When I started blogging years ago, I never imagined having thousands of posts on my blog. But when you are blogging everyday for a few years, your blog posts will add up quickly. Many bloggers do a good job promoting their new blog posts. Your old content matters too. In order to get the most traffic to your website and keep people interested in your work, you should keep an eye on your older posts and leverage them to grow your community. Here are 5 things you can do to your old blog posts to grow your empire:

1. update them: so you like creating lists or writing about time-sensitive things? Then you have to be ready to keep your posts up to date at all times. That way you won’t turn off your new readers when they reach your site through your older posts. Every blogger needs to have an update schedule for lists and date sensitive posts.
2. revamp them: this is what many bloggers have done with their low quality posts since Google Panda updates went into effect. When we start blogging, we make mistakes. Your older blog posts may not reflect too well on the current quality of your website. It never hurts to go through your older posts and work on improving their quality. Use Google Analytics to identify the top posts. I would start by focusing on the posts that get the most traffic. This is probably not a process you can complete in one night but you should integrate it into your weekly schedule.
3. spread them: so you have some ageless content on your site that are just sitting there and don’t get enough love from your visitors? You should use your Twitter and Facebook accounts to promote these posts. Tweet Old Post is a cool WordPress plugin that lets you do just that.
4. link to them: this is a no brainer. How can you expect the search engines to give your old blog posts some love if you are not doing them any favors yourself. Every new blog post gives you an opportunity to link to your older posts. Seo Smart Links is a cool script that allows you to link to your older posts. I personally love using Random Posts plugin.
5. repurpose them: no matter how old and outdated your posts are, you can always salvage them. Repurposing them is one way to do that. Why write a blog posts from scratch when you can modify your existing ones to get what you are looking for. Reusing content ideas lets you come up with new killer posts fast. I am not talking about repeating the things you have said in the past but rather using different angles to approach the same topics.

Your older blog posts do matter. Don’t neglect them. Embrace them!

Image credit: Gronvik

I was a John Reese junkie once. For those of you not familiar with John Reese, he does have some interesting marketing products for those hoping to do better marketing and promotion for their business. I haven’t followed John’s work for a couple of years, but I did learn a couple of powerful concepts from him. One of the most important things I learned from him was ways people can go about spying on their competitors. In this day and age, there is no reason not to do it when others are doing it to you.

You may think you are running your blog in a vacuum. Your competitors are always paying attention to what you are offering on your website (especially if you are the top dog in your niche). If you are not at least paying attention to what your competitors are doing, you are setting yourself up for major surprises.

There is a difference between spying on others and imitating them. By spying on your competitors, you can figure out what things they are doing right and how you can beat them in their game. Here are 6 things you can learn by keeping an eye out on the top players involved in your market:

1. topics/angles: I don’t know about you but I like my blog to sound different from others involved in my niche. If you are just doing what most others are doing in your market, you will have a harder time differentiating your product from others. By watching the topics that your competitors cover and the angles they approach them from, you will have an easier time setting yourself apart from other players.
2. keywords: search engine optimization is must know for all bloggers. No matter how great you are in keyword research, there is a good chance you may have missed targeting some key phrases related to your niche market. Studying your competitors’ keywords by using tools such as SpyFu can give you ideas on the keywords you need to target on your website.
3. ad partners: everyone wants to make more money from blogging. Unfortunately, many of us choose the wrong ad partners for our sites. By studying your top competitors, you can save yourself some time researching top ad partners in your niche and start increasing your revenue fast.
4. ad layout: have you ever wondered how you can make more money from services such as Adsense? Just compare a bunch of your competitors to figure out what they have in common in terms of how and where they use their ad units.
5. promotional efforts: so you want more traffic for your website? You can learn a thing or two from your top competitors. I am not suggesting you should just imitate what others are doing to bring traffic to their sites. At the same time, spying on others can teach you a thing or two about tactics you can use to promote your website more effectively.
6. strategies: running a top blog is a complicated process. Their owners need to spend time creating content, promoting it, and finding new strategies to gain traction for their website. That’s good news for the rest of us. By looking at some of the ways top bloggers grab attention for their sites, you can identify more ways to do the same for your own site.

There is nothing wrong with spying on your competitors. They do the very same to you. Of course, you always want to think outside the box to stay one or two steps ahead of other players in your market.

