Part 2 - Cloudfront.net

Part 2:
Fitness
Blogging
For Fun
and Profit
By John Romaniello
How to Get Published, Part 2 2 So you want to be a fitness blogger. You’ve got your personal training certification. You’ve trained dozens—perhaps hundreds—of clients; and you’re ready to help the world become a fitter, healthier, and happier place. Now, you want to start building a presence on the Internet to expand your business and make money outside the gym. An excellent thought, and—for better or worse—
it’s a thought you’re not alone in thinking. As you are no doubt aware, there are thousands of blogs on teh interwebz1 that cover fitness. Fitness blogging can be an exceptionally rewarding hobby, and, if done correctly, an exceptionally lucrative career. It can also lead to bigger and better things, including opportunities to write for magazines, as well as other websites, and even books. I know this because my blog has allowed me to do just that. And so, before we begin, perhaps some introductions are in order. My name is John Romaniello, but everyone calls me Roman. I run a fitness blog, appropriately called Roman Fitness Systems, which, as you might have guessed, covers the systems that I use for fitness (more on this later). I started my website in a hotel room in June of 2009, with exactly 0 readers2. Over the past three years, I’ve turned it into one of the most successful fitness blogs in the world, receiving over 100,000 unique visitors per month (and growing each and every month, thankyouverymuch); having links back to it on hundreds of 1 Not a typo; if you’re going to build an online presence, then you n eed to get familiar with Internet humor. Check out KnowYourMeme to get up to speed. 2 Two d ays a fter launching the blog, I told my mom a bout it, bringing my total readership up to exactly 1. Remember: we all start in the same place. How to Get Published, Part 2 3 websites; being named one of the must-­‐read fitness blogs; allowing me personally to be recognized as one of the best in the world at what I do; and being listed among the top 100 influencers of health and fitness and the top 15 most influential fitness bloggers. During this time, I’ve leveraged my blog (and the visibility it has created) to help me get published on more websites than I can count, and in every magazine I’ve ever approached3—and not just those specifically covering fitness. That same visibility has created opportunities to guide brands, companies, and publications. I’ve had the honor of being asked to serve on a number of advisory boards, including Fitocracy, FitFluential, Livestrong, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s site. My blog has helped me to build my readership and community, to the extent that I now command a subscriber list of over 75,000 dedicated readers, many of whom are die-­‐hard customers. This happens because, through my blog, I’ve been able to create and release a number of high-­‐value, bestselling digital products that have dramatically increased my income.4 Finally, and, more recently, my blog created the opportunity to sign a major book deal with HarperCollins. I say none of this to impress you, but rather to impress upon you the heights of what is potentially possible if you become adept at fitness blogging. I won’t say it’s easy; in fact, it’s quite hard. I personally feel that I have not mastered it by any stretch. However, while there are things I could do better, I have a firm enough grasp on things to have achieved a high level of success in our industry. Which is really the point of this chapter. I’m not going to teach you to master fitness blogging—that takes years—but if there’s anything that I’ve learned from my friend Tim Ferriss, author of the world-­‐
famous Four-­‐Hour book series, it’s that you can probably get 80 percent of the benefits by mastering only 20 percent of the necessary skills. If you’re already blogging, I believe that this chapter will help you take your game to 3 Want a list? To date, I’ve been published in or on: T-­‐Nation, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Shape, Oxygen, Women’s Health, Prevention, Livestrong, Yahoo! Health, The Huffington Post, Newsday, AskMen, US News, People, Experience Life … oh, and let’s not forget Schwarzenegger.com. Interestingly, blogging about fitness (or, more specifically, being v ery successful at blogging about fitness) has led me to be quoted as an expert in business magazines like Fast Company, as w ell as on Forbes.com. Along other lines, I w as quoted in a health and beauty capacity on BirchBoxMan.com. Not bad for three y ears. 4 I’m best known for my products Final Phase Fat Loss and the Super Hero Workout. If you’re interested, you can check out the rest here. How to Get Published, Part 2 4 the next level. But for those of you who are not yet blogging, we will begin at the beginning and take you through the basics. No matter where you are in your career, I promise you will get something out of this chapter. In fact, I guarantee it because I’m going to give you everything. I’m going to tell you everything I know about blogging and writing on the Internet. My goal in this is to create the guide I wish I had, and distill into this chapter all the shit I’ve learned over the past few years. And that begins right now. Part 1: Birthing a Blog What’s in a name? Picking a name for your blog is probably not the most important step in your career, but it is the first one you should take. In many ways, the name defines the feel of the site. I prefer to treat naming your blog more like naming a book, or perhaps a band. It should be catchy, but not outlandish. It should say something about who you are and what you’re offering. The name will be the first thing the world learns about you, so put some time into it, and make it as you as possible. Let’s look at some of the common themes for naming your site. What not to do Do not go generic. It may seem advantageous to play it safe and vanilla and give your site some basic albeit recognizable theme like LoseBellyFat.com, HealthyWeightLoss.com, MuscleBuildingHowTo.com, or something similar. You’ll see a ton of these on the Web, but please realize that they are named primarily for keyword and SEO dominance. And obviously, they are fucking lame. It should be noted that naming a site in this way does lead to a decent amount of traffic; however, it’s a huge turn-­‐off for the majority of the people who land on the site. The people running these sites are almost never real fitness experts; they’re tech people or marketers who use their mastery of Google witchcraft to get people to their page, where they sell the occasional product. Going too generic makes it sound like you’re running a sales site, not an expert site, How to Get Published, Part 2 5 and everything you connect to it (newsletters, videos, blog posts, etc.) will seem less valuable. While the extra traffic resulting from search engines may seem appealing, it’s pointless to get eyeballs to your site if they’re just going to click off right away because it feels like a big commercial. In short, even if you have a great idea for teaching the basics of getting ripped abs, you don’t want to call your blog “Ripped Abs Basics” because it will just be spammy. And lame. And you’re not spammy or lame, are you? Now that you know what not to do, let’s take a look at some of the more beneficial options for selecting a name. OPTION 1: YourName.com The first option is obvious: name your blog after yourself. Your parents already did all the work for you, so it’s easy, and, unless your name is John Smith, it’s unlikely that your name will be taken.5 While it can be argued that this doesn’t necessarily say anything about your business, your training styles, or yourself other than who you are, there’s a lot to be said for personal branding. If you have great content and great service, you can build your name into something recognizable. A perfect example of this is Eric Cressey, whose name has become synonymous with high-­‐quality information. That’s no accident. Eric is one of the best in the business, and for more than a decade has built a sterling reputation among both clients and colleagues. His site, EricCressey.com, has a tremendous readership. This has also been true for guys like Alan Aragon, Chad Waterbury, and Tony Gentilcore, all of whom have been in the industry for years and built great reps. Creating name recognition is easier when you can get your name to appear in publications other than your site. It needs to appear frequently or in a lot of places, but preferably both. If you write consistently for a single magazine, or getting published in a lot of magazines, having your name as your site name will help you, because you’ll be getting searched for quite a bit. In other words, the more you get published, the more valuable your name becomes. For this reason, it’s no surprise that my co-­‐authors have their names as their URL. As editors for magazines, both Sean and Lou have their names in front of people on a regular basis—including other fitness professionals, who in turn send them a lot of traffic. All of that said, it’s obvious that you don’t need to be an editor or staff writer for a 5 This also a pplies if your name is James/Jim/Jimmy Smith, in which case you’re fucked, because there are already four well-­‐
known trainers with that name o n the I nternet. Seriously. Google it. How to Get Published, Part 2 6 large magazine to make an impact, and so it’s also true that those things aren’t necessary to build a brand around your name. Up-­‐and-­‐comers like Ben Bruno, Nia Shanks, Anthony Mychal, and Sirena Bernal have all used their names as their URL, and built great name value because they provide fantastic content. I’ll close this section by saying that even if you decide not to go with this option, do yourself a favor and buy the domain for your name anyway.6 If you become well known, it’ll occur to someone else to buy it. Go to godaddy.com right now and take care of that. Now. I’ll wait. Good to go? Cool, let’s move on. OPTION 2: Your name with a twist If you hate your name, or find it difficult to spell, or someone else already has it, then you need something else. As you know, I opted not to use my own name for my main website, for several reasons. First, I think “Romaniello” is not just hard to spell, it’s hard to pronounce, if you try to pronounce it based on the spelling.7 I reasoned that if people had trouble verbally or mentally pronouncing my last name, it would make it harder to identify with me and form a connection. Second, if I named my site JohnRomaniello.com, people would probably get into the habit of calling me John instead of Roman, which I didn’t want. Nowadays, nearly everyone calls me Roman,8 and I like it that way; it helps me stand out from all the other Johns. And so, for those reasons, I chose to name my site something other than my name. You may decide to go the route I did, but, like me, you may also decide to include some part of your name. I went with Roman Fitness Systems because it was the name of my personal training company. However, I think it’s worth examining how I arrived there. Roman Fitness Systems implies a few things: • The use of the word Roman suggests—to those who realize it’s a name—the methods used are those of someone worth naming a company after. Whoever he is, Roman must be somebody noteworthy. • For those who don’t immediately recognize that Roman is a name, it also 6 I was dumb e nough not to own JohnRomaniello.com w hen I first started out, and eventually had to b uy it from someone else for a thousand bucks. Please be smarter than me. 7 For the record, it’s j ust Roman-­‐ello. Not Roman-­‐E-­‐ello, or the more Italian-­‐sounding Roman-­‐yellow, or even the original Italian pronunciation, Ro-­‐mahn-­‐E-­‐ello. 8 The only people who call me “John” are my mother and the girls I’ve dated. It’s a special privilege bestowed upon a select few, and usually requires that you have cooked for me.
