come true for many reasons.  But here’s three that are really cool!  

Evangelists decrease your need for marketing

Think about it. An army of individuals who support you; who believe what you say because it’s worked for them: Imagine all of them telling two or three friends or colleagues about your business. Imagine never having to launch a blog marketing campaign again…ever.

OK, I know. Marketing is so much fun that I know you’d never really give it up.    But just think, with the support of an army of zealous evangelists, you can certainly cut back and focus on more immediately productive actions, right?

Evangelists help decrease new customer resistance

If I need a new widget, I can Google until the cows come home without making a buying decision. But if my best friend, or some one else that I trust, tells me about how they bought this one widget and how it worked flawlessly, then my resistance to buy just vanished.  I’m more likely to go right out and buy the very same widget my friend did because the recommendation came from someone I know and trust. Lots of people know and trust your evangelists.

Evangelists are great for your bottom line

No one buys as rapidly or as often than a very satisfied customer. Evangelists, because they’ve purchased or benefited from you and your blog many times previously, are your best customers.  They trust you, they know you, they have no doubt you’re going to deliver on your promises.  Only the most satisfied customers will keep buying from you each time you release a new product or service.

Yes, evangelists are your dream come true.  They can be the difference between breaking and banking.  Seems to me they ought to be given a position of honor in your blog-religion’s seating arrangement!

For Jews, it’s their Torah. For Muslims, the Koran; Taoists, the Tao Te Ching. It’s their source of comfort, their tangible talisman linking them to the greater good.

It their ultimate resource

All popular religions have one.  It serves as the ultimate resource for their followers. A place to turn for answers or at least the promise of answers.

Many popular blog-religions have a Bible. ProBlogger.net has “ProBlogger: Secret To Blogging Your Way To a Six Figure Income”; ZenHabits has “The Power of Less”; Psychotactics has “The Brain Audit;” Entrepreneur’s Journey has “Blog Profits Blueprint” (and it’s totally free)!

3 Reasons Why Your Blog Religion Needs a Bible

There are several reasons why your blog-religion needs a Bible. Let’s explore a few, shall we?

1. Bibles establish rules and principles

All religions have rules. Some are good (do not steal, do not lie, etc.), some are just pain silly (you must eat fish on Friday or not eat a pulled-pork sandwich or a BLT at any time – when both are so doggone yummy).  However, rules play an important part in your blog-religion.  Rules govern your followers’ rules of engagement with you, with each other and in life outside the blog.  The principles your bible establishes are guidelines. They light the path for your followers to walk.

2. Bibles clarify terminology

Most definitive texts, even sacred ones, speak a distinctive language.  They define or clarify a terminology all their own.  In Mark Silver’s Unveiling the Heart of Your Business, he establishes several terms that are his own: the First, Second and Third Journeys in marketing for example.  Nowhere else will you find this terminology.  Mark’s book not only establishes terminology, but he uses it to take the reader to a new level of understanding about the marketing process.

3. Bibles put your religion on the map

Who ever followed a ‘religion’ that didn’t have some sort of definitive text? Without one, a religion is nothing.  Followers and believers need something to hang on to, read, print.

And this brings up another point; your bible doesn’t have to be 300 pages to qualify as a definitive text. The Brain Audit started out as only 16 pages of text. Think you could write 16 pages of text?

Where do you begin with writing your Bible?

We’ll save that for the next post.

Podcast Player:

More visitors, more money, right?

If you have a thousand hits per day to your blog, you’re bound to benefit.  That’s the conventional wisdom and it’s true in most cases.

But what happens to your blog income when traffic dies?  Ah, that’s the unfortunate side of traditional blogging.

Crowds. Who need’s em?

Name a popular religion, say Islam or Hinduism and the image of huge crowds making a pilgrimage to a holy shrine comes to mind. Perhaps you think of the massive throngs that jostle against one another like swelling ocean tides in St. Peter’s Square when the Pope celebrates Mass?

Maybe the image of the huge crowds that descend on the Hajj, the largest annual pilgrimage in the world (pictured here) comes to mind.

Believers make up the crowd

Believers -devotees of the religion’s central message make up the throng.  They willingly travel great distances to pay homage to a deity or other object worthy of their devotion.  They endure hardships, life-risking peril and time away from loved ones in order to fulfill their mission.

Wouldn’t it be great if your blog inspired such devotion and dedication? Imagine it; crowds of people making the virtual pilgrimage to your blog and joining your religion.  It is possible?

Not if you run a store

If you’re relying solely on Google Adsense or other forms of direct advertising monetization to create blog income, you’re most likely caught in the traffic trap; an endless quest for more people to visit your site in hoping a good number of them will click on one of your ads.

If you sell products, your own or affiliate products, you’re still dependent on traffic for sales.

When monetization is linked to numbers of visitors, your blog is more like a store. And one only needs to look around the world right now to see how stores are suffering in time of economic downturn.

