One of the aspects of blogging that constantly surprises me is the power of personal sharing on your blog as a technique for increasing sales.

Recently I posted my first travel blog post (or really a pre-travel recap post), which you can read here. 

Within 24 hours after publishing that post I had four new people sign up for Blog Mastermind 2.0.

If you read through that post you won’t see an overt pitch for my course, although I do mention and link to it many times because it is a big part of the story I shared.

Although the post does talk a lot about my business, it’s also a very personally revealing post. In fact I even got an email from my aunt in Canada stating how surprised she was to read me openly reveal how much money I make and other personal financial matters, which for her are usually kept private.

I included pictures of my cat, pictures of my friends and going away dinners, my house and other personal images from my life – most of which are certainly not business relevant.

People Buy From People They Like

If you’re operating a personality driven business – and most individual bloggers are – then you should never underestimate the power of full disclosure.

People like honesty. People like other people who show vulnerability, fears, failures and a personal side to what they do. This is how you connect on a human level. It’s also how you build trust, the most vital ingredient for sales.

A long long time ago I was listening to a recording a of teleconference between two internet marketers. Although I’ve forgotten what the actual topic of the teleconference was, one statement made during the call has stuck in my memory for years…

People buy from people they like

I agreed with them at the time because I was already blogging, and I felt blogs were great for demonstrating your personality and as they suggested… making people like you.

What I didn’t know at the time was how powerful that idea truly is as a marketing tactic.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not about tricking people into liking you so they buy your stuff. This is about being willing to be vulnerable, open and transparent with your audience.

The strange thing is, most of your audience you will never actually meet. The “friendship” isn’t a two-way street, it’s closer to reality TV or a basic form of voyeurism, where your audience gets an insight into who you really are, and that in turn leads some of them to liking you and feeling they really know you.

Be Vulnerable

When I first started blogging I loved that I could just write what I was thinking. I use a style of writing that reflects the way I think, at least in edited form for the sake of brevity.

This in turn made it natural for me to feel comfortable sharing openly on my blog. Strangely enough at the time I didn’t feel as comfortable sharing in person, but as is the case with many things on the internet, the safety of sitting on my computer and clicking publish on a blog post without being physically present with other humans, made me a more open person.

As I have worked with many bloggers over the years I’ve noticed that openness doesn’t always come easy. People are not comfortable sharing a personal side of themselves out into the world. They also wonder where they should draw the line – what is too private, and what is safe to share on the internet?

I don’t have an answer to that question because the line can only be drawn by you. What I can say is that being willing to be open and vulnerable, and doing so in every communication you have online, will have a positive impact on your business.

There is a reason why I have all Blog Mastermind members make their first blog post a “lifestory” article. It’s a great way to begin combining what I consider the two most important content creation skills –

1. Storytelling
2. Personal Vulnerability

All the best individual bloggers are leaders because of these two aspects, hence you should practice them as often as you can.

Liking Leads To Sales

People will buy from you because of one reason – they trust what you are selling can help them.

That trust is established through a variety of ways. As bloggers and email marketers the best tool we have is our ability to share our unique human stories as a way to connect with the unique humans who read our work. This in turn leads to trust, and when the time is right, people purchasing your products.

This form of marketing is as old as human civilization, yet seems strangely new to us. The internet’s social evolution, which began with blogging, has turned commerce into a social interaction. People buy because of peer reviews, or because they follow a certain YouTube star who also uses the product, or in our case, because they read our blog posts and develop a relationship with us.

This is why you should talk about your cat… or your dog, or your kids, spouse, your annoying neighbours, your music tastes, what movie you saw on the weekend, and why you like Star Wars more than Star Trek (boo!).

Of course you need to cover the actual topic your blog is about too. People come to you for solutions, not just pictures of your puppy, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t interject stories from your personal life when it makes sense to do so.

As I said at the start of this article, you may be surprised how many new customers come as a result of you openly sharing the more personal side of your life.

Yaro Starak
Sharing

I want to make an important point, one that highlights the biggest difference to how I used to teach people to go about building a blog.

