Blogger Interview: with Skellie Wag

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Because I’ve been having problems finding time writing interesting blog posts, I thought of an idea: why not interview interesting bloggers instead? And so, without further ado, here is my first interview with a prolific blogger: Skellie Wag. Who started blogging just 4 months ago and grew her blog to 1800+ RSS subscribers in 4 short months.

1. Can you give a quick introduction of who you are and what you do?

I’m Skellie from (currently) sunny Melbourne, Australia. My own blog is Skelliewag.org. I’m also a staff writer at a number of other blogs I’m proud to be a part of: ProBlogger, Daily Blog Tips, Daily Bits and (soon) Freelance Switch. I’m trying to steal Leo Babauta’s crown of ‘Most Prolific Blogger’ ;-).

2. Why did you start blogging? Did you have any specific goal in mind before you started blogging?

I started Skelliewag.org because the process of building popular blogs and websites has always fascinated me, but it’s something nobody I know has an interest in. In a lot of ways, Skelliewag is a social outlet for me to have conversations about something I can’t really talk about with the people I know — conversations in the form of blog posts, comments and in talking to readers.

I work in a pretty boring job and another goal for me has been to find a way to make enough money doing something I love (blogging) that I could transition away from that job. As it’s part-time, I don’t have the challenge of making a full-time income, which makes the goal more attainable. I also wanted to achieve this without using traditional methods. The freelance blogging I’ve been doing has moved me towards that goal, but I’m not quite there yet.

3. How has blogging changed your life?

It’s changed the way I use my time. You discover that being bored is a luxury. Let’s just say, I don’t watch much TV. One thing I’ve made a commitment not to take time from is my family and my social life. I make time by changing the way I use time when I’m doing my own thing.

So far, I’ve been pretty successful in a short period of time. I think that’s made me more confident of my own abilities and myself in general.

It’s also changed my life financially. While I’m not well-off by any means (first and foremost I’m a student), I’m moving towards the point where I can support myself — if I live frugally — doing something I love. It will be a while before I get there, but it’s certainly had a profound effect on me.

4. What is the “one” ingredient or idea that played the biggest role in your blogging success?

Giving without expecting to receive has been something that makes many of my readers feel really positive towards me. I’ve made it my policy never to ignore a request for help/advice, to engage with commenters and to help everyone as much as I can. In return, I have a wonderful network of people who recommend me highly to others. Without them I don’t think the blog would even be worth interviewing me about.

5. What is your secret to writing such terrific posts consistently? Do you have any writing tips?

Thanks for the compliment :-). The great thing about writing for the web is that writing for people who scan actually encourages a really efficient writing style. My strategy is to encapsulate all the points I want to make in one sentence or a few words each, then flesh out each point in any order I choose. I also have a habit of writing the introduction to my articles last. Starting is a lot easier when you start in the middle! I then turn the summary of each point into a sub-heading or bolded text.

It’s not the most beautiful way to write, but it’s clear and quick. I think what you say is always more important than how you say it. You’ll notice that a lot of the world’s top bloggers who are worth emulating got there not because they’re great writers who abide by all the rules, but because they have something profound to say. I’m more interested in striving for profound ideas than writing a neat turn of phrase.

6. How do you attract traffic to your blog?

When the blog was younger the emphasis needs to be in sourcing out your target audience. During that phase, I was trying to write a lot of guest-posts for popular blogs, to bring in new traffic streams.

Once you have traffic to work with, I’m realizing that the focus needs to shift to social media and links other people create, rather than links you make. My traffic building strategy relates mainly to writing the best content I can — posts that my readers will appreciate, firstly, but posts with some level of attraction for social media, too. Over time, it becomes less a question of finding new audiences and more about utilizing the audience you already have.

7. Any product / service of yours that you would like my blog readers to know about?

I’m always happy to take on more writing work, either writing blog posts, sales pages or ‘About’ pages. The latter has been in high demand lately, which I think is fantastic. I think your ‘About’ page is the single most important part of your blog, because it’s the site where a new visitor can be persuaded to become a reader.

If you want to hire an A-grade writer whose posts spread faster than fire online, contact Skellie.

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How I Got a $1,000 Site Made for Free

“Success doesn’t depend on how many resources you have. But how resourceful you can be.” - Tony Robbins.

Let me tell you a personal success story of mine today.

I am a young naive kid still in high school. Its the days of Napster (remember that music sharing software that rocked the internet?) And I have an idea for a website.A  The idea is simple

Can we napsterize advertising?

