20 Best Tips from Jon Morrow (The God of Blogging)

This week I was lucky enough to be on a 2 1/2 hour webinar with Jon Morrow (The God of Blogging – no joke). The webinar was about how to go from 0 – 10,000 blog subscribers.

Jon used to write for Copyblogger (here’s a not-to-be-missed post I wrote as a result of reading that blog). Now he’s started his own blog and it’s fabulous.

So here are the best tips I learned:

1. There is no such thing as free traffic.

2. To get traffic, you either pay for ads or you blog, which equals trading time for traffic.

 source

3. 20 hours a week is really what it takes. If you can’t commit that time, you’ll never build the momentum to build a popular blog.

4. You need to understand that you will not earn anything for the first few months.

5. You must enjoy writing – sitting down in front of your computer to write. If you don’t like it, you’ll simply sabotage yourself down the road. And by the way you don’t need to be a brilliant writer, you just need to be able to get your ideas out there in a way that people can understand you. And you have to enjoy it enough so that you’ll continue to get up day after day and write.

6. The rule of thumb for how much money you can make is: Take the annual income you want to earn and divide by 50. In other words, 2000 subscribers is $100,000 per year.

7. 49% of bloggers have less than 50 subscribers.

8. The number of bloggers that have more than 10,000, in the survey that I did, only 1 did. It’s less than 1%.

9. 15 out of 150 were between 1000 – 5000.

10. The harder something is to do, the bigger the rewards are.

11. Choose a mass market topic – first place that bloggers fail is they are blogging about a topic no one else is interested in.

12. It’s best if you’re obsessed. Your topic needs to be something you think about all the time, you read magazines, you subscribe to everything you can.

13. Nothing is more valuable then email subscribers.

14. You need to send your subscribers cool stuff.

15. You need to overwhelm them with how generous you are.

16. You need to show your readers how much you care. You know the saying, ‘No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.’

17. Focus on the results you’re going to get people.

18. Write long and insanely valuable posts. It’s a proven fact, long posts get more traffic than short posts. At least 1,500 words. The longer the post, the more traffic it’ll get.

19. People do not read posts before sharing them. What they do is look down the post and decide whether they think it’s valuable. Which post do you think is the most valuable?  3 ways to get more traffic vs. 47 ways to get more traffic.

20. If you can only write one valuable post every week or every month it’s way better than one mediocre post every day.

These tips were just a drop in the bucket. He went on to explain how we could become one of his students.

I tried but this particular class was for beginner bloggers only.

So I asked if he would consult with me. And lucky me, he said he would make an exception (even though he does not consult with the public anymore).

I booked a one hour consultation ($1000).

Oh, and by the way, if you don’t own this handy little cheat sheet for headlines (above) get it here ASAP. It’s responsible for so many of the headlines I’ve written, for example:

What Everyone Should Know About Gray

This Colour Mistake will Make Your House Look Bad

What Nobody Tells You About Publishing eBooks

The Shocking Truth about Your Ceilings

Are you going to start a blog in 2013?

Here’s a list of my best tips if that is your plan.

If you would like your home to fill you with happiness every time you walk in, contact me.

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