The key distinction lies at the spectrum between making a sale andbuilding a community. The sale is at one end and the community at the other.

With a blog you can try and build community first and then make a sale, or you can try and make a sale and then build a community around that market.

In the past I would have said build an audience and community then start testing ways to make money, starting with advertising. Today I believe it’s smarter to make money with your own products and services (actually I’ve always believed that, I just haven’t recommend you start there).

The question you need to decide is where on the spectrum you want to sit, which is all about time and how you use yours.

How much time do you want to put into content creation for the purposes of building an audience and community, vs how much time do you want to spend creating content to specifically sell something.

Here’s the interesting thing about this question – the real outcome you are after is TRUST.

Trust Is What Leads To A Sale

A community is brilliant for trust. Once you have a large enough community then making a sale is easy – you just have to present a product and your loyal following will buy. You don’t really need to sell, you just tell people about your product and if they want it there is no issue, they already trust that it’s a good product.

That definitely makes life easier.

If you try and make a sale without community (to people who do not know you), then you have to put in a lot more effort to “sell” what you have. You have to do it with marketing materials in a much shorter period of time, hence you need things like good sales copy, a longer sales video, testimonials and case studies, a more focused sales message following a proven formula.

Bear in mind, these sales tools help no matter what the situation, with or without community, you can just do well without them when you already have trust.

So the question you need to ask is when do you want to make sales?

In my experience with bloggers they are much better at building community and not so much at selling.

It’s a lot more comfortable to deliver great content, help people and then six months to a year later ask if they want to buy this amazing new product you have just created.

It’s a smooth process with far fewer uncomfortable feelings about selling because it requires less overt sales tools like copywriting.

The one big risk with this path is the ambiguity of whether people will eventually buy. You can build community and have a loyal following only to discover they don’t want to buy from you. Maybe you have the wrong product or the wrong target market or something else. The problem is you don’t find out until much later, after months and months of hard work building that community.

The alternative is to start with the sale process earlier, before you have much community built. In this case when you create your blog you are immediately offering something for sale. 

The not so fun aspect of this strategy is your need to be a good marketer, you have to have strong selling tools.

Because you can’t rely on existing trust you have to use far more psychological triggers to convince a person to buy. You have to manufacture trust all within the first few interactions with people. To do this means learning and implementing a whole different set of skills like good copywriting, how to make better offers, how to split test, and get really good at sourcing the right traffic, all things bloggers do not enjoy nearly as much.

The good thing about trying to make a sale first is you can keep testing until you find something that works without investing any more effort than is required to make the sale. It also forces you to really tighten up your selling process, which certainly is a good thing no matter whether you have community or not. However it is work, often work that does not appeal to the brain of a creative content creator.

Then once you know what sells and whom is buying, you can build the blog community around them, attracting more traffic from a market segment you already know buys things.

What Should You Do?

My advice is to take the best from both worlds.

Set up your blog so it is designed to sell something from day one. To do that you create a path for people to follow that guides them towards a product.

That path can be as simple as having an optin form on your blog with a targeted offer, then a sequence of targeted content released over a week or two via email and/or blog posts that they go through, that leads them to a product offer.

Look at this sequence as your money-testing machine. All the variables of this process – how many people optin, how many people open and click the emails and of course, do any of them buy – are the parts of the machine you test to improve. This is how you learn how to sell and how you find out if you have buyers.

Once this process is set up, which should not take longer than a few weeks to a month or two, depending on your ability to set up a newsletter and put together a first product offer, then you build your blog as usual.

You write blog posts, one or two or three a week, aim to create pillar content, start getting your message out to people and start building that community.

Of course the benefit of having the money-machine ready, is when you do start building your community they are exposed to your offer making process straight away. As soon as you attract your first blog readers you will attract your first email subscribers and possibly your first buyers too.

It’s not the quickest path, but it’s not the slowest either. This methodology allows you to explore the creation of your blog, which I think everyone benefits from because you learn about yourself and your audience, but it also gives you a mechanism to make money from day one, and learn about the selling process too.

