Jade Craven

I’ve been avoiding writing this post since last year.

So. In 2009, I had some severe problems that caused me to make some major screw ups online. I can’t talk about it but I can say, it affected me a lot. I spend half my time at my parents, helping out and babysitting, because thats the only useful thing I can do. I spend the other half trying to deal with the various emotions. Its tough. I dropped a lot of balls. I screwed up my blogs in just about every way possible.

This post reflects on the mistakes of the past 6 months and how, despite f**king up, I was still able to come out of everything with the respect of my peers.

Mistake 1: Broken Promises

Last year, I asked Darren Rowse if I could do weekly guest posts on Problogger. He agreed. I was unable to follow through due to family circumstances. Darren was very understanding but I still felt shit about it. Now, I see Kelly Diels has a weekly slot. Thats awesome – I’m so proud of her as I am still unable to make that commitment. I still feel sick about it though.

This story has been repeated many times over the past year. I have a huge backlogs of guest posts, reviews and interviews to fulfil. Most people have been cool about it. As things dragged on, I started telling more people about how hard things have been.

I learned that I should have been honest from the start rather than try to hide the problems. I also should have reduced my online commitments as soon as I started to feel overwhelmed.

Mistake 2: Confused Branding

I found that my plans for this site evolved as I started interacting more within the social media community. At first I was just targeting bloggers. Then it evolved to info product creators and small business types. It took a long time to decide that my main skill was teaching people how to connect with others online.

I messed up so bad trying to find a way to develop my brand. Initially I had a WPMU set up where I segmented my content into the three main sites: business book reviews, product reviews and authentic networking. I then moved all the content to the one site but tried to create 3 seperate blogs using funky wordpress coding thanks to my friend Matt.

These mistakes confused google, confused readers and make things really difficult for me. This mess lasted for months while I was busy dealing with other stuff.

Mistake 3: Assuming no-one was reading.

I did two launchs of my blog in 2009. The first was in January, when I blogger as The Prolific Writer. This was short lived. I was suffering from extreme anxiety at the time and spent the next 4 months struggling to find the right medication.

In September, I did a MASSIVE post called 892 lessons from 36 bloggers. That post took about 7 weeks to do. It involved a lot of work and liasing with other bloggers. It was fun but extremely successful. It was around this time that my personal life became really stressful and I withdrew online.

I spent most of the next four months just adding product reviews. I didn’t think anyone would be reading. In reality, I’d probably picked up some readers but alienated them all by my irregular posting.

I’ve now moved all product reviews to a seperate site – Social Media Store – and have started posting again regularly. I’ll also be making more effort to get to know the people that engage with my content, and will target my posts accordingly.

Mistake 4: Being too scared to make money

I was so stressed out last year. It got to the point where I was too scared to earn an income because I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle it. I set up processes to earn an income but never really worked at it. I’d do guest posts but wouldn’t ask for paid work. I wrote an ebook but did no work to promote it. I threw up a basic services page and, because I didn’t put enough time into it, didn’t make any sales.

I don’t regret this. If I pushed myself, I may have become to scared to sell my products and services. However I probably would be thousands of dollars better off if I had gotten over the fear.

Mistake 5: Having no faith in myself.

Last year I was just so afraid of doing everything wrong. The fear made me too scared to do anything. I had a low self esteem which was, and still is, reflected in my writing. I was paranoid that people would hate me and flame me.

It took the help of some awesome friends to realize that I have something to contribute to the community. I remember crying when I randomly got $500 as a thank you for the work I had done that year for a friend. I also remember @rockyourday sending me a DM saying ‘psst, I’m proud of you’ and being unable to stop smiling all day.

Its the small acts of kindness that helped me pull through and be able to return to blogging.

Over to you

What mistakes have you made blogging? How did you get through them? I’d be very interested to hear about them in the comments.

Note: This post was really painful to write. I’d appreciate you guys going easy on me. This will be the last self indulgent post for a while

Image by Stevendepolo

If you’re following my twitter account, you’ve probably noticed I’m on a slight guest posting spree at the moment. I had one up recently on Remarkablogger. I just submitted one to The Launch Coach. I’ll now be working on ones for Ittybiz, How To Make My Blog and David Risley.

I always say that you should guest post to accelerate the learning process. I’ve been surprised at the amount of feedback I’ve gotten lately. People have thought that I was more successful then I am and that I was amongst the rank of the blogs I’ve posted on.

In this post, I’m aiming to shatter a lot of the myths surrounding guest posts and give tips on how you can rock your guest post campaign.

Myth 1: Your main incentive to guest post should be traffic

Whenever people learn that I’ve guest posted on Problogger, they always ask about the stats. ‘How many thousands of visits do you get?’ Sometimes you do get a bucketloads of traffic from a post and some people are able to achieve that consistency. That’s awesome. It’s always replicable.

Now, my main priority has always been learning but guest posting does have other benefits. They include:

Building credibility:

Guest posts are awesome for changing how people perceive you. They get a bit of a shock when they realize how down to earth I am and, oddly, that accessibility leads to more product sales.

To learn:

I’ve paid thousands for various courses and, most guest posts are a form of free training. If you screw up, people will tell you. It’s then up to you to figure out how to improve with your next post.

If you’ve had other benefits from guest posting then share them in the comments.

Myth 2: You can’t make money from a guest post

My feature on Remarkablogger earned me $90 from sales of an ebook – an ebook I created because Dave Navarro challenged me to.

I’ve earned about $2000 on the back of three other guest posts. My posts have also led to me getting a job, going to conferences for free and JV’ing with other bloggers.