1. Send an email to members with 12-15 ads in each email. Each member can receive a maximum of 5 emails per day.

2. For every email that a member reads, send her ad to 10 other people.

3. Let members refer their friends to this service. For every email a friend reads, send the referring member’s ad to 1 more person.

4. Have the referral network 3 levels deep.

For eg:

• A Member A signs up and his ad is sent to 10 people for every email he reads.
• A He promotes and gets Member B to signup under him. For every email member B reads, Member A’s ad is sent to 1 more person.
• A Member B promotes and gets Member C to signup. For every email Member C reads, Member A and Member B’s ads are read by one more person.
• A Member C promotes the service and Member D signs up. For every email Member D reads, Member A, B and C’s ads are read by one more person.

The idea seemed brilliant to me. But I’m a kid with no resources. And no credit card. And the idea would require at least $1,000 - $1,500 to bring to life!

I’ve designed a couple of websites before on freelance basis. Which would allow me to pay for my own hosting. But there was no way I could hire a programmer and pay him $1,500 to create the entire site for me!

So What Could I do?

What I did was tried learning programming on my own. That was a big disaster. I soon gave that up. But not before I’d wasted a couple of months. (Mini lesson: Play on your strengths. Outsource everything else.)

I could always borrow money from my parents. But I didn’t want to do that. (In the end, I did end up borrowing $10 from my Dad to pay for the domain name.)

Instead, here is what I did. I logged on to the ICQ chat network and started finding programmers over there. I asked a simple question to all of them:

“What would it take for you to create a site for me for free? What could I do in return?”

The first 7 or 8 programmers let me know that they didn’t work that way. But one project manager working for a big programming company in Ukraine made me an offer:

If I found 2 paying clients for him, he would assign a junior programmer to create my website for free!

I then spent the next few days contacting anyone and everyone I knew and asked them another simple question:

“Do you know someone who knows someone who needs programming work done?”

I did manage to find 2 paying clients for the Ukranian company. And they did keep their word and create the website for me.

And within the first month, that website became moderately successful. Attracting close to 540 members in its first 3 weeks.

Would you like to see a snapshot of the website?

MaxMailer.com - now defunct.

Every time I’ve told this story to others, I’ve always been asked: why is MaxMailer.com no longer functional?

The answer is embarrassing: because I was young and stooopid.

I ran it for a few months. And the site was profitable from week 1 - as I had very little monetary investment in it. But then, I started having hosting problems. The site grew too big too fast. And my servers would go down every other day. At the same time, I moved to USA. So I gave up on it.

If I would have stuck with it, I could have sold it off for a lot of moolah!

Action Summary:

• Think Barter. You can always borrow or barter for resources.
• Ask for help.
• Play on your strengths. Do what you are good with. Or else, you’ll just end up wasting time.
• Just do it. Take action. Keep on moving.

Would you like to share one of your success stories with me?

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The Bill Clinton Secret to Writing

I’ve been a bit busy in wrapping up a few of my projects.A  So I’ll let my friend Daphne take over this post…

The Bill Clinton secret to writing

Last night, my 13-year-old daughter came to me complaining about her social studies homework. “I just can’t make myself do it, Mom,” she said. “It’s soooooo boring.” I squelched the urge to scream, “That’s because the school system has given you the world’s worst textbook.” (Is being dull a requirement for textbook writers? It surely seems so.) Instead, in my best and most patient writing-coach voice, I suggested that she emulate Bill Clinton.

No, it’s not what you might think. It’s just that we had recently watched him in the wonderful DVD Wordplay. If you haven’t seen this charming documentary yet, rush to your local store and rent it immediately. The movie is all about crossword puzzles and it includes interviews with, among others, the former president. He’s certainly not the most interesting or proficient puzzler of the bunch — the real fanatics brag about doing the weekend New York Times crossword in four minutes, in pen! But he does have a strategy worth emulating.

Clinton explains how he looks over the puzzle until he finds one clue he can answer easily. From there, he goes on to look for other openings. I’m paraphrasing here, but he says something like: “I just kind of chip away at it.”

You’ve probably done this with crosswords, too — but did you ever think to adopt the same strategy with writing? Remember the old joke “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: One bite at a time. Turns out this works for writing, too.

When I produce my newsletter, for example, I never do it all in one go. It takes me about two hours — but I spread it out over six days, mostly in five- to 30-minute increments. Here’s the drill:

Day 1: pick topic
Day 2: do a mindmap
Day 3: start writing
Day 4: write some more
Day 5: revise and copy edit
Day 6: enter into software and proofread

Whether you’re faced with a tricky crossword puzzle or a difficult piece of writing, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. But you can fight that feeling by doing just a little bit at a time, taking a break and then going back to it.