How much you focus on the selling process vs the blog community process from there is up to you. Your results can guide your focus. Whatever is not working so well, whether that is not attracting traffic, or not getting people to optin to your newsletter, or people not buying if they make it all the way to your offer dictates what is broken and needs fixing.

There’s a lot to do here of course, but I hope you can see it is possible to enjoy the process of fostering a community at the same time as making money.

Yaro Starak
Still Blogging

Last week I attended James Schramko’s SuperFastBusinessconference in Manly, Sydney Australia.

James has run a yearly event in Australia for seven years in a row. The events are always a great way to reconnect with the local community and catch up on what people are getting results with.

This year the seminar featured a range of presentations over two days from local and a few overseas speakers. I was most excited to hear James talk about what he is up to and also catch up with Andre Chaperon, an email autoresponder expert who has been working online for as long as I have.

Despite being in the email marketing game for as long as I have been blogging, Andre has never done a conference presentation because he is a serious introvert (I think he gets anxiety about it). This event was, and I quote Andre “the first and last time he will ever present on stage”.

In case you have never heard of Andre or his absolutely fundamental email marketing techniques, you can listen to the podcast interview I did with him here –

• How Andre Chaperon Developed His Unique “Soap Opera Story” Email Newsletter Formula

What Were The Biggest Takeaway Lessons?

I figured to help my fellow EJ Insiders I would share with you some of the biggest lessons I took away from the event.

There were three key themes this year, which very much represent the current trends online for getting traffic and making sales.

1. Podcasting

James opened the event talking about how he has simplified his business over the previous year to give himself more time to surf (James constantly talked about surfing during the whole event!).

James said podcasting is a major part of his strategy. He has four podcasts running now, three of them are business focused and conducted with co-hosts. James didn’t really explain anything new or different about podcasting, just that he was focusing on it as a key tool for connecting with new people (prospects).

2. Webinars

Taki Moore did one of the best presentations about his webinar formula. His presentation was more strategic than tactical, although he did present a nice overall framework for selling with a podcast.

The framework focused on a one hour long presentation, broken down like this –

1.  10 minutes for an introduction
2.  35 minutes for content
3.  15 minutes for the offer

Taki suggested you have no more than three core content lessons and do not try and teach too much. He also pointed out how most people have no problem doing the content part of the webinar, but really struggled with the “pitch” or offer. He made a good suggestion about seeding the fact you are going to make an offer throughout the webinar, so when you reach the end it’s more natural and there is no “shock” as you switch modes.

3. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads is by far the “hot” traffic source right now that everyone is talking about. Thanks to the incredible amount of detailed targeting you can do with the platform, you can keep ad costs down by focusing on highly targeted groups of people.

Not that I am in any way qualified to comment on this, but I will: If you do any stock market investing, Facebook is a company I would seriously consider investing in – I am! There must be so much money flowing to the company right now as new people discover how good the advertising platform is.

Keith Kranc did one of several presentations at the event that covered Facebook Ads. He made a really important point that if you want to advertise on mobile platforms, Facebook is by the best option.

Think about it – a sponsored post that goes on your Facebook timeline works really well on the mobile version of Facebook. It looks like any other content in your timeline, which presents really well on the Facebook App for smartphones.

Keith suggested you look at Facebook ads as not just a pure selling tool or a pure lead capture tool, but also as a way to keep connecting with your audience by sharing blog posts.

He recommends spending about 10% to 20% of your ad budget on sharing your best blog posts, which keeps you top of mind with your existing contacts, brings new people to you and doesn’t appear at all like an advertisement. If your blog has an optin form on it (which it should!), then you can capture optins with this method too.

The other 80% of your ad budget should be spent on making offers to specific segments, which take people to landing pages where you can move people through an email gauntlet (an auto response email series designed to engage and presell your product or service).

What Does This Mean For Blogs?

The one really big thing I noticed that no matter what the technique, everyone talked about having an authority site – your blog, as the center of everything.

You use Facebook ads to share blog content which gets people to sign up to a webinar. You use a podcast to bring people back to your blog to sign up for a webinar. Those are two possible pathways, which clearly many of the presenters on stage were using and recommending.