Interacting with your readers and getting them involved will make your community more solid. The longer people stay on your website, the better off your blog will be. These 5 tactics can help you keep your readers interested for longer:

Add a forum: your bloggers don’t want to just listen to you talk all the time. They want to have a say in your community too. Most bloggers let their visitors comment on their posts. That is a good way to keep your visitors engaged but is limited in some ways. By adding a forum to your website, you can empower your visitors to take charge and bring their own topics of interest to your community.

Start a chat room: chat rooms let you and your visitors connect with one another and engage in lively discussions. Services such as Wibiya allow you to create Twitter and Facebook chat-rooms on your website. The sky’s the limit.

Encourage Q/A in your community: adding a Q/A section to your website gives your visitors yet another way to contribute to your community and get answers to their questions. Your Q/A section could get indexed by the search engines, leading to more free traffic for your website.

Recruit your visitors: I have seen this approach used on many top sites. If your community has been going for quite a while, you have probably had a chance to identify the top contributors on your website. There is no reason not to ask your top commenters to submit guest posts to your site or help you moderate it more effectively.

Start video/photo contests: these types of contests can be quite powerful and bring a lot of attention to your blog. Make sure you provide your visitors with a good incentive to participate in your contests. Putting up a couple of hot gadgets up for grabs is a good way to start.

We all want to provide our readers with as much value as possible. But boring them to death is the wrong way to do that. By throwing contests and getting your visitors more involved in your community, you can strengthen your business and grow it faster over the long run.

Charlie Sheen - Credit: Wikipedia

As a startup owner, I don’t have the time to keep up with the latest TV shows and the celebrities. But it seems everyone is still talking about Charlie Sheen these days (even after earthquakes and major issues in the Middle East). Apparently, he went nuts on the Alex Jones radio show or did he? Many in the media assume and pretend as if Charlie Sheen is insane. He may be taking a huge risk with his approach and might have some tiger blood in him. But he is far from insane. Charlie’s action have generated a whole lot of buzz around his career and the future of his show.

Charlie may or may not get his job back. He still has a lot to work out in his personal life. But he clearly understands how to manipulate the media. Here are just a few things that have attributed to Charlie’s recent achievements (not counting losing his job and the wins he claims he puts on the board every day):

1. controversy sells: Charlie has been quite controversial with some of his remarks. But he is going according to his plan. As the WWE has proved time and time again, controversy can sell big. Since Charlie is a comedian, his comments are easier to handle for folks.
2. he is being funny: I admit. I do not exactly enjoy the type of work Charlie does in his show. 2 and a half men is not my cup of tea. But Charlie has made some funny comments even when facing extreme pressure from all sides. It is easier to connect with people when you are not being nasty and bitter about things.
3. the lines are blurred: in the age of political correctness, people are always watching out for the lines they should not cross. Charlie has crossed some lines. More importantly, he has blurred the lines. Sometimes we can’t tell if he is crossing it or just walking on the edge. That makes his situation even more intriguing.
4. Charlie’s brand: Charlie has stayed true to his brand. Those who have followed Charlie Sheen’s career in the past are not surprised by some of his actions. His goddesses and lifestyle are not nothing new to his fans either.
5. Charlie has a track-record: Charlie is was the highest paid actor on TV. He has a proven track-record. People care about his work and what he has done in the past (in most part). Charlie and people such as Howard Stern are probably the only people who can get away with this approach.
6. his choices: the fact that Charlie went on a radio show about conspiracy theories was quite interesting. It does seem as though Mr. Sheen and Alex Jones are friends. But having Alex Jones on network TV talking about some of his conspiracies made the whole episode more interesting. It is not as if Alex pulled Charlie back when he was dropping nuclear bombs on his show. The Howard Stern and Piers Morgan show appearances were brilliant too.
7. seizing the right moment: Mr. Sheen may or may not get his show back. But he realized the right moment to pull this move. He may come to regret it in the future if not already. But right now he has millions of Twitter followers and a bunch of offers from all kinds of people in Hollywood.
8. crossing the lines: many of us don’t dare cross the lines. Some people are more afraid of doing that than facing the end of the world. Charlie has crossed a few lines already. He even had to backtrack on some of his comments. But his boldness (or craziness) has made the whole episode more interesting.
9. understanding of the media: Mr. Sheen has brilliantly manipulated the media to provide him with even more coverage. People are dying in the middle east, yet top cable news programs are dedicating time to cover Charlie Sheen and his interviews. You don’t have to agree with it. That just shows why cable news channels are becoming quickly irrelevant. At the same time, these channels understand what gets them ratings in the short-term.
10. everybody is interested in a train wreck: I am personally not a big fan of watching people go through these kinds of troubles in life. But a lot of people pay attention to train wrecks in one way or another. Many of us do hope for Charlie Sheen and his family to pull out of this for the better. Some just can’t take eyes off this whole situation.