Stores don’t inspire legions of followers.  Stores don’t hold a customer’s dedication and devotion.  Only religions do that.

Religions offer escape from the traffic trap

Blog religions differ from their blog-store counterparts in numerous ways, but the most important way they differ has to do with numbers of visitors.  Sure, it’s nice to see thousand of RSS subscribers in your FeedBurner chiclet, but it’s not the most accurate metric for a blog-religion’s success.

Blog religions, by definition, have a different structure. Inherent in the structure are multiple monetization modes in which the blog can realize income. The metrics for a blog religion are also multiple.

Blog religions build loyal followings by diversifying their offerings to take advantage of both high and low traffic states.

Here are some examples to consider:

• One-on-one coaching  (consulting)- low traffic requirement
• Tele-classes (training) – moderate traffic requirement
• leverage product sales – low to moderate traffic requirement
• Advertising option – high traffic requirement

These examples illustrate how even low traffic blogs can generate income.

Blog traffic doesn’t have to define your income

Don’t get me wrong, traffic is a GOOD THING! But your blog model and the success it brings you shouldn’t be dependent solely on the amount of traffic it receives.

By structuring your blog business like a religion, you can enjoy and good income even when traffic is minimal.  We’ll look at how to do this in the next post.

What about you?

Does the success of your blog depend only on traffic?  What ways do you use to diversify your blog income that doesn’t depend on high traffic volumes?  Care to share?

In the last post, I wrote about -not only the the central message of this blog- how you should think of your blog like a religion.

Click here to read the original post.

Today I want to show you some of the basic architecture for taking that idea a bit further.

Below is a simple diagram of what most will recognize as a church, temple, meeting hall, any term works.

Let’s look at who makes up your blog-religion.

Back Row Readers On the back row of your church, sit the unconverted -those who have yet to hear your blog’s central message.

They are casual readers of your blog – the kind of one-time visitors we all get from time to time. But they remain unconverted and haven’t invested themselves in the blog.

New Converts The first conversion occurs when they subscribe to your blog feed via RSS or email or they subscribe to your newsletter.

At this point, they are believers in your opt-in offer if not your central message. They may be lukewarm, but they have a pulse and they voluntarily became a part of your blog-church. (Hallelujah)

Faithful Followers The second conversion happens when they decide to purchase a product or service via your recommendation.It’s much more than just a purchase or a commission from an affiliate link. It means they trust you. That is huge!

At this point, your new converts have taken an important step forward in their new-found faith – they become faithful followers – those that look forward to each new post and eagerly await a new service or product.

Zealous Evangelists Finally, a third conversion takes place when they invest their total thinking (around your niche) in your blog religion. They believe in your blog’s central message so much that they begin to mention it outside the ‘church.’

Maybe they refer others to your blog or write a post about your blog on theirs.  Whatever they’re doing, these Zealous Evangelists are doing it voluntarily and (at least at first) without any other motivation save their trust and belief in your central message.

You, the Guru?

As we stated in the original post, every successful blog is like a religion in that there is a charismatic figure spearheading the effort of the organization.

Steve Job fulfills that role for Apple, Inc.  Until recently, Bill Gates was the ‘soul’ of Microsoft; Warren Buffet – Berkshire Hathaway; Barack Obama – the free world; Rush Limbaugh (you know, the comedian) - the conservative political right in the US; Richard Branson – Virgin Atlantic, etc.

Because it’s your blog and your message, you’re the de facto Guru of your blog-religion. My mentor Yaro Starak is the life-force and personality behind Entrepreneurs-Journey.com and Blog Mastermind. Developing your blog’s personality is essential in leading your followers. That too, is another lengthy future post.

Final Thoughts

Give some thought to how your blog’s central message is like the guiding philosophy behind a religion.  Unless your blog has dedicated followers (who believe in who and what they’re following) it will go the way of the Druids on Salisbury Plain.

Give some thought to adapting your blog to the religion model and if you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Incense permeated the air and I inhaled deeply.  At first the aroma was enticing, then it became a bit thicker. I focused on my breathing and took another deep breath.

Ommmm…….cough..wait a sec.  Was I having trouble breathing?  cough..sputter..wheeze..crackle..clear throat…choke.

OK, so much for creating a monastic visual of calm devotion and clarity of thought.

It’s not like I’m Thầy or that web monk guy. (Actually, both of these guys are tops in my book! Check ‘em out after you’re done reading.)

Though I’ve always been drawn to the ascetic (and am absolutely convinced if the world’s inhabitants learned to meditate daily, we’d end all war), this post isn’t about my spiritual path.

It’s not even about religion

OK, it is…sort of. It’s about how I started my own religion. And it’s about why you need to start one.

Let me explain.