This really made me see how important it is you get your blog structure right from day one. Since everything goes back to your blog, you need to make sure your blog does what it’s supposed to do – build trust and move a person from visitor to prospect to customer.

Luckily as an EJ Insider, you have the advantage of a coaching program focused entirely on blogging 🙂

That’s it for my wrap-up of the event. If you’d like any more details just hit reply and I’m happy to share.

Have a productive week!

Yaro

I’ve covered some of this in my new blog traffic guide coming out later this month, but I wanted to pass on some interesting experiment results to EJ Insiders in advance.

Here’s a bit of background for you…

The Entrepreneurs Journey Traffic History

My blog, EJ, when it first started grew steadily during the first two years from 2005 to 2007, peaking around the 100,000 visitors a month level. That wasn’t nearly as big as many of the top blogs, but it was more than enough for me to build a great business behind it.

Traffic seemed to steady at around this point and stayed there for years. I was a bit disappointed that the growth didn’t keep going, but since I had plenty of people join my newsletter I wasn’t too upset and instead turned my focus to monetization.

Fast forward to 2012 and I noticed my traffic started to decline. It wasn’t anything sudden, but since I was focused so much on CrankyAds at the time I didn’t drop everything to work on my blog traffic. I hadn’t stopped blogging by any means, but clearly Google was changing things.

Within 18 months my traffic had halved. It wasn’t a sudden drop like Google had penalised me, it was this slowly trending downwards curve, settling at around half of what it used to be in the “good old days”.

In 2013 we decided to close down CrankyAds so I returned all my focus back on EJ. I did some experiments in 2013 to try and stem the falling traffic based on the following assumptions –

1. Google doesn’t like too many ads, so I reduced how many ad positions I had on my site. I was planning to move away from a dependence on advertising anyway so I was happy to do this.
2. Google wants to see frequent new updates, so I upped my blog posting frequency and wrote some pretty epic new posts.
3. I became more active on social media, hoping to increase social distribution of my content.

The results of these experiments were negligible…in fact my traffic continued to decrease, which was pretty upsetting after putting in so much effort on some weeks to produce quality content.

What Did The Experts Have To Say?

I was getting pretty frustrated, so I decided to ask around a few people I know who are SEO experts.

The sad result of these discussions, even after looking at my data and seeing that my blog seemed to be doing everything right, was that they just didn’t know.

SEO has become so far from a science that honestly, there is no such thing as an SEO expert anymore. You can be a content marketing expert or good at generating traffic, but no one can truly know what the search engines are up to. In fact sometimes Google seems to do some things that make no sense at all, for example, what Glen Allsop wrote about here –

http://www.viperchill.com/new-seo/

By this time I had a theory on what was going on with my traffic, which Glen’s article all but verified…

The conclusion I took away, which has since been backed up by another person who has been talking to people at Google, is that what used to be considered a good thing – having an old site with plenty of authority, is not nearly as good as what it used to be. In fact, as Glen illustrates, creating a brand new site will likely result in you ranking better.

Matt Cutts (Google Rep) did a video attempting to explain why old established sites like mine would decrease in search traffic –

Matt says that you need to make sure your site has a new modern design, and still updates with valuable content. You can’t just expect the traffic to continue coming in if you haven’t changed things since five or ten years ago.

I had updated my site design several times in the last couple of years and I was publishing some pretty amazing content all throughout that time, so I wasn’t too impressed with what Matt had to say.

I did “read between the lines” so to speak, and came away with a few other ideas that might be responsible for my decrease in traffic (I will always say “might be” when talking about conclusions related to Google because there are no facts, only assumptions) –

1. Other sites in my industry have popped up in the last few years, which are obviously newer, hence rank better as per Glen’s theory. They also feature modern design, are attracting fresh links from other new sites and have great social distribution.
2. The modern design aspect relates more to things like bounce rate, time spent on your site and number of pages viewed. Modern design just to look pretty is not important, but modern design that keeps a person on your site for longer makes a difference.Google will rank you better if your site provides better solutions or more entertainment. A person who sticks around indicates that they are engaged with your work.
3. Old sites have links from other old sites. While this used to be a benefit, now you need to make sure that your incoming link structure is “keeping up with the times”. The sites that link to you also have to be fresh, have strong engagement and new incoming links too. In other words, if your old friends are not doing so well, then they will drag you down because their links to your site don’t matter as much as they used to.