Is Charlie winning? That depends on your definition of winning. But people can’t stop paying attention to Charlie. No wonder he is so optimistic about his future.

When you build an iPad for your blog, you don’t want to offer just the same old content through your app. You need to offer extra value for iPad owners to truly care about your app. If your app is going to be a paid one, you better give people a reason not to regret their purchase. Here are 7 ways to do just that:

• Offer High Quality Content: this goes without saying. If your content is crap, for the lack of better term, people are not going to use your app or read your blog. It’s really a no brainer. That’s why I talked about having a resourceful team. iPad is a tough channel to master. You’ll need to have your “A” game to have a chance.
• Interactive Content: Wired.com’s iPad application shows exactly how iPad is different from all other e-book readers. Developing interactive content can be costly, but if you have a paid iPad app, you are better off offering this type of content.
• Don’t Forget Multimedia: this is much easier to do than the previous item. Exclusive videos and audio commentary is not that hard to add to an iPad app.
• Exclusive Content for Loyal Followers: don’t forget to link your blog to your iPad app. Your iPad app should help your blog become more successful. That would not be possible if you are not leveraging your app properly to achieve that goal. Providing exclusive tips and content to your loyal blog readers is a good start.
• Convenience & Usability: forget about the bells and whistles. Not until you have an app that is easy to use and does not confuse your readers. Give your readers the tools they need to share your content with others on their iPad. Don’t try to be too fancy with your app.
• Performance Matters: nobody likes a sluggish iPad app. If your app is paid, you should double your efforts to make sure your app performs well. Crashes and bugs are annoying too. So work them all out with your team.
• Aggressive Pricing Strategy: you can monetize your app properly and make a decent chunk of profit if you play your cards right. You will have to focus on content and value for your readers if you expect them to pay for your app. There are so many useless paid apps in iTunes. Don’t let yours be one of them. Don’t be too greedy either. If it makes sense to offer your app for free, don’t hesitate.

What are your suggestions on how to build a killer iPad app for a blog?

There are plenty of ways one can supercharge a blog giveaway. It really depends on your creativity. The below 6 methods should give some ideas though:

1. Do not forget social media: if you have a Twitter profile or Facebook page, the least you can do is ask your visitors to join you on those sites. If you must, you can make it an optional entry. There are hundreds of people who have gained thousands of visitors by giving away iPads and other top gadgets. Don’t miss your chance.
2. Ask Your Visitors to Blog: giving away things is a great way to gain incoming links to your blog. So ask your visitors to blog about your giveaway and share their link with you. Give them extra entries as an incentive.
3. Encourage Video Shout-Outs: creating professional quality videos and posting them to YouTube can take a lot of your time. Why not use your giveaway as a way to have you readers create some additional videos for you? These things add up after a while.
4. Don’t forget social bookmarking: StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Reddit can all bring you more visitors. It never hurts to ask your visitors to add your website to those services. Just make sure you tell them not to spam.
5. Spread your button (brand): banner advertising could cost you money. There is no reason not to do it. You can bring your costs down by asking your contest entrants to post your banner or button to their sites for additional entries.
6. Reward Referrals: this is my favorite way to throw a killer giveaway. Create exclusive links for each visitor and give them additional entries for every person they refer to your blog. This affiliate-type model can bring you lots of traffic!

What are your suggestions? How would you go about throwing a killer giveaway?

Blogging is a very risky business, especially if you put all your eggs in one basket. Your risks are even higher if you are a pro blogger and do not have a backup source of income to get you through in case things go wrong with your blog. When you go to business school, they teach you about the importance of risk management for large businesses. Most top companies have solid risk management plans in place to help protect them against uncertainties in their market. The same concept does apply to bloggers as well. The market is changing all the time and no matter how smart or dedicated your are, things can go wrong in ways that you could never anticipate. So it always pay to have a plan just in case you are faced with a nightmarish scenario.

