Social Media

On my 21st birthday I shared a list of 21 lessons I’ve learned during my short spell on earth. On my 22nd birthday I worked for weeks on a free 2 hour video course called Cloud Blueprint. And if there’s anyone really good at guessing, then you probably know that today is my 23rd birthday. I thought for a long time about what I wanted to share here. I knew that I didn’t want to share something “personal developmenty” and I already have a big marketing related announcement coming in the next few days, so I decided to do something else.

That something else, is just to be personal.

This is an important blog post, because it makes a prediction. A prediction about the future of blogging; a platform actively used by over 181 million people (Nielsen data for October 2011). Not only will you learn why I think most blogging advice is dated and ineffective, but I’ll also reveal where I believe this entire industry is heading, so you can stay ahead of the competition.

This is not only an important post, but also the longest I have ever written. It’s more like a mini-eBook, without the price tag. Don’t let its lack of cost make you doubt the value here though. I will at least sell you on what you’re about to learn:

• A weird tip I personally received from Google’s Matt Cutts which increased my ViperChill search rankings
• What Gawker does once per week to double their traffic figures. That’s going from two million to four million uniques per day
• Why the Daily Mail recently surpassed the New York Times as the number #1 newspaper website in the world
• How Mashable crushed TechCrunch on traffic numbers (even though they used to be the underdog)
• Why the successful ‘make money online’ blogs of the past have now faded into obscurity
• The number one reason Leo Babauta dominated the personal development industry in two months
• What Steve Kamb did to build a six-figure blog in the overly saturated health niche
• Why feed counts mean absolutely nothing (and never really have)
• Which Huffington Post articles attract 3X more clicks than any other
• Why the Verge was one of the fastest growing blog launches in history

…and most importantly, how this all helps me to make a prediction about what it now takes to build highly profitable blogs.

As you would probably expect, the last few weeks of my life since launching OptinSkin have been absolutely crazy. I can’t remember a time when I’ve spent so much of my day with my head in my inbox, dealing with customers. I assumed that most of the feedback after the launch would be from people with feature requests, support questions and pre-sales curiosity.

As a team, we’ve definitely received enough of those, but the most common type of feedback I have received personally was totally unexpected. Dozens of people from around the world got in touch just to let me know how cool they thought it was that I actually got to do this. That I could spend my days working on a creative project of my choice and then finally get to show it to the world.

You don’t have to look far in the IM world to see people touting how powerful email marketing is. How “growing subscribers” is a crucial aspect of building a sustainable internet business. I’ve talked about it myself on countless blog posts. Smart bloggers are catching on to the idea that their sites can act as an effective funnel for building their email lists.

Yet even though everyone wants to grow their audience, few people are prioritising that conversion from visitor to subscriber. In October 2011 I wrote out the specifications for a WordPress plugin that would let bloggers of any skill level add attractive opt-in forms and social share boxes to their blog, in seconds. There’s more…

A few weeks ago I asked on the ViperChill Facebook page whether people would be interested in a blog post on how I’ve developed various web software and plugins. The question was the most ‘liked’ status update I’ve ever made, making it clear that I should definitely write about this topic. Instead of just covering the development of my tools that already exist, I also have an announcement to make about an app I’ve been working on for months, which is making its world debut this week on Monday the 27th.

Not only that, I’ve interviewed WordPress Rockstar Joost de Valk, author of plugins which have been downloaded millions of times, to see what advice he has for people looking to create plugins — both free and premium. Finally, I’m also sharing some amazing development advice from one of my best friends, who also happens to be an integral part of my big announcement, which is…

In my post on how to become a niche rockstar I said that in order to be at the top of your industry (in a lot of cases online) it’s important to know as much about it as possible. What your competitors are doing, how they’re making money and how they’re getting traffic are just a few things that you can discover with some in-depth niche research.

In that particular post I looked at the green industry from the perspective of a blogger and shared some of my findings. Based on some of the comments and emails I received at the time, a few of you were interested in how I collected the stats I did and how you could go about investigating your own niche further. I’m going to expand on that topic today, in the way I always do.

Though the title of this blog is ‘viral marketing’, regular readers will know that it’s far from being the only thing I talk about. Sometimes I’ll share a case study to inspire you. Sometimes I’ll offer insights to educate you, and sometimes I’ll give you step-by-step advice so you can take action.

This post is, purely and simply, for those who want more from their lives. If you’re happy with the position you’re in or at least like how you spend your days, then skip this post and come back next week (I have $7K/m case study on the way). Today I’m simply sharing what I wish someone else had written a few months ago when I was once again at the busiest point in my life and questioning the direction I found myself heading.

There’s more documentation on ‘how to make money online’ than most subjects out there, yet I can safely say that 99% of people who try to replace their offline income fail to do so. Many of you have seen the case studies of marketers – who clearly already know what they’re doing – building another successful website. Inspiring? Without a doubt. But obviously there’s still something missing.

For a long time I wondered what it would take to fill that gap. What would increase the number of people who follow advice in this space and actually achieve some form of success. Then the answer came to me. Or rather, she did.