The broad general conclusion from all of this is that freshness and engagement matter now more than age and established authority. 

My First Experiment Results

I’m still working on a broad range of changes to my blog to reflect these conclusions, however it appears that finally some of my efforts are being rewarded.

Of course I cannot conclusively say that results I have experienced in the last month are at all related to the changes I made because we are talking about Google, but based on timing I am pretty confident they are.

About a month ago my traffic jumped 20%, then a couple of weeks later it jumped again. It’s now on track to reach almost back where it was. Fingers crossed things will continue to head in the right direction.

Experiment One: Google+ Authorship

I’m fairly confident when I tell you that Google wants you to use Google+, the social platform they created to compete with Facebook, and will reward you if you do.

So the first thing you should do is set up your Google+ account if you haven’t already.

On top of this, my first big experiment was to set up Google Authorship.

Authorship is how Google can identify what content online you create. It ties your name to your articles and then via Google+, you can stick your face along with your articles in search results, so it will look like this –

That first bump in my traffic occurred the day after authorship was turned on. It took about a week from setting things up for authorship and for my face to start appearing, but the results were instantaneous.

How I Set Up Google Authorship

There are plenty of how-to guides for setting up authorship, including the one from Google that I followed.

This is what I did –

1. Made sure everything in my Google+ account was set up, including the very important parts – your name, profile picture, blog URL and email address. Your picture is what Google will use for authorship, putting your blog URL tells Google that you write for that site, and if you have that same domain name in your email address that provides more evidence.
2. Your full name must be exactly as it appears on your articles. Obviously your blog posts should have your name on them and that name needs to be the same as the name in Google+. Hopefully you also have your email address listed as the same addressed associated with that profile in wordpress so everything matches up with the same domain names.
3. I added the rel=”author” attribute to the link to Google+ I have in my authorbox on my blog. This one is a bit trickier, but if you go to one of my blog posts you will see at the end of the article my author box were I put who I am and provides some links to my social profiles. On the link to my Google+ account I use the rel=”author” attribute (it’s in the HTML for the link itself like this <a href=”https://plus.google.com/+YaroStarakBlogger/” rel=”author”>Google+</a>). By doing this I tell Google that this author on my blog owns this Google+ account.

That was enough for me to activate Google Authorship a week later. 

I did have to make a few other adjustments due to how my blog was set up. One issue was that I personally have three accounts on my WordPress site, which were created over the years. My blog posts were spread across these three accounts, which also had different author boxes and usernames. I was concerned this might mean some of my blog posts won’t be attributed to me in Google+, so I made sure to combine all my user accounts so only my one active WordPress user account owned all my articles.

Choose Your Photo Carefully

When I initially set up Google+ I had this as my profile picture (the same one I used here in the EJ Insider Community initially too) –

I like this photo, but I realised when shrunk down because the background isn’t white, it doesn’t present as well as this one –

This photo has better background contrast (I should probably even get it changed to a pure white background). 

I’m not 100% certain this made a difference, but I believe it might be responsible for the second jump in traffic since it seemed to occur around the days after I changed photos.

Experiment Two: I Removed The Datestamp From My Blog Post

This experiment is much more controversial, but it’s something I wanted to test after reading Glen’s article.

You recall my conclusion about newer sites ranking better now – I thought, what if I remove the datestamp from my blog posts?

If there is no date, it’s difficult to know exactly when I published the article. My old posts will no longer be penalised just because they were written in 2007 instead of 2013.

Of course you’d think Google is clever enough to know when an article was published, so it might not make a difference to how an article ranks in search results.

It’s impossible to really know, but I have noticed one significant change since I did this experiment: My blog posts in search results no longer list the date published.

