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There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc? experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a ?guru? (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of?well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from ?scratch?, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

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Below is some great advice from Yaro Starak about how to convince people to leave comments on your blog.

HOW TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO LEAVE COMMENTS

Let me set something straight right now.

If your blog has no traffic you will not receive any comments.

It makes sense of course, but some people don’t see the connection between these two elements.

If no one is reading your blog then no one will leave comments either. Simply posting great articles to your blog is not enough – you have to *market* your blog to bring people to it.

We will talk A LOT about marketing throughout my newsletter, so stay tuned for that.

For now, understand if you don’t receive any comments to your blog it’s probably not that your content is bad or people don’t like you, it’s because you simply don’t have enough traffic.

If on the other hand you do have some traffic, yet no one replies to your posts, there are ways to stimulate comments.

Try these tips to begin with –

- Write articles that reference or focus on other bloggers. You will get their attention that way and there’s a good chance they will come to your blog and leave a comment as a result.

- Ask your readers a question at the end of your article.

- Write about topics that stimulate conversation, such as current events (think politics, news, entertainment).

- Be controversial with your writing. Have a strong opinion and others with strong opinions will reply to argue or agree with you.

- Be patient. Sometimes you just have to wait until the first person leaves a comment which opens the floodgates.

KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING

A while ago I stopped actively responding to comments on my blog unless I was asked a direct question. I really had no excuse for not doing it, I was just lazy and working on other writing projects. Consequently the average number of comments on my blog entries dropped A LOT.

I noticed the regular commentators stopped commenting as frequently and most conversations on
my blog ended very quickly.

This is really tragic for a blog and I’ll tell you why – it reduces your “Social Proof”.

WHAT IS SOCIAL PROOF?

Social Proof is when humans take action or make a decision based on seeing other humans doing it first. It’s sort of like an implied recommendation

- if other people do it, it must be good.

It’s like when you see a bunch of people all looking up at something in the sky at the same time. You can’t help but turn your head skywards and see what all the fuss is about.

When first time visitors to your blog see other people making lots of comments they are more likely to decide there is something valuable at your blog and bookmark or subscribe to it and may
even make a comment.

This is good for blog traffic. This is social proof in action.

I was very conscious of always taking part in comment conversations at my blog and consequently my readership was growing in leaps and bounds. I stopped and I noticed I hit a wall and my blog didn’t grow quite as well as it was.

I know a blogger who has a rule – she responds to every single comment made to her blog.

Consequently she has developed a fantastic community around her blog and her traffic has skyrocketed in a short period of time.

Remember, comments on your blog are very important, take the time to respond to them.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak

www.BlogMastermind.com

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Is your goal to become a full time blogger?

Do you like the sound of blogging for a living?

Yeah, me too. At least I did anyway. But then I learned the truth. I don’t like doing anything
“full time”.

Even something as fun as blogging is not an activity I would want to do for the majority of my day. I like variety in my life and while I want blogging to be a part of it, I don’t want it to be the main labor. I want to do it because I like it, not because I need to do it to make a living.

I remember when I first decided to become a serious blogger. I monitored some of the other professional bloggers, the guys and girls making a living from blogging. Darren Rowse was of particular influence on me because he was doing very well, had started off as a complete Internet beginner and was from Australia like me.

I tried to emulate Darren’s blogging style. I knew I had the skills to do it and in fact more experience than Darren in a lot of ways because I had been working online for over seven years while he started much later. I had plenty of material to blog about so I knuckled down and committed myself
to posting multiple articles every day.

It didn’t last long.

Maybe I was lazy, maybe I was blindly following someone else’s lead without really thinking it through. Whatever the reason I wasn’t cut out for writing blog posts each and every day. My blogging strategy had to change…again.

Darren and many other bloggers are machine-like in how efficient and how frequently they can pump out good content for their blogs. These people work hard. They enjoy solid rewards for their labor, but my motto is not to work hard, but to work smart, so I needed another way to make blogging work for me.

REALIGN YOUR GOALS

I’m going to assume you are like me. You blog, you want to blog, you enjoy blogging and you want to increase your blog traffic. Most importantly you want to do it quickly and efficiently and not waste time putting energy into activities that don’t produce fantastic results.

The first thing you have to do, and this is what I did when I decided full time blogging wasn’t for me, is to decide what your blog is for – what you want to get out of it and consequently what your audience should get out of it as a result?

I decided that I would use my blog for two main
activities –

1. To dump all my knowledge built up from years of working online into article and audio format. I wanted a repository of my skills and experience.

2. To increase my exposure and enhance my credibility – to improve the “Yaro” brand.

With these two goals in mind I went to work producing some big meaty solid how-to articles, stuff you would read in books and manuals on Internet marketing.

I didn’t bother blogging too much about news or linking to other blogs in my industry at this point because those activities were not aligned with my goals. I wanted my best stuff out there so other people could learn from me and I could demonstrate that I was an expert in my field.

In your case your goals should dictate what you want to achieve with your blog.

If your blog is designed to help you get freelance writing gigs, then publish lots of original creative articles.

If you are interested in selling your consulting services then go to work putting out articles and case studies on the work you have done.

If you want your blog to become the news source for everything related to Michael Jackson celebrity gossip then aim to post multiple news-bite sized articles per day.

The point is to define your objectives and work to your goals. Don’t follow someone else’s goals just because they appear to be doing well.

THE LAZY BUT SMART BLOGGER

I want to be clear about one point – you *don’t* have to work hard to be a successful blogger.

You don’t have to post an article each and every day. You don’t have to create something of ‘genius level’ creativity each time you blog.

Ahh, see, now you can relax.

Of course if you don’t write articles you won’t get traffic but as long as you post something interesting, creative, practical or valuable every once and a while your blog readership will increase. People that like your work will look forward to it regardless of how frequently you post. A little anticipation is a good thing.

When you start to post regularly, not hourly or daily but at least weekly, people adjust their expectations accordingly. Remember you don’t owe anyone anything when you blog. Blogging is only about putting in as much effort as is required to
meet YOUR goals.

If you post new articles six times a day people will start to expect it from you. You will start to expect it from yourself and blogging will feel like a job because of pressures to publish a certain amount of new content each day.

Now if that’s your goal, that’s fine, just remember you can change things if you find yourself suffering because you set unrealistic goals. Don’t ever feel obligated to do anything.

In my case I started to post between one and two big articles per week and about one or two podcasts per month. I’d also do a little news linking or track-backing of other articles I had a strong interest in during the “heat of the moment”. I could brain-dump my thoughts quickly and effortlessly into a blog post whenever the inspiration hit me.

I did most of my early foundation blogging while at work. I worked at a computer help desk with Internet access so I could blog in between helping people at my job.

I ended up blogging collectively for maybe 2 hours per day on average and I still managed to grow my blog traffic to 1000+ daily readers within a year and then 5,000 by the end of the second year, and I didn’t have to post each and every day to do it. There is a smarter and easier way to get blog traffic.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Click this link to receive “Building a list Free Report”

PS. If you like the idea of working smarter but not harder on your blog and would like to learn how to get the most out of those two hours per day you spend on your blog, I invite you to join my coaching program.

Blog Mastermind is all about finding the highest points of leverage when you blog so you work less for more reward. It’s not a walk in the park, but it’s not about working 8 hour days on your blog either.

www.BlogMastermind.com

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