Problogging 101 Tutorial

The Meaningful Marketing Strategy Behind the Screens of Shift Your Spirits
by Slade Roberson

Are you looking for your life purpose? For a meaningful mission, based in the most authentic aspects of who you are and what you love, that serves others on a greater scale?

Have you considered CREATING your perfect career? Nothing is more rewarding for a writer than making powerful information products out of thin air. Considering the limitations of selling your time, working dollars for hours, nothing compares to contributing something that works FOR you — a piece of your heart and soul that takes on a life of its own, generating attention, income, and carrying a part of your highest self beyond the limits of time and place.

Nothing beats the power of laboring to produce something you care about ONCE that has the ability to benefit you over and over again, to infinity.

Publishing is a practical form of immortality.

Your life purpose is not necessarily a JOB. You are already everything you’ve ever wanted to become. You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take. You’re not missing anything, there’s nothing outside you that will alter your existence in the manner or to the degree that you seek.

There is no job description, career path, or social role that will conform 100% to the unique expression of consciousness that is YOU. You have to create the life you want to live — your creativity is your divinity.

When you speak of discovering or defining your mission, what you’re really referring to is a project that transforms the scale of who you are and what you do every day. You are already living your mission — what you are seeking to change is your spiritual perspective and the number of people with whom you can share that wisdom.

Publishing (blogging) IS a spiritual activity.

As a writer, like you, I have found no more straight-forward way to transform who you are and what you love into a creative project, a business, a career, a meaningful contribution to the collective wisdom of humanity than becoming an author.

Blogging is a revolution in what was once an expensive and exclusive industry. I’ve been seeking all my life to find my way to this power. The path I’ve discovered is not unique — it can be universally applied.

Shift Your Spirits IS my career — it’s my spiritual mission, my work, and my JOB. I am a professional blogger — I have been for years.

You don’t have to be motivated by money, but there is no shame in being meaningfully compensated for shining your light out into the world. Even churches and non-profit organizations still require funding, and raising money requires focused, intentional marketing.

The cool thing I’ve discovered, after years of working in web development and internet marketing — what works on the web, works. Regardless of the mission, intention, bottom-line, product, service — you name it, original content is actually the interchangeable component — however you define success, you cannot escape the human element.

You must reach out and engage other people.

I applied the same expertise I used with my business clients to my blog Shift Your Spirits. I was not originally motivated by anything other than an authentic, personal expression of my unique spiritual experience. I was called to share — that’s it. I had no grand expectations for the project.

I am still amazed, incredibly grateful — sometimes stunned — at what has happened to my life in the last ten months, as a result of combining practical internet marketing know-how with personal passion and a meaningful mission.

My goal was to begin building an audience for my work — specifically, my spiritual writing. My literary agent, who works with me on a completely different set of commercial fiction, half-jokingly said “We’ll talk about this spiritual publishing niche of yours when you show me the audience for it. Call me when you have a base of 10,000 readers.” He told me he wouldn’t touch my memoir of Marian Visitation or my autobiographical tell-alls about my life-long clairaudient intuition without having some numbers to shop.

In other words: Show Me the Audience. First.

I began Shift Your Spirits in July, 2006. In May, 2007 there are 8,150 + subscribers. In the context of the Economy of Attention, this project is more successful than all the commercial business web sites and email marketing campaigns I have worked on — combined.

The interest in my work as an author and the income indirectly generated by my personal blogs rivals any wage-slave job I’ve ever landed. My entire business overhead is around $15 a month. The Quality of Life benefits are through the roof — the freedom of my lifestyle would be impossible to find in any corporate employment benefits package (or book deal, for that matter).

And the truly meaningful impact my problogging mission has on others is impossible for me to quantify. It’s a challenge just responding to the personal emails that result from each weekly article I post. The blog is just an introduction — the real work is a dream job of playing Pen Pal to people all over the world.

There is no other medium that could possibly allow me to travel and engage with so many like-minded, beautiful individuals. Sometimes I like to imagine how big a neighborhood the physical realm would require to surround me with this much love and community.

Online, anyone and everyone you love is your nextdoor neighbor. You already have a virtual presence — you are literally incarnated in this newly invented space — the most amazing example of democratic human accomplishment we have ever seen.

Are you just a ghost, invisibly traveling the web, haunting those who inspire you? Or have you made the transition to incarnating, putting something back out into it? Your blog is where you live online. Without one, you are virtually homeless and wandering. Participating without contributing.

You can always afford to pay attention to others. But that’s still about taking. The real mission behind publishing is what you have to give away.

I work my ass off, and I’ve starved to get here. But I’m here, where I am supposed to be, with my readers as my bosses. The work is a challenge I wake up every day eager to engage. A simple weekly formula of writing for others, with a sensitivity for what they want to read, and the intentions to deliver it to the best of my ability — I write and watch the readership grow, exponentially. I keep plugging away, and the reach expands, slowly but surely.