I don’t know about you, but when I search google and find an article written in 2007, unless it’s one of those subjects that is timeless, I always prefer to find something published in the last 12 months.

By removing the date, the human beings who see my articles in search results won’t know how old my content is so they will treat it as just as relevant. This might be “cheating” in some regards as my old content is old – some articles, especially about technical things, don’t provide up to date information, however many of my articles about fundamentals are still valuable, so I want them to be considered equally along with fresher content.

Again I can’t be certain, but the timing of that second bump in my traffic did seem around the same time that the removal of dates from my blog posts was reflected in search engines.

You won’t find many people talking about this tip and whether it will make a difference to your own search results I don’t know. You can of course always turn back on the datestamps easy enough (well your tech person can anyway!).

Have You Experimented Lately?

Those are my two most recent experiments. I’ve got a few more I am rolling out over the coming months and of course I will report back what is working for me to EJ Insiders first.

If you have any experiments you recently did that had a positive impact on your traffic I’d love to hear about them. Why not write a blog post or forum post and explain your case study?

Yaro Starak
EJInsider.com

This article is from Blog Mastermind graduate Nicola Lees.

I am an accidental blogger. In 2008, just before the financial crash, I took voluntary redundancy from a major TV broadcaster after ten years during which I specialized in developing new non-fiction TV shows.

I entered the world of freelancing exhausted and anonymous with no contacts, no reputation and even less direction. I now have a name that is recognized internationally in the TV industry – admittedly it is TVMole  and not my own – a website and newsletter with an international high-profile subscriber base of 2,500, and a twitter following of 3,600.

People constantly approach me to ask if I’ll work with them and some even even ask for my autograph. If you’d told me back then that to do all this but all I had to do was start a blog, I would have a) laughed and b) run away. Luckily, I had no idea what I was starting, otherwise I would have talked myself out of it, found reasons why it wouldn’t, couldn’t, be successful.

Benefit #1: Have A Platform To Sell My Books (And Courses Later)

I started TVMole out of (what turned out to be unnecessary) necessity. After leaving my job I took some time out to retrain and spent six weeks in NYC practicing my editing skills on two feature films.

Whilst on the editing course, I also signed up for a Mediabistro Non-Fiction Book Writing course: my job had involved writing pitches of 300 words maximum, so I wanted to challenge myself to write more than page.

I started my assignment of 15,000 words and couldn’t stop. 70,000 words later (mostly written on the sofa in the editing suite as I waited for tutors) I had the draft of a book. It seemed worthwhile attempting to pitch the book to a publisher, but was advised that I wouldn’t be able to get an agent or a publisher without a ‘platform’.

I decided to set up a WordPress blog. It took me months, and many tears of frustration, to get it up and working properly. But it didn’t matter, because before I’d even bought my domain name I’d secured an agent (within 48 hours of sending out my proposal), and I got a publishing contract soon after.

I continued to wrestle with my blog out of sheer pigheadedness rather than any real desire to have a blog of my own. I stumbled across Yaro’s Blog Mastermind course and started working my way through it.

The lessons were invaluable and guided all the decisions I made, from whether to use my own name for the domain name or choose another that would serve as a brand (I chose TVMole), whether to set up a newsletter (yes, via AWeber) and deciding on the look of the blog (just choose something and start producing content and worry about the details of the aesthetics later – after a couple of false starts I went with a magazine theme called The Morning After, which I’m still very happy with).

Following Yaro’s advice I composed a series of ‘pillar posts’ before going live, and and then set a publishing schedule – a couple of short ‘news’ posts per day plus daily ‘inspiration’ posts (to help with the brainstorming of ideas) and a monthly longer ‘pillar’ post. 8000 posts later my schedule has been refined a little – I now only post my ‘news’ posts during the working week, have dropped the inspiration posts (I don’t have time), and I produce longer posts more infrequently, most usually after industry events such as festivals and conferences.

Benefit #2: Build A Global Reputation

Although my visitor and subscriber numbers are modest compared to many blogs (internet marketers would  definitely sniff at these numbers), I’m happy. In fact, I spend a lot of time fending off suggestions from people (marketing people, spammers, my agent) who think I should be growing my numbers, but they miss the point.