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7 brings to mind the possibility that I’m using training methods from the Imperial Infantry, or perhaps gladiators. Even for those who understand the name, this gives it a certain mystique, and helps build interest. Fitness obviously eliminates any doubt about the topic I’m writing about, or, in the case of my training company, it makes it clear what we’re about. Use of the word systems implies that there is an overarching series of concepts that govern the things that will be covered. In other words, it lets you know that there are rules and principles upon which the programming is based. These things are intended to create implicit understanding, from which I can work to create explicit trustworthiness and value. Of course, I’m not the only one to benefit from this naming style. Another fantastic example is Robertson Training Systems, the website of Indianapolis-­‐based expert Mike Robertson. In his case, “training” instead of “fitness” makes things seem a bit more hardcore, at least in my mind. Robertson Training Systems gives me the sense that Mike is really targeting people who want to get strong and perform better as athletes—and that’s just what he offers. Slightly less developed but equally valid, there’s the option to simply add the word “fitness” to some variation of your name. A few examples: We have JCDFitness, the site of Nashville-­‐based expert JC Deen. There’s also his buddy and podcast co-­‐host Roger Lawson, whose site RogLawFitness is named in a way that allows him to push his nickname9 out in the world. Building on that, another example is “@BornFitness, the Twitter handle of Adam Bornstein, the Editorial Director of Livestrong.com. Like Roger and I did with our own names, Adam capitalized on a preexisting nickname while shortening things. For the ladies, we have Flavalicious Fitness, the website and blog of Flavia Del Monte. I really like this name for everything it implies. An obvious portmanteau of “Flavia” and “Delicious,” as a single word, Flavalicious 10 implies “become delicious … like Flavia.” In other words, it allows Flavia to create a physique-­‐oriented goal based on her own physique without actually coming out and waxing poetic about her physique, and there’s a lot to be said for something like this. Being Flavalicious becomes a desirable goal; in the case of Flavia, it makes her body aspirational instead of merely inspirational. 9 At this point, everyone—including his readers—calls him “ Rog,” which I believe helps bond people to him. 10 Flavalicious o bviously draws its inspiration from Beyonce’s bootylicious; t his is worth m entioning because there’s a savvy bit of marketing involved with piggybacking off a piece of well-­‐known pop culture. Well done, Flavia. How to Get Published, Part 2 8 As an added bonus, it lends itself well to tribe-­‐speak, giving the members of her community the option to say things like “I want to become Flavalicious!” or even personalize it with their own names; a reader named Diana might want to become Dianalicious. It’s not hard to see how this would be incredibly valuable. You can, of course, create a blog based around your name without using the word “fitness.” The best example I can think of is Nate Green’s blog, The Nate Green Experience; I love this name because it speaks to something more than fitness. The experience of being one of Nate’s readers is as least as much about lifestyle, edification, and self-­‐development as it is about building muscle and losing fat. Along similar lines, there’s DrK.com, the website of my good friend Kareem Samhouri, a doctor of physical therapy whose content is mostly video-­‐based. His name is a bit hard to spell, so he gained some benefit there, along with the credibility of making it clear that he’s a doctor, not just a run-­‐of-­‐the-­‐mill fitness professional. A final example of “your name with a twist” is the blog of my friend Chris Ashenden, the founder of a company called Athletic Greens. His blog is titled simply ChrisTheKiwi, playing up the fact that he’s a native of New Zealand.11 Chris is a health and fitness blogger who got a lot of attention when he was mentioned in Tim Ferriss’ The 4-­Hour Body. Now, it’s important to note that in this book, Tim referred to Chris specifically by his nickname, the Kiwi;12 at no point in the book was the name “Chris Ashenden” mentioned. This is important because Chris, who launched his blog after the book came out, very quickly recognized that Tim’s readers would be Googling that term. Lest I lead you to believe that Chris’ selection was based purely in marketing, I’ll offer that Tim and everyone have been calling Chris “Kiwi” or “the Kiwi” for years—
in fact, he’s stored in my phone as “Kiwi Chris.” The site probably would have used that name even if it hadn’t appeared in the book. Kiwi is a canny guy with an innate understanding of relationship building. He recognizes that nicknames make people feel close to you. I have touched on this several times now, and for good reason. It’s a valuable lesson, and worth thinking about when you name your blog. 11 New Z ealand is a mystical place where people are called Kiwis and Hobbits roam the land. 12 At various points on Tim’s blog, Kiwi was referred to as “Chris t he Kiwi,” but never as C hris Ashenden. How to Get Published, Part 2 9 OPTION 3: Let ’em know what they’ll get by listing the benefits The last avenue for naming your blog that I believe has merit is to simply list the effects or benefits of your fitness philosophy in your title. Isabel De Los Rio’s blog, The Diet Solution Program, while grammatically questionable, clearly implies the benefit. It’s the solution where previous diets have failed. A popular example is Joel Marion’s site. Body Transformation Insider immediately tells you that not only will you be transforming your body, you’ll get “insider” information, implying exclusivity. Sports-­‐ and speed-­‐training coach Alex Maroko has taken a similar approach with Game Speed Insider. Interestingly, I find that this is popular among women bloggers who use it as an opportunity to let their readers know the goals of the blog, and what they’ll get by reading it. Names like these usually come in a three-­‐pronged package. Sometimes the benefits are listed as part of the mission statement instead of the site name. A few examples: Marie Forleo, a New York–based business coach who teaches women entrepreneurs, has her main hub at MarieForleo.com. However, in nearly all of her messaging, she uses the phrase, “Rich Happy and Hot.” Obviously, she’s teaching women to make money, be happy, and be “hot” in terms of both getting in shape and achieving self-­‐
acceptance. Wellness, life, and business coach Nisha Moodley uses the term “Fierce Fabulous and Free.” I interpret “fierce” to mean both attractive and confident, “fabulous” to be stylish and happy, and “free” to mean financially successful and without stress. To kick it back more toward fitness, there is Neghar Fonooni. A Baltimore-­‐based trainer and RKC, Neghar’s message is “Eat, Lift, and Be Happy.” Those are the major themes for selecting names. Whether you come up with something creative or simply use your name, your blog can be great and create brand awareness … as long as you don’t use something lame like Ab Shredder 3000. Housing your blog Okay, so now you’ve got your name picked out. You’re totally ready to launch www.YourName.com as the new leading site on training or diet or fitness information. Now you need to set up a website, and that means that you’ve got to choose a platform to blog on. How to Get Published, Part 2 10 There are multiple options for the type of blog that you want to run. However, in all practicality, there is only one, and its name is WordPress. While you could, theoretically, look at options like Blogger, Blogspot, or Typepad, or any of the others, WordPress is simply the best, at least for fitness blogging. Not only does WordPress allow the greatest level of customization, it also happens to be the most search-­‐engine friendly and easiest to use. These features make it most popular, which allows for another benefit: a lot more designers, experts, and tech people are versed in WordPress than in anything else. Should you need help with your site, finding it will not only be easier but also cheaper. Making it do what it do Oh, you’ve decided on WordPress? Excellent. Someone must’ve given you very good advice. Now you need to decide what YourName.com will look like. This is yet another advantage of WordPress: thousands upon thousands of themes that are easy to install. And that will be good in the beginning. A few sites to get you started are Themeforest, Woothemes, and ElegantThemes. In the beginning, I suggest you pick a theme that best suits the tone of your website and what you feel your writing will be. Later on, you’ll want something custom designed. A lot of the fitness sites on the Internet blur together. People seem to be in love with a combination of red, black, and white, or blue, black, and white, and it makes sense. The ones with red tend to be a little more hardcore, and the blues tend to be a little more basic. These color combinations are fairly clean and suit a number of designs. Still, I think it’s important to be different. In the end, your site is going to be the main hub for your personality on the Internet, and should reflect that. Finding a good designer who can capture that personality and translate it into code is very valuable. I know a number of designers, and the ones who can truly distill “you” into a site are rare. The best I’ve found—the one I use for my current site and plan to use for all iterations of it—is Jason Lengstorf of CopterLabs. Jason designed Sean’s and Lou’s sites as well, so it’s probably unnecessary to say the authors are pleased with his work. Jason has also designed sites for his friend Nate Green, John Berardi, Mike Robertson, Cassandra Forsythe, Nia Shanks, and countless other fitness pros. His talent for making your site an extension