Indeed, the book is worth every last cent of its $19.95 and more. If you don’t have time for an extensive blogging course or to sit down and watch videos, Darren’s new book gives you 31 days of action-oriented advice on how to improve your blog and take it to the next level.

The book is divided into 31 short chapters. In each chapter, Darren explains the task for the day and the reason why it is important or helpful for building your blog.

The best thing about this book is that you can take it at your own pace. You can do it in 31 days, 31 weeks or in one week – it’s really up to you. The tasks don’t necessarily take a whole day, so if you have a free weekend, you could achieve quite a bit more. Alternatively, if you’re really busy and blogging only part time (like me), you might want to progress a little slower.

I haven’t completed all the tasks as yet, but I have found this workbook to be a useful addition to the blogging course I am already working on. I can’t give you the details of the tasks in the book because Darren has specifically asked his readers not to divulge the information. However, I can tell you that the task from Day 1 really helped me identify the specific niche that I want my blog – Babylicious – to target.

One of the most important parts of creating a successful blog, especially today where blogs are a dime a dozen, is to create a blog that is very specific. For instance, Babylicious was pretty much a personal blog that was initially about my pregnancy. After my son was born, it began to take on more of a parenting focus. Even then it wasn’t very specific and if you search online, you’ll see that there are far too many parenting blogs for my blog to have any significance.

Although I knew it was important to be more specific and to identify a target audience, I still struggled to find the niche I wanted to be in until I read 31 Days to Better Blogging.

I probably should add that this book is only suitable if you already have a blog and want to know how to make it better. For those of you who want to know what blogging is all about and need advice on how to get started, you’re better off taking Yaro’s BlogMastermind or the Become a Blogger step-by-step video tutorials.

Click here for more information about 31 Days to Better Blogging.

March: US$572.66

April: US$516.48

May: US$632.63

There has been a drop in income from Text-Link-Ads which I assume might be due to the current world economic state and many companies reducing their advertising budgets.  But, as Yaro always advised, it is important to diversify your income streams so you don’t end up losing all your income just because one of your income streams have been affected.

Indeed, I think that was the reason for the drop in income during April – a lack of motivation to work harder.  I managed to turn the trend around for May, but we’ll see if we can keep this up in June onwards.

March: US$572.66
April: US$700 (target)

Okay, so we missed the original target for March by about US$28. Nevertheless we will push on with a new target for April. It is only by pushing ourselves further that we can achieve greater things. Who was it that said, “Aim for the moon and if you miss, the clouds will catch you”? Okay, so US$700 isn’t exactly aiming for the moon, but I’ll be happy if I can hit that this month.

The long term goal is to make a replacement income online (replacement being the amount I brought home back when I was still working a formal 9-5 job), which means I should be targeting to earn about US$1.9k a month (based on today’s exchange rate). We’re getting there – nearly a third of the way there.

One of the main reasons why I love using the wordpress platform is because of the availability of plugins.  If there is something special you want to be able to do on your blog, you can bet that someone’s already thought of a plugin to help you get it done.  All you need to do is to search the WordPress Plugin database for it.

Plugins are great for individuals like me who don’t know much about the nitty gritty of programming but like to enjoy the conveniences of being able to do things quickly and easily.  WordPress allows me to access these plugins and that is the main reason why I would choose WordPress over the other blogging platforms.

Here are some of the plugins that I use which I recommend:

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.  Generally pretty good at filtering out spam comments, although they do occasionally catch out a legitimate comment so it is wise to check your spam filter from time to time.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.  Helps to optimise your blog so the search engines like it better.  This is one of the simple methods that help to optimise your blog without having to hire an SEO expert to do the job.

Atomic Blogging 3.0 Social Submitter – Autosubmits your blog post to Socialmatic when published.  This is one method of encouraging more visitors to your blog without the pain of individually submitting your new blog posts one at a time.

Brian’s Threaded Comments – This gives you threaded comments and a “wandering” comment form.  Probably more relevant if you have lots of commentors so you and your readers can follow the relevant thread of comments.