My heart sinks when I see someone subscribing who doesn’t fit my demographic (actors, real estate agents, pastors), because I know that they aren’t going to ‘get’ my content and will no doubt unsubscribe in frustration when they find I’m not posting reviews of their favorite cop show or publishing detailed TV schedules. 

These people probably don’t read past the name of the blog and assume it’s a fan site. But even this has an unexpected benefit: because I post early information about shows I often get the viewing public posting comments when these programmes eventually go to air. This offers a fascinating insight into which programmes are popular with the audience and why. Interestingly, industry people never leave comments; it seems we’re a shy lot in the world of TV.

My real audience is comprised of Development Producers, production company Creative Directors and MDs, and Commissioning Executives at major broadcasters and cable channels. The key function of TVMole is to publish information about shows that have been bought by broadcasters – extremely useful for developers who need to know what kind of shows are getting commissioned so they can leverage emerging trends and avoid pitching something that has just been greenlit.

I used to trawl all the trade press and press releases from broadcasters to find my content, but now I’m in the more fortunate position of having independent producers and press officers sending me information directly.

Benefit #3: Access To Case Studies

Over a couple of years TVMole grew in size (to approximately 15,000 visitors per month) and reputation. When I was commissioned to write a second book I turned to my subscribers to ask for interviewees and case studies and got volunteers from around the world:

• A wildlife producer in South Africa told me how he develops new wildlife shows
• A Scottish producer told me how he’d failed to capitalize on a show he’d made by not having an online profile
• A Canadian broadcast executive explained how he made a show with five different international partners
• A Belgian producer told me the story of how he set up an Olympic bobsled team for a TV series.

If it wasn’t for TVMole I would never have had access to any of those people, let alone their stories.

Benefit #4: Keep Track Of Industry Trends And Intelligence

My real audience niche, although global, is tiny; there are very few people who do my job, and many, many more who really don’t want to do my job.

The beauty of working in a Cinderella part of the industry is that those who toil away, researching, developing, writing and pitching new TV ideas and dealing with rejection after rejection (approximately 1 in 100 ideas pitched are actually commissioned), were extremely grateful when I started providing resources that makes their life a bit easier and validated what they do as skilled and valuable.

I’d like to say that I planned this to be the case, but really I was merely posting information that I would find useful. When I write articles for TVMole, or am deciding what content to include, I’m writing purely for me, because I am the target audience.

The reason why I have been able to sustain the blog for more than five years is that I regard it as my ‘industry brain’. Everything I could possibly need to know and/or remember about the world of factual TV development and commissioning over the past few years has been captured on TVMole, so I know where I can find it. I can’t not write it. The fact that other people find it useful is a bonus, but by no means necessary for its production.

Benefit #5: Word Of Mouth Marketing

People definitely find TVMole useful; I know this because my newsletter subscribers increase week on week with no marketing of any kind on my part.

Referrals are all word of mouth, and happen mainly on a Monday after the newsletter drops into people’s in-boxes. Because I can track who signs up – or unsubscribes – I’m often the first to know when a new production company is launched, or when someone leaves their job or starts a new one, which is fantastic industry intelligence to have.

I decided to ignore all best practice to send the newsletter – which is a round-up of everything that has been published in the previous week –  on a Monday morning. Internet marketers would say that mid-week is a better time to send a newsletter, but I envisaged people arriving at work on a Monday morning, coffee in hand and needing to ease into the week gently.

I thought if I were in their shoes I’d like to spend that time getting up to speed by scanning the headlines in my newsletter and feeling fully briefed on recent commissions, who’d been hired and fired, and new pitching/funding opportunities – all information that could be casually thrown into a meeting to impress their boss. I’ve since heard that my readers see it less as a gentle introduction to the week and more of a kick in the pants to get going. Either way, it seems to work.

Benefit #6: Raise The Profile Of Development As A Valid Career Choice

Next something strange started to happen. Instead of working in paranoid, competitive isolation we developers have started to develop a sense of solidarity.