of your personality has him in high demand. He’s also a cool guy and a good friend. But he’s not cheap, which is why I don’t recommend hiring him for your very first site. With any designers, take a careful look at their portfolios, and make sure you vet them fully. Interview people they’ve worked with. Ask about price and turnaround time, which are at least as important as design. How to Get Published, Part 2 11 Everything else is a bit beyond me, which brings me to my next point: I honestly don’t know how to do anything technical with my blog. I’ve played around with a few things and learned a few tricks, but aside from resizing pictures and text, my tech capabilities are limited to Facebook. When you first start blogging and playing around in WordPress, you may feel overwhelmed. And a common response to feeling overwhelmed is a desire to master the thing that scares you. In other words, if you feel there’s a lot of tech shit to learn, you may be tempted to actually learn it. I cannot advise against this strongly enough. Outside of saving you a few dollars here and there, there is no benefit to learning tech. If you already know how to do it, great—you’ll probably save yourself some money and possibly (though not likely) some time. However, for the majority of us who see coding as very much like voodoo, it’s better to simply outsource it. I adhere to Ballantyne’s Law, which has helped me greatly over the years: The more tech-­related things you learn how to do, the less money you will make on the Internet. This law obviously was coined by Craig Ballantyne, and is most applicable to people who don’t already have some level of tech savvy. While it may cost you a bit of money to outsource, you’ll save something much more valuable than money: your time. Put another way, I believe as much as Craig believes that your time should be spent mastering the skills that you’re passionate about, not learning how to edit video and code HTML. Your goal is to be a fitness writer and blogger, not a code monkey. (No offense to our friend Jason Lengstorf!) Part 2: Blog Basics Okay, kids. You’ve got a site, it’s designed, and you’re ready to go. Now comes the hard part: writing. In the fitness world, one may think that there are only so many topics to write about: training for fat loss, training for muscle gain, nutrition for fat loss, nutrition for muscle gain, stretching, foam rolling, blah, blah, blah. Wash, rinse, repeat. Nearly every blog post you write will likely be related to one or more of those subjects, or perhaps all of those subjects. Given that, the hard part isn’t really knowing what to write about, it’s figuring out how to write it in a unique way. Nearly everything you ever write—anything you even think about writing—has been written about a million times before by a thousand people. We can’t help but cannibalize one another’s content. How to Get Published, Part 2 12 Rather than ignore or avoid this issue, I suggest you embrace it. Make a list of the top 15 to 20 fitness sites and blogs that you think are relevant to your niche. Spend time reading all of them. Absorb what they do and what they’ve said. After a few days doing this, make a list of the top five to 10 topics, ideas, or specific things that these blogs have in common. If an idea has been covered 10 times by 10 of the top blogs, then you can react in one of two ways. You can decide that it’s been covered extensively, and there doesn’t need to be another article about it. Or you can look at it creatively and decide there’s room for another article if—and only if—you can say something new about something old. I generally recommend the latter. Just because there have been several dozen articles on intermittent fasting doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write an article on intermittent fasting. There are two reasons for this. First, I feel I can say things in a completely different and probably more entertaining way than most people. The second is that I want my blog to be a go-­to destination for all types of training and nutrition information, which means that if a topic has been discussed somewhere else, but not on my site, then I need to write about it. I want every area of fitness covered. My recommendation: Read everything you can on the topics the top blogs cover, and think of creative ways to write about them. Remember, success leaves clues. While you should certainly never copy anything that anyone has done, you can model yourself after other people. And of course, if you borrow an idea unique to someone, make sure to give him or her credit, even as you’re putting your own unique spin on it. Finding your voice A writer’s voice is the unique style he/she uses to communicate the information the person is trying to get across. Every writer struggles with it, but it’s something you have to develop. You won’t use the same style for everything you write; when you’re writing for a medium you don’t control, as Sean and Lou cover in Part 3 and Part 4, the voice will very much be determined by the medium, brand, or market. But as a blogger, your voice is entirely your own. Developing it is a matter of practice. You must write and write and write and write and write. First you figure out how to write, and then you learn to fix all the holes in your writing. The simplest and best advice anyone can give a blogger is to not sound like anything How to Get Published, Part 2 13 you aren’t. If you’re funny, be funny. If you’re serious, be serious. If you’re smart, be smart. If you don’t generally use a lot of big words in conversation, don’t try too hard to work them into your blog posts. It will always sound forced. Where bloggers get into trouble is when they try to force a quality they don’t really possess, whether it’s humor or charisma. When they try to be funny, the jokes run aground. (Which, by the way, leads me to a very simple rule for both blogging and life: If you’re not funny, don’t try to be.) To put this in the simplest and most actionable words possible: write how you talk. My good friend Tim Ferriss tells a great story about his first attempts to write The 4-­
Hour Work Week, which would go on to become a bestseller. The first four chapters were written in what he refers to as “epic Princetonian pomposity.” Then the next few chapters swung wildly in the other direction and were pretty silly. After that, he found a nice middle ground. That became his voice, which he used for the rest of the book13. When I created my first product, I wrote it months ahead of the release date and then shut the program and didn’t think about it. While it lay dormant, I wrote consistently and actively worked on both my writing skills and my voice. When I went back to my product, as the launch was approaching, I was horrified by the writing, and scrapped the whole damn thing. Seriously. I deleted every word. From there, it was a mad scramble to hit the deadline. I recreated it from the ground up just days before the release. It was riddled with typos (sorry ’bout that!), but it was written in my voice, not some pale imitation of it. I was proud of the book, and people connected with me because of it—because of the jokes and the Star Wars references. That’s the real reason people will read your stuff. But we’ll get to that in another section. There’s no path to finding your own voice other than through practice, just as you have to write to get better at writing. The more you write, the more you’ll discover what is comfortable, and the easier it will be to determine your own voice. Once you’ve found that, writing will not only come easier, but people will respond to it a lot better. Honing and refining your voice is a tough but rewarding process. It always surprises me when bloggers make an already difficult task even harder by trying to be something or someone they’re not—a phenomenon that’s rampant in the fitness industry. A great example of someone with a defined voice is Jason Ferruggia, one of the most accomplished fitness writers I know. Jay has a shaved head and tattoos, and his 13 Unfortunately for T im, he later had to go back and rewrite t hose first chapters in what had become his voice. How to Get Published, Part 2 14 blogging style is very direct, blunt, and—occasionally—angry in tone. But he still makes self-­‐deprecating jokes and reveals the softer side that exists when he’s not under the bar. By presenting himself honestly, Jason attracts both young men who are hungry to build muscle and break heads in the gym, and older guys who have outgrown that. Jason is a perfect representation of balance: He delivers his voice and his message in a way that cements both his authority and his place in the industry, while at the same time revealing enough about his personal life (he’s recently married), his tastes in music (he prefers old school hip-­‐hop), and even his guilty pleasures (’80s pro wrestling) to let readers into his world and bond with him. Finding your place in the industry When people first start out, they have all these ideas about who or what they should be, or what group they belong to, or how they want people to perceive them. And so every trainer seems to want to present himself as either a hardcore, powerlifting badass, an elite coach to superstar athletes, or a regular Joe who trains people just like YOU! And, of course, you’ve got the obligatory origin story where they tell you how long they’ve been “in the trenches.”14 While I understand the impulse to try and fit into a specific mold, successful bloggers ultimately need to abandon prefabricated personas and develop their own. Just because you have a huge deadlift doesn’t mean your blog has to hinge on it15. Write the way you speak to your clients or anyone else you’re trying to advise, and the people who appreciate and relate to that voice will find you. On the other hand, it is important to have a defined message, and figure out where you fit—not in the industry, but rather in the lives of your readers. You can’t be everything to everyone. There’s no way you can possibly present yourself as someone who is equally expert at both powerlifting and yoga. The messages 14 If there was ever a stupider, lamer, more o bnoxious w ay of saying, “I’ve had this job for a while now,” I really d on’t fucking know it. Every time someone says this shit, I feel my brain cells committing suicide. You’re a fucking trainer, and unless y ou were training clients on the W estern Front of Germany in 1918, you’ve never been in a trench. So, in the interest o f m e not wanting to kill myself and you not sounding like a douchebag, please, p lease for the love of God, go to the A bout page of your s ite and d elete this shit immediately. 