Dagon Design Form Mailer – The WordPress plugin for a contact form mailer.  Makes it easy to create a contact form on one of your WordPress pages.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap that can be included as one of your WordPress pages.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.  Probably not so important if you have thousands of subscribers, but for the new blogs, every subscriber counts.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.  As far as I understand, it helps your search engine rankings.

HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.  You can either use this or All-in-One SEO Pack.

JAW Popular Posts Widget – Adds a sidebar widget that shows the most popular blog posts.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate – Automatically convert keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. Also manage, track, cloak and shorten unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location of Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate.  Definitely a must have if you are making money on your site through affiliate marketing.

Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.  There are several versions of this plugin that achieve the same ends out there with differing accuracy.  I haven’t really tested out any other related posts plugins to compare, but this one is sometimes very far off the mark so if anyone knows of a better one, please let me know.

SEO Title Tag – Search engine optimise your blog’s title tags with this nifty little plugin.

Show Top Commentators – Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your WordPress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one).

Smart Youtube – Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.  This is probably one of the easiest ways to add a video to your blog.  I love it!

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.  Essential to help encourage commentors to return whenever a new comment has been added to the post that they have previously commented on.

Tell-a-friend Widget Plugin – Tell-a-friend Widget Plugin for WordPress which makes it easy for readers to share your blog posts on various social bookmarking sites.

TwiBadge – This is a WordPress plugin to show Twitter Badge in your blog. Your audience can easily follow your tweets without going through the Twitter website.  Only relevant if you Twitter, but if you don’t then perhaps it’s time to think about starting.

WassUp – WordPress plugin to analyse your visitors traffic with real time stats, chart and a lot of chronological information. It has sidebar Widget support to show current online visitors and other statistics.  You can eliminate the use of other third party stats with this terrific little plugin.

What Would Seth Godin Do – Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

WP-Flickr – The plugin displays thumbnails of photos from your flickr account when writing posts / pages so you can easily insert img tags from flickr.  This is probably one of the easiest methods I’ve come across for adding lots of images to a blog post.  I really love this one, too!

If you know of any other plugins that are a “must have”, please let share them in the comments below – thanks!

Why is RSS so important?  It provides social proof that your blog is popular.

One way to monetise your blog is to have advertisers purchase ad spots – pretty similar to the way companies buy pages in magazines to advertise their products.  To decide whether to purchase an ad placement on your blog, an advertiser wants to know how many people their ad will reach.  Having a high RSS subscription count gives the blog owner the power to convince advertisers that their ad would at least reach, at the minimum, the number of people that subscribe to that blog.

RSS subscription counts can also convince other readers to subscribe to the blog because of the herd mentality.  For instance, while I was shopping one day, I saw a shop with a long queue outside.  I asked one person why they were queuing up and he replied, “I don’t know, but there were so many others in line I figured there has to be something worth checking out.”  Conversely, having a low RSS subscription count can also provide negative social proof so the general advice on RSS subscription counts is not to put up your count chicklet until you have at least 50 subscribers.

At the time of writing this, Babylicious had about 40 subscribers.  It was interesting to note that it was really easy to get the first 30 or so subscribers, but bumping it up to over 50 seems to be the really tough part.  After hovering around 40 subscribers for the longest time and still struggling to get it up higher, I did a bit of internet surfing and discovered that there are a lot of tips out there on how you can go about it.  Most are covered by the BlogMastermind course but I just thought I’d take a look anyway.

The most common suggestion is an obvious one – make your RSS subscription button easy to see and to ask for subscribers.  Common locations are to ask for subscriptions at the bottom of your blog post and to place a big button at the top of your side bar.  An interesting suggestion I discovered (which I can’t remember which blog I saw it on now), is that you re-word your request to subscribe.  To readers unfamiliar with blog terms and blogs, the term subscribe gives the impression that you have to pay money to subscribe.  Not an unreasonable assumption since we pay money to subscribe to magazines, clubs, etc.  So instead of asking your readers to subscribe, offer them free updates.  I’m still not very sure on the best way to suggest it, but the gist of it is to offer your RSS subscription without using the word “subscribe”.