It’s not an accident. I blog with very specific intentions — I treat it like a business, the most important work of my life — it’s not a haphazard hobby. It IS a mission.

If you’re already blogging, dabbling, or looking to put the full force of your will behind creating the life you want to live — take advantage of my experience. I’ve learned the hard way, by trial and error, and I can teach it to anyone.

Are you thinking it’s time to get serious about your dreams of being an author, or take your hobby blogging to the next level? Want to skip beyond guessing about the difference between blogging and problogging?

Authority Blogging — The Subscriber-Based Marketing Model
Most of the highly visibile “successful” blogs you’re familiar with are dependent on a high traffic / advertising business model — which basically boils down to needing thousands of visitors, which you trade in for a few pennies a pop by sending them to someone else’s web site via Google Adsense that you don’t control.

This is hardly the wisest business model or the short cut to success for a beginning blogger or an unknown writer. My approach to professional blogging is based on a combination of subscriber list building combined with self-publication — and less direct forms of professional monetization. Even with a relatively small amount of traffic, and a tiny list of loyal subscribers, an author can potentially make more money from creating quality original content that indirectly promotes professional services and self-published material — either print-on-demand or digital downloads.

The best part of my strategy is it works in the meantime. While your blog is new and still growing. There are ways to harness the attention of your audience before you reach the pinnacle of super-high traffic. All the one-time traffic in the world means nothing if you’re not capturing, nurturing, and growing a list of loyal subscribers.

There are more than a dozen common ways to monetize a blog, some of them more lucrative than others. StevePavlina.com is a perfect example of an author in the self-improvement niche who follows the high traffic/advertising revenue model.

I am working an entirely different approach — one that is not dependent on high traffic, but instead nurtures an authentic connection with like-minded souls and a loyal readership. Does it sound like I’m bragging a bit? My intentions are to empower you — to bring you with me — to show you how to broadcast your personal mission, the best way I know how.

See, I want to make a difference in the world, and I specifically want to do that as an author. Blogging has allowed me to go from “some crazy pagan mystic no one has ever heard of who writes about hearing voices” to a serious, focused, intentioned author with a proven track-record for my talent and an audience of thousands already reading my work.

The blog itself is its own proof of concept.

I don’t have to go out and find an audience for my forthcoming books — they’re ready and waiting. I know right where they are. My agent is THRILLED. I’ve done the hard part — the most important part — marketing my message.

It’s not just numbers, either — I know WHY you’re reading my work. I know what you want more of from me. I gain priceless insights every week into what my audience wants me to write. Hey, that’s the big secret that makes a commercial publisher’s ears perk right up — I know where my audience is and what they want to read, which is NOT necessarily the same thing as simply what I want to write.

I’m no longer an unknown writer with a few books in him and a dream of sharing my work with the world — I’m a writer with a readership who wants to read my books before they are even available.

In this day and age, if you submit your articles to a commercial magazine, the first thing an editor will ask you is “Where’s your blog?” A Big House Book deal will throw you a couple of hundred dollars to promote your own title, and guess where they’ll suggest you put your efforts?

Your Blog.

Book deals do not create instant fame and fortune. Blogs are not get-rich-quick businesses. Building a successful blog takes a lot of time and hard work. But if you’re a writer, there’s never been a more powerful way to make an impact. Spiritually, professionally, philanthropically — I can’t guarantee your talent, I can’t write for you, I can’t determine what your mission is for you.

But I can teach you the same strategies I personally use — the same information I used to charge business clients between $3000 and $7000 to implement.

To simplify my career and to further integrate my spiritual mission with my skills — my day job — I’ve made the decision, going forward, to empower other writers and kindred lightworkers with the exact step-by-step recipes for blog marketing and self-publishing that I know to WORK.

Want to transform your life experience and wisdom into valuable, marketable information content? This is how I do it — this is how you can do it, too.

Self-Improvement, Spirituality, Religion — these publishing niches ARE businesses. They deserve to be engaged as potentially lucrative, well-intentioned, meaningful markets. Let the money be the by-product of contributing something valuable. In the Economy of Attention, what defines content as valuable is simply reflected in financial abundance.

PageCoach Problogging 101
A step-by-step tutorial for using low-tech, low-cost — mostly FREE — web-based resources — like blogs and email — to transform who you are and what you love to do into valuable, marketable information content.

You already have access to everything you need to publish and profit from your original creative content.

  • Can you compose email?
  • Do you have a web-connected computer you can use?
  • Do you know how to surf the internet?
  • Do you have a ton of great ideas?
  • Do you have a personal passion to share?