Just as waves gradually wear down granite, so, too, your tiny but repeated efforts will eventually show impressive results.

Daphne Gray-Grant is a writing coach with an international practice. Sign up for her fra_Tee weekly newsletter Power Writing by going to her website www.publicationcoach.comA 

–

Its not necessary to stretch the work out to 6 days.A  But its a good idea to stretch it out to 2 days at least.A  What I usually do is sit down at the beginning of the month and write down ideas for about 15-20 posts.A  And create quick mindmaps or bullet points for each of them (Daphne’s day 1 & Day 2.)

And then I pick up one of those topics and write a blog post on it.A  And publish it either after a couple of hours, or the next day.A  (Daphne’s day 3 to 6.)

I never publish the post as soon as I’ve written it down. What I do is usually timestamp the post to be published after a few hours.A  So that I have time to refine and edit the post further. (Disclosure: I don’t usually proof read these posts though as Daphne suggests you should.)

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My November Report

I finished writing my November report.A  But its not blogging related.A  So won’t be promoting it on BlogClout.A  If you’re interested in it, please follow this link:
Making Money With Domain Names

Comments (3)

Blog Readability Checklist

Heatmap shows how we tend to read in “F” fashion

Did you know that there are two kinds of online readers?

1. Methodical Readers: They read the posts from top to bottom without a lot of scanning.

2. Scanners: They scan headlines and pictures and other display elements without reading all the text.

And research shows that both these groups’ numbers are pretty much even. About 50% of all online readers are scanners and the other 50% are methodical readers.

Are you catering to both these type of readers?

7 Tips to Improve Your Blog Readability

1. Make sure your paragraphs aren’t too wide. 500 to 600 pixels is a perfect paragraph / column width.

2. Use a lot of headlines and subheadlines.

3. Use language that is easily understandable. (But don’t try to talk down to your readers.)

4. Pictures with captions are an excellent idea.

5. Use bullet points. Bullet points are widely read by both: methodical readers as well as scanners!

6. Add a Summary at the end of your extremely long posts to improve peoples understanding of your posts.

7. Use alternative story formats to increase readability. Questions and Answers work brilliantly online. So do blocks of quotes.

Credit: Photo by Travellin’ Librarian

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Product Development Strategy for Blogs - FAQ

Strategy: Pump your first product profits to buy ads and generate more traffic for your blogA 

I’ve had some fascinating discussions with a few bloggers via email and skype these past few days after the Create a Quick Info Product post.A  Most of them have been quite fruitful and we shall see at least a couple of top bloggers come up with their own info products soon.

But there were a few hesitant people.A  This post is for them.

1. I don’t have the time to create an info product

Even the slowest of writers can write one page in one hour.A  10-12 pages is all that is required for a report / hotsheet that can be sold for less than $10.A  Are you telling me that you can’t work one weekend to raise your blog one notch ahead?

2. I’m not ready yet

Its December 2003.A  I’ve just started promoting BizTactics.com.A  I may have as many as 3 subscribers!A  But thats the time my mentor Sean D’Souza forced me to write a report for the website.A  What do you have to get ready for to write a quick report?

My suggestion: you should create an info product even before you start blogging.

That way - you can start buying ads to promote your blog from Day 1.A  And buying ads will make you popular quicker than not buying ads.

What are you waiting for?A  Can’t you dedicate one weekend this November to write a quick info product?

Comments (7)

November Goal: Create a Quick Info Product

Did you know that the entire month of November is the “National Novel Writing Month?” The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel within 30 days. The focus is not on writing a master piece. But its on completing the novel.

Here is the amazing truth most NaNoWriMo participants stumble upon:

Time constraints Brew Insane Creativity!

The less time that you have, the better work you’ll do. How come? Because you’ll only focus on the most important things. You’ll develop the main plot and give more depth to the main characters.

NaNoWriMo Adaptation for Bloggers

Let me propose an idea: Lets ride along with NaNoWriMo. But instead of writing a novel from scratch, create an info product for your blog. An information product that can be sold for anything between $3 and $20.

Why Should You Create an Info Product?