Another way to create social proof is through blog comments.  If there are a lot of commentors on your blog, a new blog visitor will assume your blog is popular because it should other readers that there are people who read your blog.  Not only that but it also shows that your blog is engaging enough for other readers to make comments.  Additionally, frequent comments add new content to your blog on a regular basis which is attractive to the search engines.  Hence, encouraging readers to comment on your blog comes highly recommended.  A couple of ways to encourage comments is to ask for them and to post questions on your blog.

Search Engine Optimisation in really simple terms refers to the things you can do to your blog to make it easier for the search engines to list your blog in their searches.  I won’t go into detail on this as there are whole courses devoted to this topic so I doubt I would be able to do it any justice at all.  Given the secret nature of search engine algorithms, it is difficult to say what works and what doesn’t, although many of the internet gurus have their theories which generally point in the right direction.

What I have learned is that there are things you can do to the internal structure of your blog that facilitate SEO and with a self-hosted WordPress blog, this is very easy to do given the vast array of plugins available online.  I’ll talk about which plugins I use in a later post.

Other SEO tactics you can employ include Tags and Ping (which is simply a method of notifying other websites about the content on your blog), internal tagging (how you link internally to other content within your blog), and having permalinks for each individual blog post you write (in other words, there is a dedicated url to each blog post – for instance, the permalink to this blog post is http://internet-homebusinesses.com/articles/pro-blogger-project-lesson-3/) which is supposed to help improve your search engine rankings.

More articles on this case study.

And because all the cool professional bloggers are doing it (first popularised by the infamous John Chow), I’ve decided to join the band wagon and publish my income report for my blogs. No, I don’t normally believe in telling people how much I earn.  Quite frankly, if I were earning as much as John, I probably wouldn’t want the world to know either, purely because I belong to the group of individuals that prefers to be rich and unknown.

However, since I am just starting out and Alvin Phang, who is a professional blogger in this part of the world, says it is important to create accountability for the goals that we set for ourselves, I have decided to begin this exercise – at least until I hit my goal to create a replacement income through professional blogging.

So to start with a fresh slate for 2009, this is my income report for January and February:

January: US$504

February: US$525

Goal for March: US$600

Submissions to blog carnivals are actually pretty easy. If you already have good content on your blog that you want to promote, then it is simply a matter of submitting those posts to the relevant carnivals and waiting for the link back to your blog. Unfortunately, based on my experience so far, blog carnival submissions alone won’t do much. My biggest spike of traffic came when I physically went to each of the blogs that had also submitted their blog posts to the same carnival, read through them and posted comments.

At this juncture, I think I should point out that leaving 10 comments on different blogs or forums is actually a lot more time consuming than it sounds. If the idea of commenting on other blogs is to draw traffic back to your own blog, then one needs to construct a thoughtful reply that would interest others to click the link back to your blog to find out a little more about who you are. Therefore, a simple, “great post!” or “I agree with you!” just won’t cut it, especially if you are commenting on a popular blog that receives lots of comments.

One great thing about writing into blog carnivals is that it helps you find other blogs and more specifically, other blog posts that are relevant to the topics that you write about. So rather than searching aimlessly and commenting blindly on random blogs that may or may not be related to the topics you are interested in, blog carnivals help give you a focus. You don’t waste time looking for relevant blogs or blog posts. Clearly, the more specific the carnival, the better. For instance, a blog carnival about baby humour is clearly more specific than a blog carnival about Family Living which could be about anything and everything under the sun.

I should also add, as I discovered so recently, that leaving “thoughtful” (or perhaps I should write “thought-provoking”) comments can be a double-edged sword. The blogosphere is filled with readers with very strong opinions who may and will easily take offense to what you’ve written, regardless of whether it is intended or purely misconstrued. Then, there are the readers who will pick fault regardless of how amicably your try to put forth your point of view.