[important]A truly successful business has all the hallmarks of popular religion.[/important]

Consider how  Apple, Inc. is like a religion… 

• There’s a charismatic figure guiding the direction and philosophy of the organization. (Steve Jobs)
• There are followers – those who choose to follow the Guru or Leader of the group. (Mac, iPod, iPhone users)
• There are guiding principles that govern how followers should interact with the world.  (Simple lines, elegant design)
• There are varying degrees of membership. (Mac users, Mac evangelists)
• There are meeting places and a pilgrimage where followers receive training and then go out into the world to convert others. (MacWorld Conference & Expo)
• There might even be a holy book of sorts that ties everything together. (MacWorld Magazine)

OK, before this starts to sound high-churchy, let me talk about Star Wars. (Gotta luv the segue)

The Tao, The Force, & The Formless

Tao is ancient Chinese philosophy. I’m no authority on Taoism, but what I do know is that the Tao is kind of like The Force in the Star Wars films. (Gimme some license here.)

It’s the unseen energy that holds the universe together. Some religions and philosophies call this God, Supreme Consciousness, Brahman, Shirley (kidding), and a whole host of other names.

Wallace Wattles, writing in The Science of Getting Rich back in 1910, called it the Formless and Thinking Substance. Sufism refers to the One, the Most Tenderly Compassionate, Allah.

Call it what you will, but there is an entity that is bigger than you and me and it governs how we live, breathe, and stay planted on the earth.

It also serves as a great model for your business. Why?

[important]Because there needs to be a glue that holds your business together; a formless substance that attracts others.[/important]

The Barry Krishnas

Heidi Tran is a past client.  She’s a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant and we’ve worked together on a couple of occasions. Here’s a little comment she made about our relationship in a forum;

“I’m using what I learned about writing that letter to create a new campaign for a business expo I’m attending. Although writing a good letter involves some work, I’m enjoying it so much more now that I actually know what I’m doing. It’s also making what I write for others so much easier.

I may start a new religion… The Sect of the Enlightened Copywriters? The Morrisites? …The Barry Krishnas?”

The Barry Krishnas…that cracks me up! OK, while I’m NOT going to market myself as Barry Krishna, I am going to say that religion is a great metaphor for business.

Why religion is a great working model for your blog

When you start your own ‘religion’ around your blog you instantly become a brand.  Evidence for this is everywhere: Microsoft, Starbucks, Apple, Inc. – they all have charismatic leaders, principles to which their followers adhere, and each turns out passionately vocal evangelists.

You’d like your own evangelist, right? Someone who can’t stop saying enough good things about you?  Maybe a couple hundred of ‘em?

Hey, what business wouldn’t want their own zealots roaming the streets and shouting out the gospel according to [insert your name here]?

Is it really possible to create a following of devotees who preach your version of the Good News?

It’s possible if you begin doing these three things.

Keys to creating a religion around your blog or business

1. Care for your readers and clients

That’s right, you really need to care for your clients. When you care about someone, you hold their interest at heart. You don’t try to sell them just anything. You find out how they feel and what’s bothering them and then find ways to help.

Caring for readers’ should to be at the core of your blog religion.  When they feel cared for, they stay.  When they feel ignored, they find other…churches…where they feel cared for.

Fail to care enough and you’ll learn the same lesson that many members of the clergy have learned: people vote with their feet as well as their wallets.

While caring is absolutely vital to creating fervent following, guiding them is essential.

2. Guide your readers

As the leader of your blog religion, it’s your duty to guide your readers toward a better life. That means reminding them often of how you can help them move forward. (Hmm, sounds a lot like like marketing, eh?)

You spend time developing workshops or products that meet their needs and don’t just fleece their Paypal accounts. To only offer advice without providing a safe environment within which to develop the skills would be similar to a engaging in a one sided relationship where no one gets their needs met.

True guidance is about caring for those who look to you for advice and guidance. If you don’t do it, someone else will. They’re your flock: Guide them to greener pastures.

So, first you care, then you guide, and finally, you protect.

3. Protect your readers

Like any parent, I’d lay down my life in a heartbeat to protect one of my children from harm.  It’s built in to a loving parent’s genome.

In business, it is our duty to protect our clients as well. In caring for and guiding them, we also need to protect them from poor decisions, careless marketing, and at times, maybe our competition.

But there’s also an element of risk in protection because it assumes that you know what’s best.  And that’s how it should be.  You either become the expert in solving the problems your reades face or you don’t engage them as a reader or client.

Final Thoughts

When you commit to caring for, guiding, and protecting your clients, you’ll begin to attract followers.  The followers will become your devotees and given subsequent care, guidance, and protection, they’ll willingly shout your good news from their rooftops.

Your army of evangelists will go forth and spread the word about how you…yes, YOU, are….the chosen one…in your field. When you do it right, they’ll follow you into the promised land.

(This is a special guest post by Yaro Stark of BlogMastermind.com.  Yaro is my blogging mentor and his advice is not only straightforward and easy to understand, it’s absolutely trustworthy.  Enjoy this special post!)

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

[important]Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.[/important]

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better. 

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was written 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