What excuses are you using for NOT publishing and being compensated for your writing? Do you think you need a bunch of Money to do this? Wrong.

Do you think you need to be a web designer or a computer programmer?
What year are you hiding in — 1997?

You don’t need a webmaster — you need a blogging coach!

My PageCoach Problogging 101 Tutorial takes Self-publishing, Web Development, and Internet Marketing and puts them all in a blow-by-blow instructional format any web surfer can follow and implement — using entirely FREE and low-tech web-based tools and services.

Features

  • 129 page ebook in PDF format you can download and start using immediately
  • 85+ pages of pure How To – detailed, practical, straightforward lessons
  • 35 color screenshots show you exactly what to do, screen by screen
  • 75+ links to the best free blogging tools and web-based services - (3 pages of categorized links mentioned in this tutorial — a PageCoach Self-publishing Rolodex)

Here’s What You’ll Learn

  • The two best free blog publishing platforms on the planet
  • The ONE blog that’s perfect for beginners – the powerful publishing tool that absolutely ANYONE can learn to use

How to Make Money with Your Blog

  • 12 ways to generate income from your blog –
    links to the most popular free money-making services — with easy-to-follow instructions for setting them up and using them
  • Accept payments online – credit cards and donations — without having to pay thousands of dollars for a merchant account

Before You Blog

  • Naming your blog the right way
  • 6 different formulas for creating effective blog names
  • 4 most important qualities of a strong blog name
  • How keyword-rich names impact the success of your blogging efforts
  • 4 free keyword research tools
  • Why you should wait until after you’ve been blogging for awhile before registering your own official dot-com domain name

Make more money selling information instead of physical products

  • 7 ways to define your audience –
    if you don’t know who your audience is, your blog is going nowhere
  • 8 factors to consider when a choosing a niche market – a topic — to blog about
  • Determine what you want to sell and how to identify the people you want to market to
  • 8 potential actions you want your readers to take
  • The ONE single most important call to action any writer or blogger wants to offer readers
  • Template for Defining your Project Mission in One Sentence
  • 9 potential incentives that will build your subscriber list
  • 2 best incentives a blogger should focus on

Write for the Web
Writing for the web is definitely different than writing for print — but it’s a format you can easily learn and adapt your writing to.

  • Do you know exactly how many seconds you have to grab a visitor’s attention?
  • Do you know how many times a reader must be exposed to your work before she’ll trust you enough to purchase something from you?
  • Find out #1 amateur blogging faux pas you don’t want to make

Launch Your Blog with All the Professional Features
A step-by-step walkthrough of the Blogger, WordPress, and Feedburner dashboards — with color screenshots — that show you exactly which settings to change, which ones to leave alone, what to enter in each and every field — and WHY.

I advise you about each and every setting, in detail:

  • Title
  • Keyword-Rich, Descriptive Taglines
  • Email branding
  • Publishing
  • Comments — how to set up comment authorization and security verification
  • Trackbacks –what are backlinks and why you must enable them
  • Site Feed — what the heck is RSS? What are those Little Orange Buttons for? Should you enable Full or Short syndication feeds?
  • A secret tip for Blogger users — a killer idea for what to put in your Feed Item Footer — the most desirable out-of-the-box feature I’ve ever seen offered on a blogging platform — and it’s on the most popular free web publishing tool on the planet. It’s so crucial to subscriber incentives, I’m furiously writing my own WordPress plugins to port the potential benefits to my own favorite publishing tool.
  • Blogging by email — How to set up your blog to automatically create and publish posts just by sending an email to a special address. God, it’s so easy to do this — if the super-simple blog dashboards intimidate you, you can publish from your email account.
  • Permissions and Privacy Settings

Crash Course in Design

  • How to choose the best professionally-designed style for your blog
  • 2 best Blogger themes to use and why
  • 2 most important design concepts for non-designers
  • The difference between images and graphic elements
  • Killer workflow for creating and publishing professional-looking images on your blog
  • How to get photographers to contribute free images to your articles and posts
  • How to get free traffic and build links to your blog through image contributions
  • My favorite source for high-quality, free, original stock photography you can use on your blog
  • 4 favorite web sources for free graphics and icons — just one of these web pages is a master list of dozens of other sites
  • A crash course in image preparation
  • The perfect free photo-management program that will allow you to create free online galleries and automatically publish images from your computer to your blog

Do you know the ONE single most important image you must put on your blog?
Hint: it’s not a logo!