It is inevitable, as you grow your readership, that you will encounter plenty of such individuals. Finding a way to handle them appropriately will be a bit of a challenge – one that some of us might shy away from. Being a rather non-confrontational person, I dislike such frays, even though I do enjoy discussions amounting from a difference of opinion. What’s the difference, you may ask. The difference being that the former may amount to name calling and other methods of verbal abuse, whereas the latter is constructive and educational.

This also leads me to a very interesting concept that I remember reading about in a sports book called The Mind Gym. Under a chapter entitled “Permission to Win”, the author aptly describes an inherent problem faced by many of us who seek the spot light but have not yet had the opportunity to really bask in it for all its glory. I will use the example described by the author to illustrate the point.

In a golf tournament, there was a player who was not among the top rated players who had emerged out of the blue as a contender for the trophy. Being a wild card, no one had ever expected him to win. Quite frankly, I’m sure, neither did he. One hole away from the trophy, all that was required of him was a conservative shot – it was an easy win. Instead, he hit a bogey and lost the tournament.

What happened? He hadn’t given himself permission to win. He was so used to being the underdog that he wasn’t prepared for success. While this might be a sports example, I think the philosophy is relevant in all other aspects of our lives. In this particular case, it is going from being a regular blogger to a professional blogger. While we might aspire to become a professional blogger, the mindset of being a professional blogger might not be there. In other words, we might be unintentionally sabotaging our efforts to become a professional blogger through unwitting actions that detract from our blogs because we are secretly unsure of how to deal with blogger fame.

A simplistic blogging example might be what I described earlier. I mentioned my dislike of verbal debates amounting to little more than petty name calling. Although I felt I had posted a carefully drafted comment, another reader had obviously seen fit to make a mockery of my response after misconstruing the true meaning of my comment. The realisation that to become prominent in the blogging world also means to become a target for such individuals might have led me to retreat to the insular world of my own blog, never to venture out again.

It is our fear of the consequences of success that hold us back from performing at our best. Until we can overcome that fear and accept the responsibility of success, we will not have the proper mindset to succeed.

The main reason I initially used a hosted blog software, like Blogger, was because I was daunted by the task of having to set up a domain, purchase hosting and install my own blogging software.  But when I signed up for BlogMastermind and Yaro strongly advised us to set up our own blogs using the WordPress Platform, it turned out to be a lot friendlier than I had anticipated.  There were hosting companies like BlueHost that made it so easy, all it took was to fill in your details, choose a domain name that wasn’t already taken and click “install WordPress” and there you have your very first self-hosted WordPress blog.

Having hosted my own blogs for nearly a year and a half now, I think the biggest pain is software maintenance.  For instance, every time WordPress.org releases a new version of WordPress, I need to update my blog software.  Although BlueHost makes it easy to update with it’s one click program “Fantastico”, the problem with this is that it never updates the software to the latest version available.  Fantastico is usually a couple of versions behind.  So if you really want to have the most updated version of WordPress, you have to install it yourself.  Bad news for the tech-unsavvy people.

I tried it once and managed to successfully upgrade my blog software without destroying anything but it was such a painful process, I swore I never wanted to go through it again.  Thankfully, I discovered this wonderful little plugin that will automatically update your WordPress blog to the most updated version of WordPress available with a few clicks of your mouse.  Still slight more time consuming compared to using Fantastico, but infinitely better than upgrading manually.

My only issue now is that I don’t really like the new WordPress 2.7…  Or perhaps I just need some time to adjust to the new layout?

Although it has been over a week since we got back, I didn’t expect to take so long for us to settle back into our daily routine.  After the vacation blues I had coming back to Earth after a truly enjoyable holiday, it took me a while to settle my son back into his regular routine and for me to recover from jetlag.  Yes, it’s only three hours difference but somehow I couldn’t seem to get out of bed after getting my son to sleep.  I even fell asleep in his cot a few times and woke up feeling rather stiff from sleeping awkwardly.