Instead of relying on making money through ads alone, you’ll have your own product that you can sell. And you can pump in the profits from the sale to further promote your blog. And become more popular. You can then parlay your popularity to earn a full time income from your blog and quit your day job and live your dream life…

Info Product Formats

You don’t necessarily have to write a 50,000 words 175 pages info product. Here are some other quicker alternatives:

1. Write a report / hotsheet / manifesto: 5,000 words.

2. Create an audio book: 9,000-12,000 words. (You’ll have to record the words to make a 60-80 minute audio book.)

3 Quickfire Ways to Create an Info Product

1. Expand on one of your posts

Pick out any one of your old posts and add more details and depth to it. Cover all the angles to convert the topic into a report. Just answer the 6 W’s relating to your topic.

i. What is the idea about?
ii. Who should read it?
iii. Why should they read it?
iv. How, When & Where should they implement the idea?
v. Frequently Asked Questions and their answers.
vi. Case studies.
vii. More case studies.

2. Compile your back posts

Popular cartoonist and blogger Scott Adams recently did this. He deleted some of his older posts so that the public could no longer read them. And converted the posts into a book “Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!”

If you’ve been a long time blogger, then this is something you can do without spending a lot of time.

3. Interview an expert

This may be the easiest way of creating an info product. Especially an audio product. Just interview an expert. Steps?

i. Find an expert and get her permission for the interview.
ii. Create a set of 20-25 questions. Send the list of questions to the expert prior to the interview so that she can prepare the answers.
iii. Call the expert on a pre-arranged time and start interviewing.
vi. Record the phone call. Thats one audio product for you.
v. Transcribe the recorded call. (Or outsource it for around $100.)
vi. Edit the transcript for a second polished info product.

Action Summary:

• Set a goal to create one info-product before November 30th.
• Make a post on your blog announcing the info product. (Optional.) What this will do is make you accountable to your readers. And make sure that you meet your goal and create the info product.
• Let me know in the comments if you plan to create an info-product this month.

Note: If you’re stuck and cant come up with an idea to write on, let me know and I’ll brainstorm with you so that you have a viable idea that would make a good info-product. Just post a comment or contact me privately.

Comments (27)

No Posts on BlogClout?

A short note: I’m a bit busy.A  Have sold 2 of my projects this past week.A  And am in the process of wrapping another project of mine.A  Hence, the shortage of posts over here.A  Give me a couple more days before the posting resumes.A  Thanks for your patience - Ankesh.

Comments (1)

What Makes a Website Credible?

I just saw this comprehensive slide show by Stanford’s Persuasion Research Lab. Its based in 2002 research. But its still worth a view.

Especially slides 14 to 25. They give 10 guidelines for increasing web credibility.

| View | Upload your own

via: GrokDotCom

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The Scary Blogging Bottleneck

I recently had an epiphany while reading a classic 20 year old business book.A  Would you like to hear about it?

1.

One of my all time favourite stories is about how King Leonidas of Sparta fought against the mighty Persian army of a million men with just 300 soldiers.A  (The story was recently made into the movie 300. )

King Leonidas uses the “bottleneck” strategy.

How can a 300 person army prevail against a million soldiers?A  By making sure that no more than 300 of the million can fight with them at any one time.A  The Spartan soldiers set their camp on the one side of a very narrow cliff.A  The Persian army has to go through the narrow pathway to reach Sparta.A  But because the pathway is narrow, they can’t all of them walk through it together.A  The narrow cliff gives the Spartans a chance to fight on equal footing.

And because the Spartans are better skilled at using the sword, score after score of the Persians die while crossing the narrow cliff.A  While very few of the Spartans perish.

2.

Lets take the flip side: what would you do if you were Persian to beat the Spartans?

You have to neutralize the bottleneck.
Or you can’t proceed forward. A A 

The Persians finally find a secret goat path to outflank the Spartans and surround them.A  And win the battle.A  But with unimaginable heavy losses.

3.

The book that led to the epiphany is: The Goal by Eli Goldratt.A  Its the book that introduced the “theory of constraints” (bottleneck) to the world.A  It teaches us: Deal with the bottleneck or you can never grow.

The book mainly deals with bottlenecks in production and manufacturing facilities.A  But I tried asking the question:

“What is the bottleneck in my blogging ventures?”

4.

The answer:

Me!

I am the biggest bottleneck.A  Because I am - for the most part - the only writer and marketer for this blog, and my time is limited - the success of this blog depends on how much time I can give to it per week.

Just as the Persians can’t move forward without outflanking the bottleneck, this blog can’t grow without outflanking me!

To that effect, you’ll be seeing a few changes to this blog over the next few months.A  So that:

1. This blog has momentum of its own.A  It attracts its own traffic.

2. The content of this blog is not dependent on me alone.

Do you face the same situation with your blog?A  What is your plan of action?A  Lets start a conversation… (I’ll be sharing what I do for this blog and 14 of my other websites with you too.)

Comments (8)