(WARNING: it’s a long page, so watch the video instead if you don’t like long sales pages) -

There’s been quite a build up to this opening.

Yaro’s report, the Masterplan, was hugely popular and is still being downloaded at a rate of over 100 people every DAY.

Over 450 feedback comments were left about the Masterplan and it’s clear lots of people are interested in launching a membership site or selling an information product online.

The best way to make dependable and significant money from the Internet is to have a real business based on a product of your own.

The membership site format is the best product model to follow, which can after just one successful launch, result in a six figure yearly income.

Imagine that – do just one successful membership site launch and change your life forever.

Okay – That might be just a dream right now, and obviously there is work to do to make it happen, but you have to agree that it is possible.

If Yaro can do it, and his students Will, Fran, Joanna, Jay Jay and Daniel can all do it too (and that’s not all of them), then you have a chance.

All you need is some focus, some energy – heaps and heaps of action of course! – and if you’re ready, some help.

Yaro’s Membership Site Mastermind course is the best help you could get regarding this topic, so if you’re ready to join the hundreds of people who have already taken part in the program, here is the link.

BONUS IF YOU ACT TODAY:

Get $50 off your membership!

To claim my bonus, just order through this link then forward me your receipt so I can confirm I have received credit, and I will refund you $50 through Paypal.

This is the link you MUST order through to qualify.

Good luck with your membership site and enjoy Yaro’s program.

PS. If you’re not sure whether Membership Site Mastermind is right for you, go read the details on the order page.

There’s a lot of information about the program and a really powerful video you can watch of Yaro presenting.

The video itself offers great content, so set aside 30 minutes and go watch it now.

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.

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.

The main tasks for lesson two is to:

1. Pick a domain name
2. Identify a topic you want to blog about.  Although you can research which topics are better for monetisation, the real key is to have a topic you’re interested to write about.  At the end of the day, the most important factor to generating an income from your blog is to have a blog with a good flow of traffic.  Traffic is the source of income.
3. Since we’re using Wordpress blogs, the third part is to customise our blog theme either using one of the many free wordpress themes available, or by hiring someone to create a custom theme.

Well, I already have a domain name – it’s Figur8.net.  It’s probably not the best domain name for my blog project since a more ideal domain name would have something about it related to my topic.  About the only thing it’s got going for it is that it’s short and fairly easy to remember.  I had the domain name before I started BlogMastermind and I didn’t want to abandon it to start something new because I have a secret affinity for the name “Figur8?.

Why Figur8?  Because I’ve always loved rock climbing and the figure eight knot is the simplest, most basic knot in rock climbing.  It is the first thing you learn when you start rock climbing.  To me, it represents going back to basics and it represents safety (because it ties you to your belayer who holds your lifeline in case you fall).  Figur8 is also a play on words because it sounds like “figure it” as in “figure it out”, in other words, learning about new things which seems rather apt because my blogs are a way of reporting the things I have learned through my experiences and personal research.

Figur8.net was to be the base from which all my interests stem:

• Figur8.net/baby (Babylicious) is all about my pregnancy and being a Mum.
• Figur8.net/sports (Pro-Sports) is all about my love for rock climbing, running, fitness and health.
• Figur8.net/wedding (The Household COO) is all about my wedding and life after the wedding (which is basically everything that isn’t about sports or my son).
• Figur8.net/writing (A Writer’s Papyrus) is where I explore ideas and story-lines for that novel that I dream about writing.

But since the Pro-Blogger Project is about Babylicious, I’ll focus on how everything relates to this blog.

Although it may not be apparent to my readers, the Figur8 domain name does have some significance to the theme of the blog.  In Babylicious, I’ve “gone back to basics” by choosing to breastfeed my son, attempting natural infant hygiene and using cloth diapers, among other things.  Babylicious is also about safety issues – melamine in infant formula, bisphenol A in certain baby bottles, etc.  And the whole experience of the pregnancy and motherhood has been one about learning.  Whatever I’ve learned through experience or through what I’ve read, I’ve “reported” back about it on Babylicious.  So although Figur8 might not mean much to anyone else, to me, it has great significance to everything that Babylicious represents.

Since I already have a blog – several, in fact – the task of choosing a topic was also completed.  Yaro’s suggestion is to pick a topic you enjoy because your passion for your topic will be reflected in your writing which naturally helps you to keep your readers coming back.  Although he suggests a tighter focus on the topic so you can make your blog a niche, he also emphasises that it is more important to start your blog than to get bogged down with blog topic research to see what would be the best blog monetisation topic to write about.  At the end of the day, any blog (no matter the topic) that has good readership will make money, just as surely as a blog without readers will make no money.