Pro blogging is not as easy as it sounds. Writing content and promoting your content are only a part of the story. There are many moving parts that could potentially go wrong and halt your business operations. That’s why you should have a risk management plan for you blog. If you have no idea where to start, here are 7 ways you can manage risk for your blog:

1. Have a backup plan: it’s never too late to write a risk management plan for your blog. It does not have to be something formal. But you want to make sure you are ready to take the actions necessary to save your business when faced with an unanticipated situation. For instance, your database could fail on you or you can get kicked out of your favorite affiliate program. If you have planned for these situations ahead of time, you won’t have to worry about going completely out of business.
2. Diversification: never put all your eggs in one basket. I see so many bloggers who talk about how their affiliate partner makes them a lot of money each and every month. Would that partner stick by you if Internet tax is legislated in your state? Would you go from hero to zero without your affiliate partner? If you haven’t planned out your escape, that could happen.
3. Keep Your Eyes Open: just because you spend hours of your day coming up with content for your blog does not mean that you should forget about what is going on in your industry. It’s so easy to fall behind and miss some of the major developments in your industry if you are too obsessed about content development. Let’s take Internet tax for instance. A few states have already passed the law, and it could be coming to a state near you. You can easily track such legislations if you are following the news in your state. But if you keep your eyes closed, you are going to get sucker punched.
4. Grow Your Business: I do not make my living from blogging. I never intended to do so. But there are a lot of people who do. If you are relying on your blog to make money and have no other source of income, you are going to get burned badly when something happens to your blog or your niche. I am not suggesting that you should forget about blogging and focus on other endeavors. But this business is not predictable, so you should always take time to grow your business and never sit on your past success.
5. Expand To New Areas: going back to the previous point, it always pays to be involved in multiple markets and have multiple businesses. In that case, you are always going to be prepared when one of your businesses fails. Let’s say your blog is bringing you lots of revenue through affiliate advertising. You should also take time to identify other ways to bring revenue to your business just in case your affiliate partners go away. Being involved in multiple niches would help as well.
6. Build Layers Of Competitive Edge: your goal as a blogger is to build assets that will last your business a long time. Your content is one of those assets. Your domain and brand are other assets available to your business. The same can be said about your membership website, your book, and your videos. You get the point. Being involved in all those areas makes you more prepared for the tough times ahead.
7. Never Burn Your Bridges: sometimes your business is not going to work out no matter how hard you try. It’s tough to accept, but it happens. Never burn your bridges with your contacts if you want to have an escape plan in that scenario. In fact, you should focus on building long-lasting relationships as a blogger just in case. You never know what doors your contacts can open for you.
8. Be Optimistic: the only thing to fear here is the fear itself. Don’t let your risk management process stress you out. Remember, you are preparing for those worst case scenarios, but that does not mean that they will happen. When you are faced with those scenarios, you are going to be more prepared to handle things without making rash decisions.

Blogging may sound simple on paper. But it is far from it. Plan ahead and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches.

Credit: twvogel

There are three types of bloggers out there. In one group, we have a bunch of people who know how to come up with original blog posts on a consistent basis. These bloggers have mastered the art of grabbing an idea and looking at it from a unique angle. In the second group, we have a group of bloggers that come up with original ideas once in a while but mostly rely on other bloggers to do the job for them. The third group, which I happen to dislike a lot, are copycat bloggers. These bloggers not only steal your ideas but sometimes don’t even bother changing your posts enough to differentiate themselves.

There is nothing more frustrating than working so hard to come up with an original blog post, only to see someone else still your idea and run with it. To be frank, you can’t really complain about someone grabbing the idea behind your blog post and coming up with a unique post on the very same topic. But it is frustrating when someone copies you and your points and only changes the words around (we are not even going to talk about blog thieves).

I happen to believe in free competition. There is nothing wrong with someone looking at a blog post and deciding to write a better, more powerful post on the very same topic. That’s fair game. After all, your post idea is not that important. What you do with it and how you build your content around that idea is what matters. Copycat bloggers are more frustrating to deal with. These are folks who pick up your post, spin the words, add some nonsense to it, and post it to their own blogs. I wouldn’t go as far as calling them content thieves, but their approach is certainly unethical.