15 I have a p retty d ecent deadlift, having pulled over 660 pounds, but I don’t think I’ve m entioned it on my blog b ecause it’s not really relevant to my message or m y audience. Think about that for a second: I wrote a 4,000-­‐word review of the Twilight Saga, but I don’t have an a rticle on deadlifting. With my deadlift numbers, I could certainly t ry to p resent myself as a clone of Jim Wendler (the 5/3/1 guy) and probably have some success with it. But that’s not who I am. I’m a geek who just happened to work h is way into fitness. I’m more about Hobbits than Harleys, and more about living an awesome life than having an awesome b ench. 15 How to Get Published, Part 2 compete too strongly for you to focus on either for any length of time. Being well rounded is one thing, but at some point, you’ll have to pick a focus of some kind. Early in your career, it’s best to concentrate on your greatest strength, and what you can best offer people. Focus on that subject and any logical offshoots of it until you build your audience, and become a recognized destination for others interested in the subject. This is carving out a niche, and it’s very different from trying to fit someone else’s mold. Once you have, you can begin to branch out. Sometimes, finding your place can happen organically, and won’t be what you expect. A great example is Ben Bruno, who has become known for creative, if not wacky, exercise variations. Ben originally came up with exercises he could do to stay strong while recovering from a series of knee surgeries. From there he started writing about them in articles and on his blog. Very quickly, Ben went from being a guy who did some weird exercises to the guy who did wacky exercises. Here’s one example of such writing: an entire blog post dedicated to the Landmine Valslide reverse lunge (seriously): How to Get Published, Part 2 16 While that’s not an exercise many people are searching for, it’s one a lot of people now do because Ben has become known for this stuff. His video demonstrations have generated a lot of traffic on YouTube, and while this may be Bruno’s niche for the moment, don’t be surprised if he becomes known for his many other skills down the road. He sees a void he fills in the industry—a unique service he provides—and he’s running with it … for now. When he’s established as the guy to go to when you want a fun new move to throw into your routine—or, more importantly, a movement you can do pain-­‐free while recovering from an injury—he may push to let his many other talents as a trainer come to light. Finding your voice is largely about being who you are, as authentically as possible. It’s not just to define yourself in the industry. The more you show your personal interests and tastes, likes and dislikes, hobbies and side projects, strengths and weaknesses, the more you come out in your writing. Personality in writing is the key. The ability to display personality in an engaging way is what separates those who become online personalities from those who just have a blog. A great blogger should sort of feel like a friend; you should know about their life, and feel like you’re being invited in whenever you read their stuff. Over the past three years, I’ve observed that the more I write about my life, the more my life tends to filter into my other writing. Creating the perfect blog post Once you’ve found your voice—which could mean fumbling your way through 10, 15, or even 20 posts—you’re ready to embark on the journey of creating a really great blog, one that will be shared, and that you’ll become known for. We’ll start with structure. I don’t think I need to go over the architecture of a post in fine detail. You’ve probably read more blog posts than food labels, and already have a feel for how it’s done. And posts aren’t structured much differently from first-­‐person columns you see in newspapers or magazines. Start with an attention-­‐getting headline, but keep it short and sweet. (See Sean’s examples for writing magazine headlines in Part 3.) Write a catchy lead and keep the text broken into chunks, much like you see on these pages. Having photos (which you can grab off the web and repurpose in minutes) is important, and not only serve to keep readers’ attention but also to break up the pacing of the lines you write. This extra visual element keeps readers reading. How to Get Published, Part 2 17 Subheads also help fight blog-­‐induced narcolepsy. Whenever you can break your big idea into smaller ones that people can donate their patience to for a few more lines, do so. When you’re ready to wrap it up, close with your strongest point. It should reaffirm the theme of your post, but also be the boldest statement yet for why it’s the right idea. This is a perfect place for a Call To Action, which I’ll discuss a little further down (don’t worry—there’ll be a subhead to alert you, should you get drowsy along the way). I believe that all blog posts should hit one of four goals: educate, entertain, inspire, or sell. A good blog post must do two of these things. A great blog post does three of them, and a perfect one hits all four. Very, very few of your blog posts will be perfect, at least by the definition I’ve given. Most of your posts will not sell something, and so cannot technically qualify. For posts that don’t pitch, but are instead content driven, the goal will be to educate, inspire, and entertain. The great majority of your posts will only hit two of these at a time; which ones do this are entirely dependent on your personality and your established voice. Take, for example, Boston-­‐based fitness bro and Cressey Performance co-­‐founder Tony Gentilcore. For Tony, writing in an educational and entertaining way comes most easily, and so nearly all of Tony’s posts disseminate high-­‐quality content laced with jokes, pop-­‐culture references, and the occasional funny picture. With Tony’s writing style, it never feels forced. He can certainly inspire people when he wants to step it up, and I’ve even seen him sell. So Tony is quite capable of writing a perfect post. The important thing is that Tony writes in a way that suits his voice. That’s why his blog is so popular. Other people write posts that inspire you to get up and do something. I personally struggle with this kind of writing, and I’m incredibly impressed by people who do it without sounding too cheesy. Craig Ballantyne is a great example. He posts motivational quotes and life lessons, but it never feels like he’s being condescending. Nate Green is another inspirational blogger, though he approaches it in a very different way. Instead of posting quotes and maxims, he talks honestly about his life. While most people’s lives don’t make for a particularly inspiring read, Nate’s does, at least to the 18-­‐to-­‐30-­‐year-­‐old crowd Nate caters to. He’s just a guy who has his shit together. Young guys can relate to and look up to him and feel like they want to better themselves. Like Craig, Nate does this without being preachy. Again, all of these examples only work because these bloggers are being true to their 18 How to Get Published, Part 2 voices. Every post they write is, at the very least, good. When they hit it out of the park, Craig and Nate can both be entertaining, while Tony and I can be inspiring. And so, on a few occasions, any of us can write a great blog post. Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers and one of the world’s leading experts on Internet marketing via social media, takes it a step further. Instead of simply telling you what a perfect blog post should include, he has a complete structure for how such a post should be written. Halpern had an infographic created that lays out the structure, which we’ve included below (for a bigger version, just click this link): How to Get Published, Part 2 19 Looking at the graphic, you’ll notice that, like me, Derek believes the perfect post will be a mix of information (what I called education), emotional stimulation (or, as I put it, inspiration or entertainment), and selling. Derek and I understand the truth of blogging: Your goal is to teach while making readers feel something. Then, and only then, can you sell them something. Before anything else, you must make your readers feel something. Sometimes you’ll want them to laugh. Other times you’ll want them to feel inspired. But the goal is always to elicit a response of some kind. Always. Got it? Calls to action Another thing you’ll notice about Halpern’s infographic is the focus on CTAs, or calls to action. Every post should inspire action, and ask for it. Whether it’s asking for a sale with a pitch, asking for interaction and comments, or asking for distribution through sharing on social media, every single blog post should end with a call to action, and usually have one somewhere in the middle, too. Calls to action can be pretty simple. On my blog they’re usually peppered throughout the post, and always appear at the end. When they’re within the post itself, CTAs are usually links that give some sort of direction. One example is a social media hook. I simply embed links to tweet16 what I consider to be the best quote, and have the anchor text read “tweet this shit.” This call to action is pretty simple and very doable: your readers are so accustomed to clicking and sharing articles on Facebook and Twitter that it won’t register as an “ask” of any kind. Here’s