A development producer in London approached me via TVMole to ask if he could set up a Development Producers Group (no reason to ask me, but that I was flattered that he did) and we met monthly for a couple of years before he moved home to New Zealand. During those sessions we had channel executives come and brief us, we got to know each other and partnerships were formed and referrals made.

In the last few years, development has become acknowledged as a specialist area, one that requires different skills and a particular mindset distinct from those required in production and for the first time ‘Developed by’ credits are appearing at the end of shows; traditionally we never got a credit; we really were the unsung heroes of TV production.

This raising of the profile of Development as a potential career option has attracted the attention of university media faculties and many have now added Development modules (based on my two books Greenlit and Give Me the Money and I’ll Shoot!) to their curriculum for the first time.

Benefit #7: Never Have To Look For Work Again

As the profile of Development was raised, so my profile rose too, which brought more unexpected benefits.

About half way through the Blog Mastermind course I had to abandon it to concentrate on writing my book in order to meet my submission deadline. By then I was in a rhythm of posting regularly and I made sure to schedule this time in, but beyond this I didn’t do any active marketing and didn’t really expect anyone to read it – as I said, I was really doing it for my own benefit.

When I emerged from my book writing I was surprised to discover that my blog had taken on a life of its own, with a growing subscriber base of loyal readers.

I’d already decided not to actively monetize the site beyond using it as a place to promote my book when it was published. But what I hadn’t appreciated was how much money would come to me via offline methods as a direct result of having the blog. Something like 90% of my freelance income has come via jobs where people approached me because of my newly raised profile in a very niche area.

This has led to me getting a variety of interesting paid jobs:

• Running workshops in the UK, Europe and North America
• Producing 50 panels at a TV festival
• Running brainstorming workshops for small independent production companies
• Providing maternity cover at a creative agency
• One-to-one consulting for people outside the industry who have ideas they want to pitch
• Chairing a panel at BAFTA
• Mentoring people in the industry who want to get a job in Development

Benefit #8: Free Press Passes To Festivals

Thanks to TVMole I’ve been able to get press passes to go to Cannes Film Festival, Edinburgh International TV Festival, Realscreen Summit in Washington DC, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and Sheffield Doc/Fest.

I started by listing these festivals on the front page of my blog when they opened for registration or were running pitching competitions and re-tweeting their promotional material. This got me noticed, and made it easier to justify giving me a press pass when I was up against some really big trade publications. Now we have a really good reciprocal relationship whereby I post and tweet about the festivals and the festival teams will re-tweet my workshops and books – and as they have MUCH larger audiences than I do my reach is much greater than my blog analytics suggest.  

Benefit #9: Build A Strong Platform To Launch New Projects

Last year I started thinking about other ways I could start to leverageTVMole and make some more money. My goal is to build several passive income streams so that at some not too distant point in the future I can cut back on my day-to-day work (which today consists mostly of running two film/TV industry talent development schemes) and concentrate on writing novels.

I looked back at my articles and one of the very first ‘pillar’ articles that I wrote – How to Write a Proposal That a TV Commissioner Will Actually Read – was by far the most popular post. I decided to run an online course that focused on this aspect of the development process.

I launched it via Skillshare (see my course here) in July 2013 and promoted it via TVMole and Twitter. Although it’s done well there are some limitations with the platform (because of issues around ideas theft I have to advise people not to post their assignments publicly, which means that I can’t see them and give them feedback either), so for my next course I’m looking at alternative options.

The good thing about doing the Skillshare course was that it forced me to get over my fear of recording videos of myself. The ones I managed to produce are not great, but they do the job and people don’t seem to mind about them being a bit rough around the edges.

Benefit #10: The Confidence To Keep On Learning

I’ve turned to Yaro’s Entrepreneur’s Journey as I feel like I’m at the same point as I was when I was launching TVMole – I have lots of ideas, and I know my niche really well, but could really do with some guidance on where to start regarding platforms and the technical delivery of the content, and I’m excited where it’s going to take me this time!

Nicola Lees
TVMole.com