Ali Hale and Robb Sutton have sold products by mentioning them in high profile guest posts. Making money is achievable.

This was a shock for me. My original plan was to guest post with the intention of getting paid freelance work. Now, I’ll be using strategic posts to promote my paid products and services.

Myth 3: You have to chase the guest posts

I get asked a lot of questions about guest posting. Many of them center on people being too scared to ask. My previous method was to wait until I became friends with someone and DM them with an offer. Most times it was accepted.

I now wait for someone to ask me for the post. I then ascertain exactly what they want, right down to specific case studies to write about. This takes less effort and also ensures that the post really resonates with the audience. It gives you more time to write killer guest post and they’ll have a bigger impact.

Myth 4: You have to perfect your home base.

Jordan Cooper brought up an interesting point in the comment section of the Remarkablogger post.

“It seems counter-intuitive, but I believe you gain more traction by having your guest posts be the “cream” of your content as opposed to it on your own blog. You’re essentially “auditioning” in front of a new audience, so why not try to impress them as much as possible?”

I countered, saying that there is little use auditioning if your home base isn’t up to scratch. He then brought up an interesting concept.

That’s the key thing to determine – what’s your actual purpose?

Everyone’s motive may be completely different when guest posting. Maybe you’re not looking to drive traffic to your blog at all… in that case, it could be a great tool to position yourself to be solicited for *other* people’s projects. Making a name for yourself can be accomplished in many different ways, not just through your own blog.

This made me realize that it was fine if my blog still needed some work. My purpose for guest posting wasn’t to draw attention to my site. If I had waited until my home base was perfect then I would have lost many opportunities.

Over to you

I’m sure many of you have your own experiences with guest posting. I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Note: Most of this post was written while babysitting my nephew on my knee. Its not up to my usual standard, but I really wanted pump out some content on my own blog.

You may have seen my latest guest post at Problogger: 30 Bloggers to Watch in 2010. I’ve been doing a bit of guest posting over the past 6 months but nothing as huge as that post.

It went viral. The post is still echoing around the blogosphere and it even sparked a group writing project on Problogger.

Now, this isn’t viral by most peoples standards. It didn’t hit the front page of a social networking site nor get a significant increase in pageviews.

I refer to it as being viral because it got over 750 retweets within a week – and they are just the ones we tracked. It also sparked a lot of comments – positive and negative – on twitter and within the comment section. Many people took the discussion back to their own blogs and it has since led to the challenge.

It was like a crash course in blogging. This post explores some of the lessons I’ve learned. It sounds daunting but at the end, I talk about all the awesome opportunities that have come as a result.

Lessons learned:

Make it very clear who the list is targeted at.

I got a lot of criticism – some of it very harsh – that my list was biased towards blogs about blogging and social media. I thought that this would have been very obvious as Problogger is the leading blog about blogging and targets those at a beginner to intermediate level.

I chose to focus on people that I was familiar with. Many lists have done the same. However, because of the authority of Problogger I should have disclosed the niche focus in the title.

Understand that you can’t please everyone.

Even if you clearly define your niche, people will still get pissed. You’ll get criticized for everything you didn’t include rather than get acknowledged for all your hard work. People will be upset because their gender, country or sub niche wasn’t represented enough.

Most of the people took the post in the spirit it was intended in and added their own suggestions and lists in the comments. Darren did warn me that these lists do cause a bit of negative buzz but I wasn’t prepared to deal with it. I needed to learn how and the experience was invaluable.

Be prepared to do a lot of work

A huge amount of effort went into the post. I tried to highlight the projects that would be relevant to the core Problogger readership. I linked to the posts they had done in the archives. I spent 6 hours editing images that eventually had to be deleted due to a formatting issue.

I thought that after publication, I would just have to deal with the comments. Instead, I stayed up until midnight dealing with the post.

There was a formatting issue that didn’t appear in the draft. A number of pictures were stretched. I researched for about 45 minutes about how to fix those and quickly realized that it was something I couldn’t fix from the backend. I made the decision to delete all the images to stop the criticism. That night, Johnny B Truant commented that he had gotten a lot of twitter followers thanks to the post and would appreciate if I could send the twitter links of the other people featured. I realized that other people would be interested so stayed up until midnight adding in the twitter handles and creating a twitter list.

This work was appreciated. It has led to many new opportunities.

The fun stuff

It gives the illusion of being busy and in high demand.

I got a few comments from people regarding  how busy I had been this year and how I should relax. The Problogger post was written towards the end of last year. The TwiTip post, which had gone up the day before, was written on a whim. It wasn’t much of a time investment on my behalf but I learned that strategic timing with guest posts can do a lot for your brand.

It reminds friends to touch base with you

Most people know that I’ve had a family situation that took up most of my time. Because of this, I dropped out of contact with a lot of people. On that day Robb Sutton, Ali Hale and Michael Martine all sent emails thanking me. I was able to use the opportunity to catch up. I’ll now be working on a guest post for Remarkablogger and will be featuring Ali Hale in my networking product. I talk to them on twitter more. I comment on their blogs. This was an amazing benefit of the guest post.

It allowed me to make new connections.

Despite people saying the whole post was just back slapping, I didn’t personally know everyone in the post. David Risley? Huge fan but never talked to him. He’s given me the ok to do a guest post on his blog. Laura Roeder? Huge fan, but have barely spoken to her.

It also made people think of me as someone worth knowing. I’m getting more comments and @replies, which was great as I had slowed down my twitter usage.

Over to you.

While the initial backlash was tough, I loved having the opportunity to learn so much. I only talked about the main points in this post. Let me know if there is anything else you want to know and I’ll cover it in a future post.