an example: “I believe that all blog posts should hit one of four goals: educate, entertain, inspire, or sell. A perfect post will cover all of them.” – Tweet that shit More to the point, while there is some value in just getting people to quote you on Twitter, this call to action serves a truly important purpose: It distributes your 16 This is a fun little ninja blogging trick I like ( and, incidentally, learned from Derek Halpern). Just go to Click to Tweet and you’ll be able to write out a tweet that your readers can send out; you’ll have options to tag yourself and link back to your s ite. Once you write the tweet, the site w ill generate a link that recreates the tweet for anyone who clicks it. Just copy that link and embed it into your post. All your readers need to do is click, and it’ll get tweeted. Again, do this with a “sound byte,” or the best, most quotable line in the post. How to Get Published, Part 2 20 content in an organic way that doesn’t feel salesy or spammy. Creating ways for people to share your content in a way they enjoy and brings them some recognition (as the person who referred a friend to a life-­‐changing article) is the force multiplier for sharing, and the simplest way to have a well-­‐written article go from “popular” to “viral.” While a CTA of “tweet this shit” won’t immediately make you more money, I personally believe that doing things like this will increase your income over the long haul. First, you’re getting more people to your site, which is the hardest step for any online business. Second, you’re spreading your content on social media, which fosters the sense of community that’s necessary for any empire to succeed. Third, you’re training the click. A tweetable call to action, like any other CTA, requires you to click a link and actually do something. This will be touched on elsewhere in this section, but for now, let me just drive home one extremely important point: The more often you get your readers to click, the more money you will make. Establishing the habit of clicking on links that don’t have an overt ask will pay dividends when it’s time for them to click on links that do: the ones that say “add to cart.” Another example of a mid-­‐blog call to action is linking to products or services that are at least somewhat related to the topic of the article. For example, if I were writing a piece on free radicals and oxidative stress, I wouldn’t include a link for foam rollers; it makes no sense, and just comes off as an effort to sell something. On the other hand, I wouldn’t hesitate to include a link to a product to help with these issues, like Athletic Greens. That makes sense for the article, and to the reader. They’re more likely to click, and more likely to buy. Going a bit further, we can look at the difference between a stable link and an action link. In some cases, the call to action will be very soft. It’s categorized by a stable link, where the anchor text is just the product name. In an action link, the product wouldn’t simply be anchored with its name. The anchor text for the link would be written in a way to inspire action: “click here to pick up Athletic Greens” or “click here to punch some free radicals in the face.” Whatever it is, it’s got a fucking verb in it to make people understand they need to actually do something. Far more important than mid-­‐post calls to action are those that come at the end of a post. The very last piece of any blog post you write should be you asking for something. You need to understand this and accept it; the sooner you get comfortable with the idea that you need to ask your readers for the things you want, the sooner you’ll start blowing up. How to Get Published, Part 2 21 Closing your blog posts with an ask makes sense for a few reasons. It’s your last chance to ask them something, obviously. It’s also when they’re most likely to give it to you. You’ve just given them a ton of content. If you’re a good blogger, you closed with your strongest point. This means they’ve just experienced a huge feeling of payoff at the conclusion of your post, and are more likely to feel gratitude than at any other time. So: You’ve given them the good stuff, you’ve closed with your strongest point, and now they’re sitting there with no clear direction of what else to do on your site. They’ll either poke around on their own or, more likely, click away from your site and go back to Facebook-­‐stalking their high school crushes.17 This is the perfect time for you to ask for something, the perfect time to give them a call to action, and the perfect time to tell them specifically what to do next. Obviously, the strongest play will be a direct sales pitch. In this case, you will have written a compelling post that discusses the product directly, or a problem that the product can solve. At the end of the post, you’ll point to the product as being the solution, and give them instructions on how to buy it. Here’s an example from my blog: 17 What? That’s not just me, is it? How to Get Published, Part 2 22 In this screenshot, you see a snippet from my blog post entitled “The Number One Thing Holding Back Your Workouts,” which discussed program hopping and periodization in programming. Even in this small shot, you can see that I summarized the problem, and then immediately provided the solution. In this case, the solution was my Super Hero Fat Loss program. You see that I provided an image, and a link to buy it. The post was written in a specific way to allow me this opportunity. Publishing content: when, where, and how often? Scheduling when to publish content is probably one of the areas of blogging where you’re going to hear some of the worst advice in the world. You’ll hear everything from once a month to multiple times per day. Either of those suggestions—and everything in between—can be good, depending on context and industry. How to Get Published, Part 2 23 For example, there are industries where news happens all the time, and frequent updates are warranted. Good examples are sports sites and gossip sites. If you follow blogs on ESPN.com, you’ll see that they update at least once an hour during the day. This makes sense, as they’re covering a variety of topics for a variety of sports. Even single-­‐team blogs can have multiple updates. As a Jets fan, I follow a few blogs that cover Gang Green, and during periods where things happen quickly (i.e., during the draft), a Jets blog may pump out four or five posts within a few hours. Along similar lines, a celebrity gossip site like wwtdd.com (What Would Tyler Durden Do?) or Gawker update frequently because they’ve got new content to share. Whether it’s pictures of celebrities in bikinis or breaking news about movies or books coming out, they’re giving opinions and reviews. This also applies to sites that cover other areas of entertainment, like IGN, which covers TV, movies, and games, to news sites like The Huffington Post. These sites are divided into areas that cover independent topics, called verticals. While IGN originally provided content relating primarily to video games (and had individual areas for each gaming system), it’s now a fully fleshed-­‐out entertainment site, with verticals for TV and movies. The Huffington Post has its origins in political commentary, but now has verticals for tech, media, comedy, and even health and fitness, where I’m a contributing blogger. It even has independent verticals for individual cities; I get a good bit of my local news from HuffPostNYC. It may seem at first that none of these examples is germane to our particular discussion, for a few reasons. For one thing, they’re all conglomerate or multiauthor sites. This is a stark contrast to single-­‐author blogs, like those run by fitness professionals like you and me. I bring them up because they demonstrate what I think is a point many fitness bloggers just can’t wrap their heads around: They update when they have something to say. Even though Gawker or TMZ is publishing news that you might consider to be nonsense, each story offers at least a small kernel of interest. Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. In other words, you should blog when and if you have something to say, and can write it in a way worth reading. There are a lot of “rules” that you’ll hear about blogging frequency as it applies to How to Get Published, Part 2 24 single-­‐author blogs. People will tell you that, ideally, you should blog every day during the week. Or, at the very least, three times per week. I think that is absolute bullshit. To begin with, I know very few people who can write a decent blog post every day. Most people don’t have it in them to churn out content that quickly, and of course they also typically don’t have that kind of time. Those who write every day are rarely saying new stuff. Which leads us to what I consider to be a tremendous crime for any blogger: blogging just because you think you should. You should always have something to say. The proponents of frequent blogging are favoring an outmoded approach to content creation. When the Internet was in its infancy more than a decade ago, there weren’t that many blogs. Blogging was new, and people weren’t generally in the habit of checking blogs. Frequent blogging helped create that habit in readers and customers. Today most of the people who come across your blog check multiple blogs on a daily basis. They don’t need new content, not if it’s created as a simple reminder that content exists. As with any aspect of life, quality is better than quantity. The best way to ensure quality is to spend time making sure the content is worth knowing and the writing is worth reading. It’s better to write great blog posts less frequently than it is to put up mediocre ones regularly. Perhaps the most obvious example is Tim Ferriss’ blog, which is one of the most popular in the world, and gets so much traffic that when he embeds a link to a site he likes in a blog post, the resulting click-­‐throughs sometimes crash that site. Tim, whose blog started when the old rules