Ideally, I should put a tighter focus on the blog topic for Babylicious.  For instance, I could focus specifically on Sign Language for children, natural infant hygiene or green living for families which would give my blog a very strong focus.  The reason I haven’t is because I can’t think of enough things to write specifically and only about those topics.  If I narrowed down my focus so drastically, I think my blog updates would be so infrequent, it wouldn’t even be a blog.  Secondly, the original intention for this blog is to talk about my journey through motherhood which encompasses a lot of other topics I wouldn’t really be able to write about if I were to narrow the focus of my blog topic.

The final part of the lesson is about blog themes.  Well, I’m sure there are better themes I could have chosen from the free themes available and as tempted as I am to go searching for a new blog theme, I have resisted because I know I could easily spend the better part of a week tweaking my blog design and achieve nothing else.  Since the more important activities are to blog and to engage in marketing activities for my blog, which I’m sure I would neglect if I was neck deep in HTML code, I think I’ll stick to this blog design until I can afford to splurge on a custom-made design which can cost anywhere from US$500-2000 if you really want a nice one.

Since I’ve completed all of these, the next thing is to populate my blog with good content and to promote my blog.  Ideally, each week, I should have done at least five things to draw more traffic to my blog, so let’s make that a target for this week.  So far, I’ve only submitted two blog posts to blog carnivals and published one blog post url on twitter – so I effectively have at least another two more marketing activities I have to complete before tomorrow night.  It is also important to write pillar articles, which I have only written one for the week – oops, better work on another.

So tasks for this week before I start on lesson three:

1. Complete 5 blog marketing activities
2. Write 3 pillar articles

Click here for more articles on this Case Study

I wrote 5 blog posts last week:

• Signing Time Promotes Earlier Speech Development
• Receiving Adequate Hours of Sleep is Critical for Anyone Under 21
• How Effective are Flash Cards in Early Childhood Education?
• How Much Should Your Toddler be Eating?
• Precocious Kids

Although there isn’t really a write or wrong number of blog posts you should write a week, the general rule of thumb is update often to get your readers to return more often, but not so often that they become overwhelmed by the content.  I remember reading on John Chow’s blog that he doesn’t recommended posting more than three new blog posts a day.  Then again, a technology blog that updates snippets on all the latest technology in the market might need to post more frequently than that.  So it all boils back to your blog topic and your readers.

My target is usually one blog post per day.  Sometimes I write less because I have nothing to write about and sometimes more because a lot has been happening.

Last week, I also submitted four blog posts to various blog carnivals, although only one has made it to print so far:

• Carnival of Baby Humour
• Family Funnies
• Carnival of Kids Health
• Carnival of Family Living

Below is one that I submitted last week which is in print now:

• Skeptical Parent Crossing

As of today, my Feedburner subscription count is up to 42 subscribers and my daily visitor count is about 150.

Finally, I re-read the Blog Profits Blueprint and made a short summary of the more salient points.  In case you don’t have time to read the report, here’s the summary:

There are 3 main steps to becoming a Pro-Blogger:

1. Producing quality content for your blog
2. Marketing your blog to increase readership
3. Monetisation of your blog

1. Quality Content:

• How to article
• Definition article
• Present a theory or argument
• Resource – free report, white paper, e-course
• List Article – e.g. top 10 ways to…
• Technical Blueprint

The following list was not from the Blog Profits Blueprint but I found it on the side bar of Dave Pollard’s Blog under the header “What Blog Readers Want to See More”.  I thought it was a good list to keep hold of in the event that I get stuck for ideas on what to write about.

• Original research, surveys etc.
• Original, well-crafted fiction
• Great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
• News not found anywhere else
• Category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
• Clever, concise political opinion (most readers prefer these consistent with their own views)
• Benchmarks, quantitative analysis
• Personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
• First-hand accounts
• Live reports from events
• Insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
• Short educational pieces
• Relevant “aha” graphics
• Great photos
• Useful tools and checklists
• Précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
• Fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

2. Blog Marketing:

a) Easy Methods:

• Comment marketing
• Forum marketing
• Trackback marketing
• Blog Carnivals
• Press release marketing
• Blog link exchanges
• Content exchanges
• Writing guest articles
• MySpace.com marketing, BlogCatalog.com or MyBlogLog.com marketing
• Social media marketing
• Article marketing

b) More Time Consuming Methods (which yield better results)

• Peer Relationships:
  - Send links
  - Introductory email
  - Email notification of good blog posts
  - Interviews
  - Podcast interviews
• Free Report
• Audio/Podcast/Teleseminar
• Video/Screencasts
• Software
• Pillar Series

3. Monetisation:

• Affiliate Marketing – Clickbank, Paydotcom, Amazon
• Direct Advertisers
• Adsense
• TextLink-Ads, Textlinkbrokers, linkworth
• Paid Reviews
• Contextual Ads/Text Ad Brokers – Bidvertiser, Yahoo Ad Network
• Advertising Brokers
  – specific: adbrite, advolcano, blogads, blogkits, chitika, federated media;
  - general: commission junction, azoogleads, linkshare
• In-text – intellitxt, kontera
• RSS advertising – Feedburner, Text-link-ads

If you want more information on each of these points, I highly recommend downloading the Blog Profits Blueprint.

