5 Essential WordPress Plug-ins You Should Be Using

by Caleb Wojcik

There are over 18,000 WordPress plug-ins. How are you supposed to know which WordPress plug-ins you should be using? 

That’s what we are going to help you with in today’s post. All of the below plug-ins we use ourselves and we highly recommend that you use them too.

Let’s dive right in.

Backup Buddy

What if you woke up one day and all the work you’ve done on your website or blog was gone? Talk about worst nightmare.

The most important WordPress plug-in that we use (and you should too) is Backup Buddy. It is not a free plug-in, but it is worth way it. It can save you a ton of time and headaches if something goes wrong with your site.

This plug-in will backup through WordPress the different parts of your website daily.  [Continue reading…]

February 21, 2012 — 30 awesome comments

Is Going Viral Worth It? How to Get 55,000 Visits from Stumble Upon in 4 Days

by Caleb Wojcik

This is a guest post by Maria from Fitness Reloaded.

I have been a loyal reader of Corbett’s stuff for a few years. After launching my own blog Fitness Reloaded in late July, I had even more motivation to bury myself into his material.

Since my website was still a baby, I was experimenting with my content to see what worked. Up until October I was only posting videos, and maybe also some text explaining the video. I had never tried to follow the popular guidelines about tweaking your headlines to attract more people, creating list posts, etc. (Why? Because I felt that doing so would make me join the club of too much marketing).

However, as traffic was low, I felt I had to try more options. Video, video+text, just text, list format, shorter posts, longer posts, different headlines, etc.

I wanted to learn what makes posts really take off.  I had read Benny’s article on the anatomy of a viral post after having his article “29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight” getting 220,000 visitors with Facebook and Stumble Upon being the major traffic sources.

These are the main points on what to do to go viral:

  1. Awesome content. Don’t take my word for that. Just read it.
  2. Including yourself in the post, e.g., with a pic.
  3. List format.
  4. Unique Title: Benny did not use a common birthday title “29 life lessons in 29 years lived”, but “29 lessons in travelling the world for 8 years straight”. Pretty different right?
  5. Bonus points for relating the post to your birthday ;) [Continue reading…]

February 16, 2012 — 18 awesome comments

Two Simple Ways to Know Exactly What Your Audience Wants

by Corbett Barr

What does your audience want?

What does your audience want?

As someone who produces content, you have to do the impossible.

You have to see inside the minds of your audience members.

As you sit in front of a blank screen, you have to know what your audience craves so you can produce truly epic content.

You have to be intimate with their hopes, fears, insecurities, needs and desires.

When you give your audience exactly what it wants and needs, magical things happen. Your content goes viral. Your email list grows. Your profile is raised. You make a difference in people’s lives.

When you miss the mark and produce content no one really wants or needs, your site becomes stale. People stop coming by. Your influence wanes.

This is one of the greatest challenges you face.

If producing your best content has to start with understanding your audience, how do you get to know your audience so well?

How can you see inside the minds of your audience and know what they REALLY want from you? How can you know what kind of content will make them tweet, comment, share and engage like crazy?

[Continue reading…]

February 14, 2012 — 22 awesome comments

Ask the Readers: Do You Blog to Make Money or to Make Meaning (or Both)?

by Caleb Wojcik

It has been a while since we’ve done an ask the readers post, so we’d love to hear from you on this one.

Does your website exist simply to make money or are you working to create something that matters?

Obviously the two options aren’t mutually exclusive. Also, the definition of “what matters” is up to you.

If you can’t think of your answer, think about it this way: When you first started out blogging or creating your website, what was the main driving force? We’d love to here your answers in the comments below this post.

Last Time on “Ask the Readers”

Our previous ask the readers discussion about what people think of pop-ups was fairly one sided. There were 119 comments and my favorite came from Tara Gentile:

I have a feeling they are useful & effective for sites with less-than-savvy readership. If you’re looking to build an audience that’s surfing a variety of sites, sticking around for a while, and doing their homework – you’re better off without a pop up.

Great point Tara. It isn’t strictly about whether or not the pop-ups work to gain subscribers, it is about what kind of people you are turning away by using an invasive tactic.

—

Alright, back to today’s question.

I’d love to know: do you work online to make money or to make meaning?

How are making meaning and making money related?

If you’re doing both, tell us in what proportion and tell us which is the primary driver.

As always, there is no right answer. We just want to hear from you, so don’t be shy. Let’s hear it!

February 9, 2012 — 50 awesome comments

5 Critical Steps to Getting Your Creative Project Funded on Kickstarter

by Caleb Wojcik

Note from Caleb: A trend we’ve been seeing lately is how bloggers have been using Kickstarter to fund major projects. A couple months back we featured the story of how Kristin and Shannon used their blog to reach more than triple their fundraising goal on Kickstarter. Also, our good friend Adam Baker from Man vs. Debt is launching his own Kickstarter campaign soon for a documentary called ‘I’m Fine, Thanks’.

To go along with this rising trend we have a special post today for you from Brian Kwong. He is going to lay out some of the findings from research he has been doing for his very own project for helping other people successfully fund their Kickstarter campaigns.

Take it away Brian! 

***

It has been a heck of a year for Kickstarter in 2011, a crowd-funding platform based in the US, where creative projects are launched and funded by everyday folks like you and me.

Since the birth of Kickstarter in April 2009, they had reached 10,000 successfully funded projects in July 2011, helped projects raise more than $100 million dollars and had their one millionth backer in October 2011.

One Million Backers » The Kickstarter Blog — Kickstarter-2

These are some mind-blowing numbers in just two and half years, especially in a weak US economy.

So I thought, Kickstarter could be a real opportunity for me to raise funds and start a creative project that I am passionate about, no matter if it’s a non-fiction book or any other awesome project that I could dream up. [Continue reading…]

February 7, 2012 — 21 awesome comments

Huge Month! January 2012 Monthly Report – Think Traffic, Expert Enough and Million Dollar Blog Project

by Corbett Barr

Welcome to another Think Traffic monthly report!

If you’re new here, in these reports we dive into exactly what we’ve done to grow this blog each month. We also share full details about the growth and revenue for our 3-month-old case study blog called Expert Enough.

This was a HUGE month for us. We launched a new course called How to Start a Blog that Matters. We saw record traffic to both Think Traffic and Expert Enough (full details below).

We also saw record month for revenue from Expert Enough.

Oh, and we have an exciting update on the Million Dollar Blog Project below in this post as well.

Are you ready to dive in? I’m pumped to share this with you.

Let’s get started.

Product Launch = BIG Traffic Boost and More

Here’s something I hear over and over again from bloggers who haven’t yet created a product for sale:

[Continue reading…]

February 2, 2012 — 49 awesome comments

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