Super-power Your Syndication
The best free service for publishers that will automatically give your blog ALL the following features, and how to set up every bit of it, without having to learn HTML, or use expensive 3rd party programs:

  • double-duty email marketing – give your blog the functionality of an email newsletter
  • Offer email subscriptions to your site — with an email capture form. If you’re not already doing this, you’re missing out THE single most important aspect of successfully online publishing. You may be giving up as much as 80% of your potential readership by NOT offering subscription by email.
  • Build, manage, and maintain your own legally compliant list of opt-in subscribers
  • Add send-to-friend features to your articles so they get passed around the web
  • Add icons to your site — all those little buttons that allow readers to bookmark your site with social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, furl, digg, magnolia, etc
  • Embed buttons so that readers can add your blog’s headlines to their homepages and newsreader programs
  • Track the number of subscribers you have, find out which links are getting clicked
  • Automatically notify up to 11 different search engines and blog directories every time you publish a new article

I’ve included full color screenshots to illustrate every potential setting:

  • Which source feed to use
  • 3 most important features to add to your syndication
  • 4 most important publicity options
  • Automatically notify 6 of the top blog search engines and directories - plus, which additional 5 services to choose for a total of 11

How to add subscribe options and email capture forms to your blog — even if you’ve never even looked at HTML or programming code.

  • What are those little orange buttons for and how do you get them on your blog?
  • How to give your readers ALL potential subscription options on one landing page without cluttering up your blog
  • Super-easy, anybody can do it HTML code editing
  • 3 best keyboard shortcuts for copying + pasting programming code into your templates
  • Add an official Subscribe by Email Form Box to your blog to capture email addresses and build your list of readers
  • The best location for subscription options on your blog
  • Turn your blog into an email newsletter — automatically
  • Which free feed via email delivery service to use and why
  • Communication Preferences — what to change and what to leave alone!

Email Branding — How to achieve a professional look and feel across all email programs and screen environments. The notoriously ornery email issues you’ll never have to deal with.

  • Which fonts to use
  • The best text size
  • Link colors

Scheduling & Delivery Options

  • The best day of the week to publish
  • The absolute minimum number of new articles you need to publish for your blog to work as a marketing tool
  • How to add an existing opt-in subscriber list to your feed

The 5 most important pieces of information to include on every web site or blog
Protect your blog against plagiarism — 3 free online resources for copyright protection
16 free ways to promote your blog online
7 ways to promote your blog offline

What blogs will this work with?
Essentially, any mainstream blogging platform that automatically generates an RSS feed will work. I provide all the details for starting from scratch with Google’s Blogger and self-hosted WordPress blogs — walking you through every single modification you need to make with simple check box options and copy + paste elements.

BUT — if you’re already blogging with a platform like Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, WordPress — even MySpace — the instructions can be easily adapted, according to the documentation of those various tools for editing templates and adding widgets, links, etc.

For TypePad users, many of the syndication features I explain are automatically available through one-click installation options.

The VAST majority of these settings are not about coding –they’re about strategically choosing the CORRECT, simple, web-based services, and the right combination of options to use — all together.

I chose to go in depth with Blogger because even if you’ve never touched anything like a blog or a content management system before — if you can write and send email, and you have a minimum of experience surfing the Web, as we all do — you can have your own web site, blog, email newsletter, and income streams set up and ready to go just by following along.

Anybody who can handle an email account can use Blogger’s super-simple, user-friendly, intuitive interface — I promise you!

It takes 15 minutes to start a free Blogger account.

If you’ve got something to share with the world, I’ll show you how to use Article Marketing principles to publish and promote anything you want to online. You have to bring your ideas, your dream, and your words.

So, What’s the Price Tag?
I charge private, one-on-one PageCoach Clients $3,000.00 - $7,000.00 to teach them these same strategies. I’m pricing this Do-it-Yourself information at $79. I want it to be accessible, I want to reach as many people as possible, I don’t want money to hold you back from creating a life-changing project to power your purpose and personal mission in life.

I spent 4 years compiling this experience and empowering businesses, artists, and aspiring writers by teaching them how to do it themselves. It works. If you read Shift Your Spirits, if you have subscribed and follow along with me on that journey, then you’ve seen all this in action. Over 8,000 of you are witnessing my growth as a professional voice in this new medium — there’s room for you to come here and do it too.

You know if this is the path for you. You are called here, and I am called to meet you.

Blogging is Spiritual. Yes, you SHOULD be an author, too!
WHY NOT? There’s absolutely no reason why you should wait. My absolute #1 Tip for New Bloggers — START YESTERDAY.

Grab this tutorial and claim your space. Get it today and the vessel that will carry your mission will be ready for you this weekend.

You can’t predict how this will change the course of your life. You have no idea the impact it will have on OTHERS until you hear it from their own mouths. Then, you won’t be able to imagine how or why you ever waited to begin.

$79

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Advanced Blogging Tutorial

Have you been blogging for six months — or maybe a year — and now you’re ready to get Really Serious about your marketing efforts?

Check out how to Build Your Blog Subscriber List