Click here for more articles on this Case Study

The Blog Mastermind program focusses on five areas:

1. Blog set-up and internal optimisation
2. Content creation
3. Traffic generation
4. Monetisation
5. Advanced topics

It makes sense to work through it in this order because you can’t progress to the next wihtout having done the former.  For instance, you need a blog before you can create content, and you’d be wasting time and effort if you don’t optimise your blog before you start building it up with content.  Without content, there is no point generating traffic because it is content that will keep your readers coming back.  If your readers have nothing of value to read, they won’t come back and the traffic you have created will be wasted.  Without traffic, your monetisation options are limited so there’s really little point in looking at monetisation until you have some traffic to your blog.

The homework from lesson number one of Blog Mastermind is to set up a Wordpress blog on your own domain.  Although you can use any other blogging platform, using Wordpress offers some great advantages that you don’t have with other blogging platforms.  Likewise, you can also use hosted blogging platforms like blogger but you don’t control the blog and if something were to happen to the blogging platform, you would lose all the work you put into your blog that you built up from scratch.

So point to note – host your own blog and make it a Wordpress blog.  I used Bluehost because they offered one click installation for Wordpress and they offered one of the best packages I had seen.  The domain came free with my Bluehost subscription and the registration was all done for me.  It doesn’t get easier than this.

The second part of lesson one requires some background reading.  It is a prerequisite to have read the Blog Profits Blueprint before progressing further with the lessons.  The Blog Profits Blueprint is free to download and you don’t have to be a Blog Mastermind Member to get it.  I’ve read it once before (about a year ago) and it is packed full of very useful information that anyone can implement on their blog to increase their blog earning capacity.

Click here to download the Blog Profits Blueprint

Click here to join the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program

I created Babylicious when I first signed up for the Blog Mastermind Program.  Babylicious was originally a free-hosted Blogger blog called Baby’s Diary.  Although Babylicious is now my focus, I still occasionally blog on Baby’s Diary because it contributes to my monthly income.  It might not be much but at this current income level, it is still something I can’t let go of.  Perhaps when Babylicious really takes off, I will phase out Baby’s Diary completely.

A quick search on google told me that RSS stood for Really Simple Syndication – which wasn’t much help to me because RSS still seemed to me to be anything but “simple”.  A couple of years later, this is my understanding of an RSS feed and how you use it:

An RSS feed is just one of various different forms that a website’s data can be presented.  Another popular feed type is called Atom.  A feed allows the website owner to offer readers a method of receiving new updates to their website without having to physically visit the website.  It’s a little like having your newspapers delivered to your home rather than having to go to the store to buy it, except that RSS blog updates are free.

So if you wanted to get RSS updates from this blog, you would need to get the feed and insert it into your feedreader.  The feed for this blog is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/InternetHomeBusinesses

How do you use a feed?

There are various “feed readers” available that allow you to collect the feeds of all the websites you frequent.  For instance, Technorati and Bloglines.  There are many more feed readers available – to find them, just google “feed readers”. Personally, I prefer the layout of Bloglines, but to each his own.

Once you register for an account with a feed reader, you can enter the url of the blog or the feed of the blog that you want to be kept updated on.  The feed reader will then check the blogs that you are subscribed to on a regular basis and notify you of any new updates in a method fairly similar to new messages in your email inbox.  The benefit of this is that you can monitor various blogs without the pain of individually going to each url to check if there have been any new updates since you last visited.  If you still want to look at the site, you can click on the links supplied by your feed reader.

How do you set up an RSS feed for your blog?

Some blog designs already have an RSS button that allows your readers to get your feed easily.  If you don’t have that, you can set one up for your own blog or website by using Feedburner.  Just sign up for a free account and follow the instructions.  It’s really simple.

Email Subscriptions

As it says, an email subscription allows a reader to subscribe to a blog and get new posts for that blog delivered to their inbox.  To set up an email subscription facility for your blog, you can also use Feedburner.  There are also other services that provide email subscription services that you can add to your blog, like Feedblitz.  I like Feedburner because it has some other pretty cool features so it’s like a one stop solution.