of blogging possibly still applied, has broken every one of those rules. Tim has had weeks where he blogs two or three times, but also has stretches where he only writes one post a month. He’s all about quality over quantity, and says so very frequently. A data geek obsessed with metrics, Ferriss has tested everything from frequency to length of posts (more on that in the next section), and he has found exactly what I’m telling you: What you say is more important than how often you say it. Of course, none of this means that people who blog frequently never create quality content. Some of the best in the business follow a daily schedule. How to Get Published, Part 2 25 A great example is Craig Ballantyne, who blogs about both fitness and business. He writes a post nearly every day, and every one is worth reading. He’s a rarity, though. Actually, rarity doesn’t come close to it. Craig is probably the most productive human I know, and in fact may actually be a robot. Most people can’t come close to matching him in terms of quality and/or pace—myself included, at least when it comes to pace. Understanding your process Now would be a good time to talk about my personal experience. My writing process is painfully slow. I am a line-­‐by-­‐line writer. I have difficulty moving onto the next sentence until I’m happy with the one that preceded it. I struggle with word choice and think consciously about sentence structure, length, and pacing. I put a ton of thought into things, and my first and last draft look extraordinarily similar. Contrast this style with that of Adam Bornstein, my coauthor on the upcoming books with HarperCollins. Adam is what I can only call a “splash” writer. He throws ideas onto the page in the order they come to him, fleshing them out minimally. Once he has all the ideas in one place, he sets about organizing them to the greatest effect. From there, he edits, rewrites, re-­‐edits, and then polishes. His first and last drafts are similar only in the topics they cover. Adam, as a result, is a faster writer than me—much faster. He argues that because he goes through so many edits, we wind up taking about the same amount of time per post, and that may be true. But because he doesn’t agonize over every word, he churns out more in a given week than I do. My writing style hampers me in that even though I often have things to say, I find I can’t write fast enough to say them when I’d like to. I sometimes find that I have several good blog ideas half-­‐written at once (a habit I strongly encourage you not to duplicate). This is all a roundabout way of saying I publish posts rather slowly, but the quality is always very high. I wish I could publish three times per week consistently, but most weeks it’s one, with a meta-­‐average showing about 1.3 per week over the life of my blog. Contrary to what the old rules would imply, the lack of publishing frequency hasn’t hurt me. Rather, my readers have come to expect around one post per week, and they expect it to be awesome. One exception to this type of scheduling is when I run a series. Even if I plan it as a How to Get Published, Part 2 26 two-­‐ or three-­‐part series, I’ll usually write the entire series first, then release all the posts over the course of a single week. These series are, not surprisingly, some of my most popular posts. One more exception is for a blogger who’s just starting to pick up readers. There’s some value in staying in front of them. Allowing them to get to know you quickly, and offering something else to read (or buy), can be the difference between a lifelong subscriber and a one-­‐time visitor. To address this, I recommend placing a “recommended reading” or “related posts” section at the bottom of every blog post.18 You’ll also want to prompt readers to join your newsletter, allowing you to encourage them to come back for more visits—and ultimately to buy, when you decide to release a product or promote one for a colleague. Leading us to our next section. Part 3: The Money Is In the List As a blogger with a strong dependence on marketing, I make the majority of my income directly from my newsletter list. This is more surprising to me than it is to any of you, because my first experience with newsletters was not good. Briefly: During my freshman year in high school, I was primarily interested in writing and wrestling. Those weren’t my only interests—I also spent a great deal of time in online role-­‐playing games—but they dominated my thoughts. (It would be another year at least before women took over altogether.) I was a freshman on the varsity wrestling team, getting my ass handed to me each day. I wanted to bring my two interests together, while at the same time lessening the sting of defeat by adding value to the team. That’s why I started my first newsletter. The goal was to write about both the team and the sport as a whole. I planned on having a weekly publication with four to six articles. I was going to summarize the matches, profile one wrestler each week, write about the sport in general (educating readers about scoring and moves), and even have a “coach’s corner” section where my coach would chime in. 18 You can do this manually, but there are several plug-­‐ins that will do it automatically. The posts they recommend will b e related to the post your reader has just read, a s d etermined by tags and categorization. How to Get Published, Part 2 27 It was a great idea. It was well thought out. It was organized. It generated interest. It was exceeding ambitious. It was a fucking disaster. Here’s the thing: Wrestling season is just over three months long. Which means that I was signing up for about 12 issues of this newsletter. It doesn’t sound terrible, until you factor in that I had a full schedule of honors classes, an after-­‐school job, three hours of practice every weekday, and oh yeah, getting my ass kicked on the weekends. I had very little time to write, which means that all my free time was spent writing. Not unusual for me, as it was my love, but I preferred to write about wizards rather than wrestling. The newsletter lasted five issues, and I hated each one more than the last. I resigned myself to a season full of ignominious defeats, and the dubious distinction of the record for the fastest pin. With a horrible taste for newsletters in my mouth, I abandoned them and never thought I’d be a part of one again. Roughly 15 years later, my newsletter is, in many respects, the lifeblood of my business. Crazy how that happens. However, my current newsletter is really not at all like the wrestling newsletter. Especially in the sense that it isn’t really used to deliver news. Wait … a newsletter without news!? That’s un-­possible! In the context of fitness blogging and marketing, it’s better to think of it not as a “newsletter” but as a “mass-­‐email–delivery system.” Or, if that doesn’t feel personal enough, think of it as your subscriber list, hereafter referred to simply as your list. If you want to make money online, your list is of the utmost importance. It is from the list that the greatest potential for monetizing your blog springs. What is the list? The list is a collection of all the email addresses of the individuals who have given you permission to email them. This is an important distinction, as it is both pointless and stupid to email people who haven’t given you permission to do so. Stupid because it results in spam complaints, and pointless because you’re unlikely to get anything out of people who don’t want to hear from you. If I wasn’t clear, never buy How to Get Published, Part 2 28 a list of emails to mail to, and once you have a list, never sell them. Your list is managed and stored on a newsletter delivery service, and you will log in to your account to send emails. This is done through an outside service as opposed to emailing strangers from your Gmail account. There are a number of newsletter services to choose from, the most popular of which are: • GetResponse •
Aweber •
iContact •
Constant Contact •
Infusionsoft •
Office Autopilot All of these are fairly interchangeable in terms of function and price, so which one you use is really just a matter of preference. I use GetResponse (GR), mainly because it’s what my buddy Joel Marion uses, and he helped set up my account. Among my particular group of affiliates, GR is the most popular. I haven’t used any others, but I hear good things about Aweber, which seems to be the second most popular. From what I understand, the main differences are in how customizable certain features are. That’s advanced stuff, and at that level there are tradeoffs from service to service. One might have better list segmentation, whereas another might offer advantages in terms of HTML coding. The advanced features aren’t really necessary for what you’ll be doing; three years into my list management, I haven’t bothered to learn. My business is doing fine without using such features. How (and why) people get on the list As mentioned, you only want to email people who give you permission to do so, which means they need a way to do that. There are several avenues, all of which require that they “opt in” to confirm their subscription. The most common way is for them to enter their email into an opt-­‐in form—an area 29 How to Get Published, Part 2 on a website designed for the sole purpose of collecting emails. Opt-­‐in forms come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but usually appear in the upper-­‐right-­‐hand corner of the content section of your website, and always “above the fold.”19 For context, here’s what the opt-­‐in form on my site looks like: Again, this appears in the upper right-­‐hand part of the content area. This is the area below the header (“Roman Fitness Systems,” in my case). 19 This is an old expression that comes from newspapers. Papers are p resented folded in half, and on t he front cover, everything above the fold is valuable real estate, saved for the most impressive headlines that might catch the eye of a passerby and get them to buy the paper. In the digital world, “above t he fold” refers to everything on the top half o f the screen that is visible w ithout scrolling down. How to Get Published, Part 2 30 You’ll notice that the text offers a FREE report. Giving something for free—be it a report, a workout, or an email course—is your first lesson in marketing: People respond to incentives. In the blogging world, this is known as an ethical bribe. You appeal to the self-­‐
