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Hi, my name is Diggy and I am the author of UpgradeReality.com, a blog all about self improvement with the intention of helping people reach their full potential.

Thanks to Deelip(from MaxBlogPress), I am going to share my blogging success story with you and you will learn:

• How I went from not having a clue about building a website to having a rapidly growing blog with 1000 subscribed readers in 7 months.

• How long it took me to get to where I am

• All the shortcuts that you can make that will save you months of trial and error (which I all figured out the hard way).

• Ways to be inspired and motivated to keep working on your project for months without giving up before you reach your desired results.

Where It All Began

My journey started back in mid-2008. I became friends with a guy who did SEO as a job for big companies. I was over at his house one day and he showed me a little about his work and what he was doing, and at the time he had just bought a domain to start a new blog.

I immediately took a big liking to the idea of creating websites and being able to share my thoughts with other people all over the world. When I got home I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do. Within a week I had decided on the name UpgradeReality and the .com domain was available so I registered it.

Although I had absolutely no clue about internet marketing, blogging or creating websites, I was pretty good with computers so I was able to fight my way through the steps of buying a domain and hosting.

Too Much Information
Today I realize that it is a problem that most newbies to the online world struggle with. It is the problem of too much information.

So here I was, I had registered my domain and I had the idea of creating a cool website that would get hundreds of thousands of visits, but I had no clue where to begin.

My first instinct was to Google what to do next, and that is what I did. I stumbled upon hundreds of web pages about blogging and internet marketing. For the first couple of months I just read and read and read. I bought a couple of online courses that promised to teach me how to blog and how to make money online.

Guess what happened?

I read these guides, spent some time trying to follow their instructions and then gave up. It was too hard and didn’t make sense. Money down the drain.

I found Squidoo, a community where you can create free web pages and use them to share your content with the world and make money with affiliate links. While I was still experimenting with my blog, I started making Squidoo Lenses and over a period of 9 months or so I managed to make a good $800 from them (with no expense), so that inspired me to keep going and working on my blog.

My Newbie Days

At the time when I wanted to get content up on UpgradeReality, I had no clue that the Wordpress platform existed, so I found a free CSS HTML template and took a few weeks of manually coding it to get a site up on my domain. Thinking back, I was pretty proud of myself, but the site was absolutely horrible!

Luckily, my friend that had inspired me to start blogging pointed me in the direction of Wordpress which I immediately installed. I was amazed that it did so many things for you in such an easy way.

I found a free (but actually ugly) theme that I put on my blog and I started writing some content. My articles were never longer than 500 words back then, the grammar was not perfect and the formatting of the articles was not very professional. In other words, it sucked. I remember thinking that I was well on my way to becoming a good blogger. I had 20 or 30 readers (mostly people I knew) and their few comments on my articles inspired me to keep writing.

For the next months it was just a massive learning period for me with a lot of trial and error. I changed themes every few weeks, tweaked with logos and designs, plugins, affiliate banners and links and I am honestly surprised that those 30 readers did not unsubscribe!

14 Months after having registered the domain Upgradereality.com, I was finally ready to take my blog to the next level and put all the things I had learnt into action.

Kicking Into Gear

August 1^st 2009.

I decided to stop messing around with free themes and purchase a professional and pretty theme. It took some searching but I settled on a ‘wood’ theme that I thought and still think looks pretty cool.

Let me put the things I did and learnt into list form so you can benefit from them:

• Commenting
  I got in touch with many bloggers in the same niche as me (personal development and self improvement) and subscribed to their RSS feed to get their updates. I started to leave real (not generic) comments on their articles and this got their attention and they would head over to my site too. It also helped me gain awareness in the community and got me quite a couple of readers who would click through to my site from my comments.
• Guest Posting
  I started writing articles for the sole purpose of giving them to other blogs to put up as a guest post on their blogs with a link back to my site. This helped them because they got good free content and it helped me because I would get some of their readers to click through to my site and subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Regular Posting Schedule
  I realized that readers get used to checking in to a site for new articles. If there is no regular posting frequency, the readers may lose interest and will unsubscribe or not come back. I decided to post twice a week, on Mondays and on Thursdays.
• Writing Style
  I needed to do something about my writing style. I decided to start writing articles that were minimum 1000 words in length and that were pleasing to the eye. This meant that the articles were broken up with sub-headings which were easy to scan (because most people just scan posts and they don’t like reading massive blocks of text).
• SEO Optimize
  Something that I had neglected up until this point, was SEO. I was not trying to rank for anything and that was a waste of potential and targeted traffic from search engines at a later stage. I read up about SEO for Wordpress and tweaked my site to be as easy as possible for search engines to understand what I am trying to rank for.

Where I Am Today

Fast forward seven months since I started taking Upgradereality seriously and here are the results:

• Around 1000 subscribed readers
• 15000 Unique visits per month
• Top-40 ranking for my keyword

I feel that I am at a stage now where my growth is going to pick up exponentially and is going to me much faster than last year. Although it has taken me a total of 20 months to get where I am, only 7 of those were needed once I took things seriously. I am confident that I could build a blog from scratch to a level where Upgradereality is today within 4 months.

However, I needed all that time and trial and error to gain the experience and knowledge to be able to have these skills.

Anyone who tells you that you can become good at something in a few months is giving you false hope. While it certainly is possible for the few exceptions, it is likely that it will take you 2-4 years to get really good at something. If you have just started blogging or are interested in starting a blog, this is something very important to keep in mind. You have to want to work for 12 months without seeing serious results before you actually start to see results. You should have no attachment to immediate results and be content with the fact that you are working on your skills and your blog, and your hard work is going to pay off sometime in the future. This brings me to my next point:

Inspiration And Motivation To Blog
I have had times where I felt like abandoning the project. I even attempted to sell my blog in the early stages because I felt helpless and was getting zero results.

The reason why I share this with you is because you will experience difficult and trying times. There will be times when you don’t see the point in continuing what you started, but if you give up you will never get to see your own creation grow into something magnificent that you never thought was possible.

You know better than anyone what motivates you. Find something, like a postcard of a tropical island, a cause you support or a friend who encourages you and use that as motivation to keep going.

When you blog, write as if you have 10 000 readers, yet don’t expect to get a single reply or comment. This will allow you to produce your best work every single time and yet you will not get disappointed because you do not get feedback. Even if your article makes an impact on one single person, it is enough to write that article.

I am proof that you do not need special talent or skill to become a successful blogger. I used to get B’s and C’s for English in school and I hated writing essays.

All you need is passion and perseverance. Keep at it and love what you do and you will become successful over time. Guaranteed!

Parting Words
I hope that you enjoyed reading the story behind UpgradeReality!

Currently my goal is not to make loads of money from my blog but instead focusing on getting many readers so that I can make a difference to the world and to other people’s lives for the better with the articles that I write. I feel there is so much positive change we can all make in this world, but not enough people are working together to achieve that change.

How you choose to build your community and the main purpose of your blog is entirely up to you. Whether you want to build up a successful blog to earn your living from or that you can share your ideas and art with others or if you want to make a difference in the world like me, it is all possible.

Decide what you want to achieve and don’t give up until you get it!

Photo Credit

About The Author:
Diggy writes all about self improvement and personal growth. He wants to inspire and motivate as many people as possible to live their lives to the fullest and to be their best selves. Spread the word or subscribe to his blog via RSS or Email

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I am new to blogging and like most new bloggers I tried a few things I learn in the beginning.  I quickly realized what worked for established blogs doesn’t work for a new blogs like mine, JohnPaulAguiar.com

The sooner you realize we all can’t be JohnChow with a million ads, the better your blogging will be. There is nothing wrong with wanting to monetize your blogs traffic, there is just a fine line to offering information and shoving ads and in your readers face.

I slowly leartned that to much to soon is bad. I hade to many 125×125 ads, I had Google Adsense, I had banners in header and sidebar, I even had banners in each post, it was just way to much.