After reviewing lesson three from Blogmastermind, I’ve realised that I haven’t even completed the tasks that were due.  So I’ve decided I’ll spend the rest of this week (what’s left of it, at any rate) completing the tasks from lesson three and begin lesson four next week.  So for the rest of the week, I need to do five marketing activities – I’ve decided to concentrate on promoting my blog posts on twitter, facebook and carnival submissions for now – and write three pillar articles, although so far I only have an idea for one article.

I’ve also decided to start some regular features on my blog each week.  For instance, I’ll be posting a “Question of the Week” on Mondays, a parenting blog review on Wednesdays, and Funny quotes on Fridays.  I’m not sure how this will turn out but I’ll try it out for a couple of months to see how it goes before deciding whether to continue it or dump it.

Before I wrap up, let’s take a look at my blog stats for December:

Despite being gone for half of December, I’ve noticed that my income stayed steady.  Since the payment for work is usually received after the work is done, I suspect that I’ll only see the effects of my two week break in January’s income report.

My readership has also stayed steady, although I did notice a bit of a drop towards the end of December.  Looks like my attempt to keep my blog running by writing post-dated blog posts before going on holiday didn’t really work out as well as I hoped.  Since my readers are used to me blogging on a daily basis, I felt I needed to keep up the blog post frequency even though I wouldn’t be around to blog.  I ended up writing several posts in advance and releasing one each day.  I think the problem lies in the fact that I was churning content out for the sake of having something to publish rather than writing a post of value which was probably felt by my readers.  Since returning back and blogging again, my readership has returned to pre-holiday levels.

So lesson learned – don’t blog for the sake of having something to publish.  If you really don’t have the time, it might be a good idea not to blog rather than to write a half-hearted blog post.

Admitedly, I’m not really a video or audio person.  I generally prefer to read things – especially now when I do most of my work at night while the baby’s asleep.  Listening to audio and watching videos isn’t the most convenient.  But as the blogging bar moves higher and higher and the need to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the crowd becomes critical, it looks like I must get over my personal prejudices and break out of my comfort zone.

I’m not even sure whether to give a progress report for week two because it was rather appauling.  Since this is a case study, I guess it is important to be forthcoming with the truth so here’s a quick summary of what I completed last week on Babylicious:

• I submitted posts to two carnivals
• I made a handful of comments on other blogs (not nearly enough, though)
• I wrote 7 blog posts but not one a day like I was supposed to

As a result of my appauling effort and lack of concentration, my RSS subscription went down to a miserable low of 22 subscribers, although they have gone back up to 32 as of today.  Total blogging income for November was $506.33, which is about the same as it was for October – at least we’re maintaining.  Next update will be in January – although we’ll be away for two weeks in December where I’ll be staying with my parents with access to the internet via dial-up so I doubt I’ll be blogging much, if at all.

Moving forwards, my marketing efforts will be targetted at:

• Blog comments - 10 a week
• Blog carnivals – 4 a week

Posting frequency will be at least once every two days.  I’ve dropped the frequency to give me time to absorb the new Become-a-Blogger material which I will write about in a later post.

Lesson 3 from BlogMastermind focusses on internal Blog structure such as RSS subscriptions, SEO optimisation (involving the addition of a title tags plugin, internal tags, subscribe to comments plugin), plus a list of other plugins to install.

The tasks from Lesson 3:

1. Set up RSS feed – done.
2. Install SEO title tag plugin – done
3. Install Subscribe to comments plugin – done
4. Activate permalinks on blog – done

More tasks for this week:

1. Write a pillar article series (three articles)
2. Interview someone famous in your blog topic for publication on the blog
3. Write 10 posts in relevant forums every night (ouch, this is a tough one…)
4. Offer to contribute a guest article to a well known blog in your blog topic
5. Brainstorm ideas for future articles

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