Many new bloggers worry about their blog posts being lifted by copycats. Some folks are good at writing posts and some are good at lifting them. While I do encourage bloggers to mark their content and let people know that their content is copyrighted, I wouldn’t worry too much about copycat bloggers. You can obviously use services such as CopyScape to find out who’s plagiarizing your content. But you can never stop unethical people from doing unethical things.

Thankfully, there are ways you can keep yourself ahead of your copycats and expose them for what they are. Your audience is not stupid, so as long as you put your best effort forward with your content, they’ll know who’s for real and who’s just a copycat. In fact, here are 5 tactics you can take advantage of to stay ahead of those annoying copycat bloggers:

• Unique Content: as long as you are coming up with content that is unique to your blog on a consistent basis, you have an edge over copycats. They can lift your content and copy your ideas, but they can’t copy your approach and blogging process. I do encourage you to link to your own posts often to make the process more difficult for copycats.
• Unique Voice: copycat bloggers can duplicate your blog and steal your ideas, but they can not duplicate your voice. If you have found your unique blogging voice, you are one step ahead of content thieves.
• Frequency: one way to make things difficult for copycat bloggers is by writing unique content on a more frequent basis. So instead of writing two times a week, you can write 4 times a week. You should also distribute your content in the social media (with the help of your readers) just to brand your content before content thieves can grab it.
• Outdo The Pretenders: sometimes you are not dealing with content thieves but people who are trying hard to beat you in your own game. These are people who copy your idea and try to outdo you in your own game. To beat these people, you are going to need deeper, higher quality content. Now this is something that can make you a better blogger.
• Change Your Code: while you can’t stop people from copying your content, you can always make the process more difficult for them. You can take advantage of action-based coding to disable hot-linking or right-click copy function on your blog. Your .htaccess file can be another place to add some of these limitations.

It all comes down to how much effort you put forward towards creating high quality content on your blog. The more research you put in and the more deep analysis your blog posts contain, the harder it will be for others to duplicate you. Your blog’s look and feel and your ideas can be duplicated but not your thought process.

Regardless of what niche you are involved in, you can always find people who are asking questions online that are probably being asked by many others. By identifying those questions and the needs of those people, you can write blog posts that people eat up and want to share with others. Not complicated on the paper but it does take some work. If you are looking to take advantage of this tactic to develop more ideas for your blog, here are 5 places you should look at:

Yahoo! Answers: still the best place to dig up ideas for blogs. There are plenty of questions in the database, which means you are going to have plenty of opportunities to develop ideas for your blog. You can also become an authority by participating and answering questions here.

Askville: a community by Amazon that doesn’t get the recognition that it deserves. If you are running a technology blog or have an audience that is hooked on Amazon products, Askville is a great place for your research.

Linkedin Answers: Linkedin is already one of the top social networking websites on the market. The quality of questions here are often much higher and the questions much more targeted. But if you are writing a highly technical or advanced blog, you are going to love using Linkedin Q&A.

Wordtracker Keyword Questions: a cool tool by WordTracker that lets you find out what people are searching for through search engines. It can be pretty useful at times.

Facebook Groups: Facebook Groups and fan pages are other places you can look at to find out about what people are asking and what you can provide to them. These social networking websites are data gold-mines as long as you are there to take advantage.

What’s been your experience with the above websites?

WP Greet Box is a cool plugin for WordPress bloggers that makes it easy to track your visitors and show them customized messages based on their referring URL. Essentially, the plugin lets you treat your Facebook, Twitter, and Stumbleupon traffic differently. You can give your Facebook visitors an incentive to tweet your posts and vice versa. This process can be implemented for other blogging platforms as well, though you’ll most likely need a 3rd party script to get the job done. With WP Greet Box, you won’t have write a single line of code, which is a big plus.

So why is this approach important? As someone who has worked on a lot of landing pages in the past, I can tell you that people often take the actions that you ask them to when they are faced with the call to action. And if you give them an incentive to distribute your content, as long as your content is of high quality, they will most likely take you upon your offer. What you don’t want to do is go overboard with WP Greet Box. Thankfully, you have got access to a series of settings that you can customize to avoid annoying your readers (e.g. Visitor Timeout).

Overall, you can’t do everything by yourself when it comes to blogging. So if you are getting ranked on search engines and your content is distributed on social media sites, why not ask your readers to help you take your blog to the next level? WP Greet Box lets you do just that.