I’m just happy that I learned this quickly, since my blog is only 10 months old and 2 of those months I left the blog quiet to work on other things, as you can see Sept no posts, Oct 1 post.

I Decided To Get Focused

Once I came back in Nov, I started to really focus on what I wanted my blog to be about, and what was important. For me building a list is important, offering strong helpful content is important, building a community on my blog for other bloggers is important.

So knowing all that I started to stop the leak on my blog and offer what is important to my targeted readers.

At that time my blog had a Alexa score of about 2.2 million, and my 3 month Alexa score was 1.1 million

As of today I have a Alexa score of 168,603

What  I Did Evey Day

First I dropped a lot my ads, now I still have ads up and I think a few ads that fit what your blog is about is ok, but don’t over do it. I try to stay away from ads that are to big and flashy and distracting.

My big secret to my new  success is……Hard Work, Hard Work Each Day!

I know, no big underground secret, but it is what works, below are a few things I have done…

- Using my 40,000 strong twitter community to drive traffic.

- I comment on blogs related to my blog, I comment a lot, I have about 50 blogs saved on my RSS Feed so I can follow each day.

- I comment on KeyWord Luv blogs to get nice Keyword anchor link backs.

- I comment on Comment Luv blogs

- I bookmark each post to about 40 sites with onlywire.com

This has got me to 5,435 uniques below.

My focus now is to post atleast 3 times a week and that alone will boost my traffic by atleast 50% monthly.

I also have 5 top blogs where I plan to guest post, which will really get things growing on my blog.

Final Thought

You first need to know what you want your blog to be about, then post content and ads, and information that fits that topic perfectly. Design wise I would keep things different to stand out, but don’t get to crafty since you still want your blog easy to navigate.

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It might be too early to call it a success story after just being live for less than three months, but there are some experiences I’d like to share. And I might add, this is not my first blog, so I was able to avoid some of the newbie mistakes from the beginning.

We’ve kind of got a jump start for our new cruise blog in German language (www.cruisetricks.de). My wife won a competition of Royal Caribbean Cruise Line becoming the “Reporter at Sea” on the brand new cruise ship Oasis of the Seas, just last November. This gave us some popularity but more important, it gave us incredibly much exclusive niche content as we’ve been the first German bloggers ever on this new cruise ship class and we’ve been even a few days ahead of TV and newspaper journalists.

jump start with massive high-quality content

Now we had more pictures and information than we could handle, so we had a fantastic start posting about this cruise ship in every detail over many weeks. And Google started to list our stories on the first page - not for the top keywords like “cruise”, but for nice two- and three-word phrases. Traffic increase was steady over the first few weeks. But then we recognized the traffic increase slowed down as more and more other websites had information and pictures available about the Oasis of the Seas. And also we foresaw that our available pool of content was not lasting for ever.

That’s were we changed a few things and started something new: First of all, of course, we broadened the topics of our postings, writing much more about general cruise related stuff instead of just Oasis of the Seas stories.

news for traffic - but do it right!

But the main issue was: Just the two of us blogging couldn’t continue posting long stories every other day. But as soon as we reduced the frequency of postings, traffic stopped going up and on some days even went down. So first of all, we started to add news to the blog site. The idea was to have new content every day, but not spend hours every day to produce it. To make it short: It works great! After we’ve signed up for the press releases of the cruise companies and subscribed to relevant RSS feeds, information was pouring in and writing short news stories out of this is easy - but brings in the traffic on days where there is no long, content-rich new posting on the blog. It also helps optimizing for long-tail search traffic from Google. That is because we don’t copy-and-paste the press releases (duplicate content), but write our own news stories from the information we get. This is more work, but it pays off quickly.

permanentely attractive content

Second thing to fix was the bounce rate that started to increase. Two things are making the difference now. First, we started adding additional stuff to the blog that drags attention and makes users clicking instead of leaving:

• We added desktop wallpaper pictures as free downloads, with pictures from cruise ships.
• We added a free, comprehensive PDF eBook, the “Oasis of the Seas Cabin and Suites Guide” (we even translated this to English).
• From the beginning we had interactive flash panaromana pictures from the Oasis of the Seas, which are the most viewed pages of the blog from the beginning; it’s unique and hard to reproduce for competitors. Very successful content, though lot of work to produce them, too.

news and special content added to the regular blog posting

Not an overly huge success, but decent, and the bounce rate went down again. Well, not directly, actually. But after we made some changes in the website’s design and moved the news as well as the wallpaper downloads right in the main section of the blog, directly below the Top-Story blog posting, it works great now (see picture; sorry for the nasty green color of the marks).

We’ve got some more ideas, similar to the wallpaper idea, that should make the blog more attractive for this specific audience of cruise ship fans. Basically the idea is to have permanentely interesting content besides the news-oriented content in the blog postings and the news.

the challenge: so much to do, so little time

And that’s actually also our next goal now. To make the blog traffic much more independent from the number of postings and news pieces per week, i.e. adding content that will be appreciated by the audience permanentely; how-to guides; link lists; we’ve added a list of cruise ship webcams, for instance; tutorials like “how to get your cruise cheaper”; stuff like this.

We’re not running out of ideas for our cruise blog; the issue is more a lack of manpower to quickly do all the stuff we’d like to do. But still, if you have any further ideas to keep this working with just me full-time and my wife part-time blogging, please let us know.

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Back-story

My name is Debbie Lattuga and I blog at BestSLRCamera.org. Like most of you, I have been attempting to make money online. I consider these last couple of years my graduate study. I love to learn new things, and I am good at it. But just learning stuff and not doing stuff, didn’t make me any money. And I wound up with Information Overload.

Here are the graduate courses I studied:

Semester I: Business Models

In order to pass this semester, you must take the following classes. In addition, you must make at least $5.00 in 4 of these classes.
* Blogging 101
Spam Blogs for Fast Money
Authority Site for Aspiring Probloggers
Site Flipping for Cash
Membership Sites for Content
* Pay-per-Click (Not for Thin Wallets)
* Pay-per-View to Make $1 at a Time
* affiliate marketing for Newbies
* product launches a la Jeff Walker

* Made some meager money in these classes.

The good thing is, I learned a lot. The bad thing is, I didn’t stick with one model. And by bouncing around to different business models, I didn’t give any one model enough effort to produce results.

And they are all good models. But I was looking for one that fit. I’m sure if any one of them had taken off - that one would have fit just fine.

It did appear that the blogging model was the one model that I could pursue that would be the best fit for my ability to learn quickly. And I love sharing what I learn.

Semester II: The Blogging Model

To pass this semester, you must take the following 4 classes and be able to produce a power point presentation on each of the core concepts.

1. Search Engine Optimization for Beginners

• linking
• remote blogs
• niche research

2. Advertising to Drive Traffic

• article marketing
• copy writing
• social media
• video production

3. List Building for Income Generation

• writing ebooks
• squeeze pages

4. Content Development for Ranking

• fast post writing
• private label rights
• rss feeds
• outsourcing

Now I passed these classes… but I had to translate what I learned into something profitable.

How I Got 1578 Uniques in One Day

So now you know my back-story, fast forward to starting my first blog BestSLRCamera.org on November 16, 2009. I decided to build several small blogs to generate a small amount of money daily. I did my niche research and determined it would be fairly easy to rank for the term ‘Best SLR Camera’. And I really view this as my test site.

Article Marketing

All the new stuff will get tested on this site. So one thing I’m doing is uploading my blog posts as articles to the article marketing sites. The post goes on my site on day 1, goes on Ezine Articles on day 7, and gets posted to 10 additional sites on day 14. Well, not exactly on that schedule, but close enough.

Around December 04, 2009 I wrote an article titled, “The Top 10 Best-Selling Photography Books on Amazon”. I figured it would be a good link-bait post and would generate some Christmas traffic. I then posted it to Ezine and the other article sites. I’m not sure it really got me any extra traffic before Christmas. My blog was too new.

