The Secrets of Creating Blogs that are Totally PRO

Greet­ings All,

If you are look­ing for a way to start mak­ing money on the inter­net, and you have a bud­get that is very small or zero, blog­ging is a great way to get started.

Blog­ging has become very pop­u­lar lately and the blog­ging world has matured a lit­tle. For one thing, it’s free. For another, you don’t need to have any tech­ni­cal skills what so ever to get started. If you can read and write, then you can blog.

If you have a prod­uct, ser­vice, or inter­est about which you are pas­sion­ate, there may be no eas­ier way to con­nect with poten­tial cus­tomers, col­leagues, and oth­ers who need what you have or know than through blogging.

You can use blog as a way to col­lect cus­tomer feed­back. Do an infor­mal sur­vey. Add a link to an RSS feed ser­vice that includes an event calendar.

So what is a blog? A blog is a sim­ple web page that any­one can set up in min­utes. Peo­ple use them as jour­nals, diaries, and sales pages. Actu­ally, blogs can be about any­thing, not only just about your daily life. As long as you make it inter­est­ing, and peo­ple will stop by to read it.

If the idea of cre­at­ing a blog makes your palms sweat, fear not. Not only are blogs eas­ier than ever to set up (even a com­plete ama­teur can cre­ate one in a few min­utes these days), it also eas­ier to cre­ate a blog, both Word­press and Blog­ger are pro­vide free blog­ging that is so easy to set up, you can do it in less time than you can eat lunch. By cre­at­ing a blog, you have the option to intro­duce the sub­jects you want to address the con­cerns of your clients and poten­tial clients.

I’m not the biggest blog­ger in the world. But I think they’re a really great told for the right place and time.

Today, I’m going to give you a few secrets of cre­at­ing blogs that are totally PRO and not ama­teur. In the other words, cre­ate a “social proof” blog.

A social proof blog is designed from the ground floor up to pro­vide social proof. In the old days, before the new FTC Law inter­pre­ta­tions in the U.S. Inter­net mar­keters mostly used tes­ti­mo­ni­als, till today they’re still legal but prac­ti­cally cas­trated. How­ever, tes­ti­mo­ni­als are not and never were the goal for your blog.

The goal you want is the SOCIAL PROOF (videos or com­ments to your blogs). Our human beings are the social crea­ture and this social proof thing is lit­er­ally hard wired not just into the human brain but some­how in the col­lec­tive genes of mankind. Peo­ple like to look to oth­ers for val­i­da­tion of whether or not some­thing will con­tribute to their sur­vival, repli­ca­tion and pros­per­ity value or not.

The tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment and social web 2.0 inter­ac­tive world not only reduce the bound­aries of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple, it pro­vides great oppor­tu­ni­ties for us to do research, lis­ten oth­ers opin­ions toward cer­tain things from the web etc.

And if you have a cool idea, here is how you can have your blog (word­press) up and run­ning in 7 days.

1. Find Your Theme

The FIRST thing you need for a social proof blog is a great theme. Yes, there are tons of themes out there, but I rec­om­mend you get some­thing really nice. Like the theme I bought from Stu­dio Press that used for this site, also for Mar­ket­ing that Works. These pre­mium themes are awe­some and the price is very rea­son­able, I LIKE them not because they are designed by pro­fes­sion­als, it is also because the guys in the stu­dio­press pro­vide their cus­tomers with top-notch service.

Now go to Stu­dio Press and find the theme that match with your needs, then you done. If in case you need to do some cus­tomiza­tion and you are fac­ing the chal­lenges, and their sup­port forum is there for you.

2. Reg­is­ter Your Domain

You can go to namecheap or godaddy.com to reg­is­ter your domain, to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing toward the process, watch this short Video to get some help.

In gen­eral, it’s a good idea to put your key­word in your domain and blog title.

3. Install Your Blog

After you buy your totally rock­ing theme, install it. The instal­la­tion part is easy. You can through FTP to upload the files to your host­ing account.

If you need help in regard­ing to the host­ing, watch this how to host­ing Video 1 and Video 2

3. Get the Header Designed

You need a good designer for this that match with your blog and your per­son­al­ity, with Stu­dio Press theme, it is very easy to do. You can just get your own header image done, upload it to your theme image folder and replace the orig­i­nal one, that’s it.

When I did the graphic header for my per­sonal blog, it took me prob­a­bly 30 minutes.

4. Set Up Your Layout

Once you get it all installed, there will be a theme lay­out options in your word­press back office under the Appear­ance sec­tion, that is where you choose your options.

5. Cre­ate Your Content

On a social proof blog, this is the FUN part and it is also the chal­leng­ing part.

Beside the writ­ten con­tent, you can also add some other type of con­tent to your blog that related to your niche mar­ket, like,

* Skype inter­views
* Audio inter­view tran­scripts
* Pic­tures of you hav­ing fun with peo­ple at sem­i­nars you attend
* Pic­tures from the things you do or from your work­ing activities

… etc …

You should be able to do this in 7 days or less.

* Installing the blog takes 20–30 min­utes
* Got a pro­fes­sional design the theme takes less than 20 min­utes
* Reg­is­ter­ing the domain name takes 10 minutes

There’s not too much more to it than that.

Keep in mind of that, your blog has to be inter­est­ing enough for peo­ple to want to read it, link to it and tell their friends about it. Your posts have to be reg­u­lar and per­sonal enough to allow poten­tial cus­tomers and read­ers to feel that they’re in touch with you, that they like you and they’d like to do busi­ness with you.

Finally, con­sider treat­ing your blog as an inter­ac­tive newslet­ter. That is, write a blog post and email your list (clients, col­leagues, friends, and oth­ers) that a new item has been posted. Tell them the sub­ject of the post, give them a hyper­link to it, encour­age them to leave a com­ment, and sug­gest that they let oth­ers know about your blog. Keep the dis­cus­sions going when you get com­ments by respond­ing to them, and keep your focus on fos­ter­ing and nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships that will fur­ther your busi­ness in an organic way and always, always make sure your blog and web­site are linked.

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If you haven’t check out our recent post, here are the recap.

* Online Global Busi­ness Cen­ter at Geta­Mar­ket
* How to Grow Your Ser­vice Deliv­ery Busi­ness
* Make Money Web­site Guide Part 1
* Don’t Let It Ruin Your Site
* Make Money Web­site Guide Part 2
* How to Find a Mar­ket and a Prod­uct to Match

Till next time — Happy shar­ing

Cheers!