interest of the readers by offering them something that they want, need, or can use. By offering it for free, you let the readers know you’re a good guy and can be trusted. (This, by the way, is not sarcasm. You should be awesome and trustworthy.) As an aside, I’ll just mention that while the report should be top quality, it doesn’t need to be fancy. Just write up a Word document and have your Web guy turn it into a PDF. It doesn’t have to be a long workout program or precise diet. Just give the people something useful that will make them interested in coming back and hearing more from you. The report is given in exchange for the email address; you’re essentially bribing the reader (ethically) into giving you permission to email him. But the free offering isn’t just about getting the email address. It’s also about providing value. Just because you don’t charge for something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be good. In fact, there’s an old marketing maxim: Give your best stuff for free. It’s a principle I apply to both business and life. By giving the reader something awesome, you’re not only furthering the good-­‐guy image, you’re also demonstrating your skill and expertise, while building a relationship. But that’s not the only way to opt in. One is the pop-­‐up. When someone goes to your site, a bubble appears with a request to sign up. Usually the text on the pop-­‐up is a bit more urgent and sales-­‐pitchy than you’d put on a static opt-­‐in form, but the offering is the same. Pop-­‐ups are a double-­‐
edged sword, of course. They’re a little annoying and in your face, but they increase opt-­‐ins significantly. Like, a lot. In order to avoid feeling like a spammer or pissing your readers off, you can set your pop-­‐up to recognize IP addresses and only pop up the first time people come to the site, then reset every 30 days. People can and should also be added to a list when they buy a digital product. This is getting a bit techy, but the main thing in this case is that when people purchase your product, they are taken to an access page to download it. You must have your tech guy set it up so that they’re prompted to confirm the subscription via How to Get Published, Part 2 31 email before they’re able to download. There are two types of people who will buy products, and you need their email either way: 1) New people. These folks will not have been on your list previously. The best customer is one that has already bought from you, and so collecting this person’s email is very valuable for making future sales. 2) Old people. These guys were already on your list and purchased directly through you. Which means you are not collecting their emails anymore but rather segmenting them. It’s very important to separate your customers from your prospects. First, it allows you to speak to them differently, which is paramount for the simple reason that you can avoid selling something to people who have already bought it. Second, you can give special offers to your customers to thank them for purchases. Finally, people can also be added to your list via something called a squeeze page, which is a page (either on your main site or elsewhere) that has no function other than to collect email addresses. Like any opt-­‐in form, a squeeze page incentivizes people to give their email just like the other methods we’ve discussed. The incentive can be a free workout or report, as mentioned above, or it can simply be access to a site (you can’t move past that page until you enter your email). Both of these work fairly well, but generally, giving something away is more effective. Squeeze pages are usually the province of marketers, and can come off a bit spammy. If you use one, my recommendation is to follow it up with a metric fuck-­‐ton of content so that people realize you’re there to provide info. These are the basics of list creation, but list building is both an art and a science, and beyond the scope of this writing. For the best information on list building I’ve come across, I recommend checking out Derek Halpern at SocialTriggers.com; he’s covered that and so much more. Now let’s move on to list management. You’ve got a list. Now what? Congratulations! You’ve created a kick-­‐ass free report, and people are opting in left and right. Sweet. You’re on your way to being more than just a good blogger; you will soon become a blogger who makes money. But more on that later. How to Get Published, Part 2 32 Let’s first talk about how to manage your mailing list, and that starts with emailing them. I think that, since we’re talking about a list, we should cover the most important aspects of list management in list form. Frequency How often should you email your list? Pretty damn often. Unlike blogs, which I think should be kept to a needed maximum, you really can’t email your list too often. That’s a bold statement, but I have data to back it up. A meta-­‐analysis of over one million email lists confirms that literally, the more often you mail, the better. Not only do you make more money, but you get a higher open rate and fewer unsubscribes. This may seem counterintuitive. You probably hate the amount of email you get, and think that if you got an email from me every day, it would be mildly annoying and you’d delete half of them. And that’s probably true. But you wouldn’t unsubscribe, at least not if the content is good. You’d delete half, but you would open the other half. Here’s the funny thing: That behavior seems pretty uniform, independent of the number of emails you send. This is true in all industries, by the way, not just fitness. The average reader will open half of your emails, while your most passionate people will open most of them. Which means that if I send an email every weekday, I’m sending 25 emails each month, 12 of which will be opened by the average subscriber. On the other hand, if I send only 12, the ratio remains the same, and six of them are opened. It makes more sense to send more often because it gives your readers more opportunities to read your stuff. You also need to consider that there isn’t always overlap. If only half of the emails are getting opened, it’s not always the same people opening them. Some will open emails 1, 4, 6, 9, 20, 21, and 25. Others will open 1, 2, 3, 8, 12, 18, 19, 23, and 24. Or any combination. Some emails, depending on their content and their subject line, appeal to some people, while others don’t. The more emails you send, the more readers you service. Read that again. The same people don’t open the emails every time. The more you send, the more you get through to them. Got it? How to Get Published, Part 2 33 You also have to take your own time and comfort into account. Do you like emailing every day? Does it annoy you to have to do it? If it does, then don’t. Find the balance between what you know to be effective, and what works for you. Personally, I don’t email every day. On average, I email about three times per week, though I’m looking to experiment with more. If I’m promoting a product, I’ll go as high as six emails in a week, and sometimes two to three in a day. My general philosophy is to email when I have something specific to say or sell, or to let them know about updates. I also like to send one email per week just to say what’s up. Here’s a quick guide you can use to help you get an email schedule down: • Anytime you write a blog, send an email to let your readers know • Anytime you’re promoting a product, send an email • Anytime you have an article published on another site, send an email • Anytime something awesome happens in your life, send an email • Anytime you think it’s been too long since your last email, send an email • Every Monday, no matter what, send an email. People hate work on Monday. The goal is to have them look forward to your email as a reprieve from the monotony. Just send a note with a brief tip, or maybe a link to a video you posted on YouTube. • On holidays, birthdays, etc., send an email • Right now, send an email. Log into your account and send a note to your subscribers, thanking them for being awesome. I follow these rules as often as I can, and it works very well for me. Since I usually publish one to two blog posts per week, I email to let my list know about those. I email nearly every Monday, even if I have to come up with something on the spot. If I think it’s been too long since I sent an email, I’ll send one with a link to one of my favorite blog posts from the past. My buddy Alex Maroko, a great trainer and better marketer, says it best and most simply: “You need to stay in front of them. Once you’ve built the relationship, don’t let it cool off.” How to Get Published, Part 2 34 If I may paraphrase Alex’s words into some fun little maxims: In love, absence makes the heart grow fonder; on the Internet, it’s out of sight, out of mind. -­‐Tweet that shit Go email your list. Incidentally, if you simply don’t have time to send newsletters with great frequency, make time one day to write a bunch of emails at once. You can set your newsletter service (GetResponse does this well) to email them out at specific times for you over the course of several days while you’re off doing something else. This is called an autoresponder, and it’s also a great way to get new sign-­‐ups in the habit of visiting your site. You can set it up so they get a new email every day or every couple days linking to some of your older posts, videos, articles, etc.—