Little did I know, a photography author that had 2 books on the list, discovered my post. And he gave me a shout out on his blog. BANG! 1578 uniques to my blog the next day. And since that day, I’ve received about 2500 visitors to my blog from his site.

And prior to his post I was averaging 30 uniques a day.

Analytics Stats

My Lesson to You

Write a Top 10 Book post for your blog. Post it to the article sites. Then send an email to each author letting them know how much you like their book. (you did like their book, didn’t you?) Mention that you noticed they were on the Top 10 at Amazon and you’ve written a blog post including them.

And make sure you are an Amazon Associate before you write the post. You want to make sure you get paid for any referrals.

Now use this tip and go drive some traffic. Your wallet will thank you.

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Before I started blogging, I dabbled in a lot of different things. I spent thousands of dollars on courses, ebooks and coaching that I never applied. I could have saved a lot of money and time by just sticking with one program.

For the whole of 2009 I had this urge to start a blog and share my life experiences. My passion has always been self improvement and spiritual growth. I never thought I could write something that people would actually like, but my experience has been completely different since I’ve started my blog on self improvement.

At the end of 2009, in December I finally had a dream that left an imprint on me. The message I remember from this dream was “start now, don’t wait any longer”, which is when I started taking action and creating the Wake Up Cloud, which is my blog.

My Fear

I was confused and somewhat scared as I was taking steps and putting myself out there. I think most bloggers go through this and experience it for the rest of their lives to some extent. It’s tough putting your face and writing out there for everyone to judge.

But ultimately the more you can be yourself, the more people you will attract that are in harmony with you. If you’ve read my posts, you know I’m a big fan of learning how to find your passion and following it.

We’re all put on this planet for a reason. It is up to each and every one of us to discover what that is so we can start sharing it with those that need it. You don’t have to work a job you don’t enjoy; you can do what you love and make a living, if you work hard and persist.

One of the first things I did when I started my blog was to join a coaching course on blogging. There are many out there, but I decided to pick Authority Blogger with Chris Garrett. It spoke to me and it has helped me immensely in navigating past the pitfalls of blogging.

My Stats

If you really want to speed up your process I recommend you get a coach or join a program that can help you head in the right direction from the start. Many are surprised by the speed of my growth. To be honest, so am I. I have reached 400 subscribers (RSS and E-Mail) in around 8 weeks.

My subscribers have been growing steadily ever since I started. I attribute my growth to the amount I have been guest posting. I think I have written over 30 guest posts soon in my first 8 weeks of blogging. I’ve seen the best results from guest posting on bigger blogs, which have sometimes brought me over 100 new subscribers in a few days.

Most of my subscribers are via e-mail because I offer a course on how to discover your passion in 5 days. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on it. People seem to really like it. We all have trouble finding our passion, so it’s something that most people really need.

My unique visitors at the moment range from around 100 to sometimes 200. The first post on my blog went up just around 8 weeks ago, so I haven’t started getting good traffic from the search engines yet. When that starts to happen, I expect to see a mini explosion.

(My current visitor stats. Click to enlarge.)

My Methods

The methods I have used to do this are guest posting, commenting and being social. By being social I mean hanging out on twitter and e-mailing people I thought had cool blogs and starting a conversation. When you’re blogging about something that you’re passionate about it’s fun to make connections with like-minded people.

I never thought about what I could get out of my connections. I just had fun and talked to people. It has surprised me how powerful this is when used together with guest posting and commenting. I’ve realized that it takes hard work to start a blog, but it is a lot of fun, because I get to write articles about things that I truly enjoy.

Being Ruthless

Another thing I’ve discovered is that I have to be ruthless with my time. I can’t overextend and start several new projects. Writing and promoting one blog is enough, not to mention the time it takes to be on social media and hang out with people.

It has all worked out better than I could ever have hoped. If you’re on the brink and don’t know if you should start blogging, just try it and see what happens. When you’re ready for some awesome self improvement ideas, drop by my blog and we’ll chat.

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