anything that will help them get to know you and appreciate the content you provide. Content I won’t spend much time on this; you should have a better idea of what your list wants than I do. That said, I feel it’s very important not to send out bullshit content. Even though I said you should email as much as you can, don’t email if you don’t have something reasonably interesting to say. Nobody wants to read an email with wimpy advice that insults his/her intelligence. Every email is an opportunity to build a relationship with your readers, which in turn will help you become more successful—not only in terms of making more money, but in creating a passionate reader base, which can help expand your influence. To be clear, avoiding bullshit content doesn’t mean avoiding talking about nonsense. In other words, your fitness content should always be top-­‐notch, but you can certainly email whenever you just want to check in20, or to talk about an awesome movie you saw. That’s fine. Just because you’re not talking about fitness stuff doesn’t mean that you’re talking about bullshit. Bullshit content is half-­‐assed fitness stuff that isn’t up to your normal standard, and isn’t helpful to your readers. What constitutes bullshit depends on the blogger and the audience. If I’m a diet expert talking about carb cycling and fasting strategies—fairly scientific stuff—I probably shouldn’t email about picking reduced-­‐calorie salad dressings over the regular kind. An email like that just begs readers to think I’ve lost my touch. 20 A “check-­‐in” e mail is exactly what it sounds like; when it’s been too long since I’ve mailed, I’ll send an email that literally says, “Hi guys, sorry it’s been a while since I’ve emailed; been really busy working on some great projects for you. Back w ith more next w eek. Hope you’re doing awesome.” That’s it. Just 33 words to let them know I’m not d ead. You would be shocked at how much this h as helped my business. How to Get Published, Part 2 35 If you can’t think about something fitness-­‐related, don’t write about fitness. It’ll be garbage. Instead, just send an email about a book you read. Like this one. Yeah, in fact, go do that now. I’ll wait. Done? Great. Types of emails There are several types of emails: teasers (“CLICK HERE”), pitches, and pure content. Let’s start with the last. Pure-­content emails are just that. Pure content. An email containing tips, an article, or a story. The reader has only to read the email and he or she will get everything that you’re offering. There isn’t a call to action to buy something or go somewhere. I dislike this approach. I think it trains your users to be lazy and apathetic. Like they can just sit back and get everything you offer without lifting a finger. I send these once in a while, but sparingly, usually with the simple goal of telling them more about myself to build the relationship. Teaser emails are designed for one thing: to get a click. These emails are short and punchy, designed to take your user away from the email and go somewhere else. In most cases, particularly with my list, it will be to a blog post. In other cases, it will be to a video sales letter or a standard sales page for a product. In either case, the point of the teaser email is simply to “sell the click.” This means that you need to write a seductive email that makes them wonder what’s on the other side of the jump. Teaser emails are incredibly valuable to you. If you want to monetize your mailing list, your readers will have to click. No matter what it is you’re selling, they will have to click to get there. And so, even when you’re delivering content like a blog post, your readers should have to click to get it. One of my mentors once encouraged me to poll my readers and ask how they liked content delivered. About 80 percent of them said they like content delivered directly to their inbox. We concluded that they’d prefer to read your information served up on a silver platter, rather than have to click to a blog post. My immediate reaction? Fuck. That. (Craig agreed with me, although in a far more delicate and politically correct kind of way.) Look, I love my readers—truly, truly LOVE them—but I have both long-­‐ and short-­‐
term interests to consider. If you cater to that preference, all you’re going to do is create a differentiation in the types of emails you send, which means content emails they don’t have to click and teaser emails they do have to click. People will begin to associate any email with a link as one that’s selling. In the short term, if you train How to Get Published, Part 2 36 them to click, they’ll eventually be more willing to click through to buy something. Teaser emails are the ones I send out most frequently. I send one every time I write a blog or release a video, and sometimes, just to bring them to my Facebook page. Pitch emails are obviously intended to sell product, yours or someone else’s. Unlike teaser emails (which sell only the click, even when they’re intended as a sales tactic), pitch emails sell the actual product. They’re sent to users who know you, trust you, like you, and value your recommendations. The email will give information about the product you’re selling, why you believe in it, and whatever bonuses you may be offering to incentivize the purchase. Pitch e-­‐mails are a very small percentage of the total e-­‐mails I send. However, the majority of my income is derived from them. This is an important point, and that relationship must be kept in mind. If you’re going to have a personality-­‐driven blog, you can only drive the majority of your income from a minority of your emails if people trust you. This trust is built and maintained through content delivered through blogs that you make them aware of through teaser emails. Consistency and continuity To create a relationship with your subscribers, you really need to think of your business/blog as a community—a club of sorts. As soon as someone subscribes, he or she is now an official member, and begins initiation into the ways of the club. This means that over time they will become familiar with the club’s history and origin, as well as its goals, the things that have been created in its name, and its other members. Thinking about this in a very real, very literal way is extremely helpful for understanding how to communicate with your readers. I call my community the Roman Empire. As my nickname is Roman, this is not terribly clever, but it’s fortunate happenstance that I’m happy to take advantage of. The point is, as soon as people sign up, they become a part of the Roman Empire, and that means I make a very real effort to include them. Like any successful community, the Roman Empire has its own way of thinking and talking. And so members of the Empire quickly realize that we often intentionally misspell words, throw z’s at the end of words where they don’t belong, and replace the word “bro” with “bru.” These things happened organically over time, but members old and new embrace them. This is such an integral part of the way I manage my community, and by extension my business, that Jon Goodman discussed it in his recently released book, The Race to the Top, which teaches fitness professionals how to leverage social media to increase their business. Jon interviewed me for the book, and then went a step further and dedicated an entire section to the strangeness of the language my How to Get Published, Part 2 37 community uses. Of course, I didn’t start out thinking about those things. The only way to create and foster it is to let it happen slowly, and to have continuity over time—which means that while you give someone immediate exposure, you have to assume they’ll have gradual assimilation. You have to allow for that, and have systems in place to facilitate it. In no form of effective communication in the history of humankind has an idea taken hold without some sort of direction in messaging. This will be true for you, because you are selling not only your products, but also your services, your ideas, and of course yourself. From the moment people join, every email should lead them in a direction. It should be written the way you talk and the way you write on your blog. It should contain or link to valuable content, and perhaps most importantly, lead them to the next email. While you may be tempted to jump from one topic to the next, I’ve found great success in giving discussions of a given topic an opening, middle, and close. At the close of a topic, people feel like they’ve finished something, have learned/absorbed valuable info, and are ready to move on to the next topic. In this way, people are moving chapter by chapter through the Book of Roman, if you will. For people who have been on the list for a while, this happens “live,” but for people who just joined, the Empire is told to them—and sold to them—over a series of autoresponders intended to accomplish this exact goal. Think about this: If you just joined my list yesterday, and I’m in the middle of a promotion for a product, it would probably strike you as odd that although you’ve known me for less than 24 hours, I’m hard-­‐selling you on one of my products, or even worse, someone else’s. You probably wouldn’t stick around very long. The way I run things with my autoresponders is much more effective. If you joined my list yesterday, instead of getting an email for whatever I’m currently promoting, you will instead be on a separate list, and over the course of a few weeks, get a series of emails delivering content and personality. Slowly but surely, I’ll send you teaser emails that link to blog posts. When you read the blog posts, you’ll be exposed to the unique language of the Empire, and see comments on the blog from other readers. After several weeks, you’ll be moved over to my main list, and the broadcasts will make sense and resonate with you, because of the relationship we’ve built. How to Get Published, Part 2 38 Even for people who are not in an autoresponder sequence, continuity in messaging is incredibly important. Which is why your voice must live in your blogs and your e-­‐
mails. People should always feel like you’re talking to them, and that they can relate to you.