His number one advice seems to be to subscribe to Aweber and start harvesting email addresses at your blog. The mailing list is the foundation for monetization.
Then he sells eBooks and eCourses to that mailing list.
Like Obama never tired of saying on the campaign trail for health care reform, if you like your current coverage, you get to keep it. So if you like your current inbox where you get emails from your friends and family and those dictators in Nigeria, you get to keep it. You actively would have to choose to go for the multi inbox option. (Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November)
The Inbox As A Spectrum
All human beings are created equal, but that does not apply to emails. All emails are not equal. And the inbox has to reflect that.
Inbox 1
This is the inbox that you see when you log in. These are emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts. These are emails sent only to you and not to a group of people.
Inbox 2
Emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts, but these emails have also been sent to other people at the same time.
Inbox 3
Emails from mailing lists I might have subscribed to.
Inbox 4
Emails from everyone else. This is not the folder for the spam emails. The current spam folder gets to hold ground.
Addendum
An email that should have showed up in inbox 3, if it shows up in inbox 1, you get to tell the system it belonged in inbox 3, and all future emails from that address would end up in inbox 3. You teach the system as you use it.
Also you get to set an expiry date on the various inboxes. All emails in inbox 3 that are more than a month old, please delete them without asking, something like that. Because even Gmail has a space limit.
And there should be an easy way to delete contacts. If you ended up saving an email address you did not mean to save, delete. Free the soul.
I think with this simple change, the inbox could see new life. Inbox 1 could again become something to always look forward to. And this suggestion is not to displace the already in place concept of threaded conversations and the other goodies.
Put your blog's address down as your email signature.
Collect names and email addresses of everyone you know. These are people who can recognize your name and face. There are no other requirements. Reconnect with all of them. Send out one liner emails. More than one line and they might miss out on your punch line, the signature.
Every time you put out a new blog post, promptly feed it to your Twitter stream.
Sometimes feed the same blog post to your Twitter stream twice, with a few hours' gap.
You must give your visitors the option to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. You must give them the option to subscribe with their email addresses. You can do both for free with Feedburner. That mailing list is key. They say, in the long run, that is the best kind of readership.
Read other blogs. Leave meaningful comments in their comments sections. Link to blog posts by others from your blog posts. That works great if they have the trackback thing. Zemanta makes it easy to link to blog posts by others. I got quite some traffic from the Google Wave Developer Blog that way. I have a feeling this post will get me a lot of valuable trackback traffic: Mashable Did It.
Engage those who leave comments in your comments sections. I recommend Disqus.
Find your passion. Find your niche. You discover your passion as the topic you blog about the most. Your niche is what Google Analytics tells you it is. If you are lucky, there is an overlap.
Once you find your niche, you have to work very hard to occupy it. There should be at least one word, one phrase - not your name - that when you google up, your blog shows up on the very first page. Work at it. You can do it. In the short run most of your traffic will come from the referring sites. But in the long run, if you are meant to be a professional blogger, most of your traffic will come from the search engines. That is why it is very important you discover and occupy your niche. You can have several sub niches, but you need one or two very well defined niches that you occupy.
Find a group or two to belong to in your niche. Do a search on Google Groups. Find one with a large enough membership. You have to be an active member of a virtual community or two of people who share your passion. That will bring you traffic. Some groups I have signed up for: Google Wave API, Wave Protocol, Android Beginners, Android Developers.Of course every message by you is going to carry your signature.
Say hello to Arianna at the Huffington Post. When she puts out a blog post, read it, and say something mesmerizing in the comments section.
Remember, every page hit counts. Just like every cent counts. Google makes its billions in cents, not dollars. You are going to 100,000 visits a month one visit at a time. Every visit counts. Every click counts.
Writing top quality, regular content is the number one thing to do to boost your traffic.
But that alone will not cut it. You have to go out there and network feverishly in your part of the blogosphere. You have to read blog posts by others, engage them in their comments sections. Ending up on other bloggers' blogrolls boosts your blog's PageRank. High rank means more show up in search results means more traffic.
If you got a great blog, most of your traffic is going to come through search engines. Tags are important. External links are important. Hyperlinks are important. For all three these days you got Zemanta. Use it.
Great, regular content hence is also good marketing. Content is queen.
Got to build a mailing list for your blog. The one that I started using for this blog is over 9,000 strong. I decided on it yesterday. And look what I got.
♫
"My name is ______ and I graduated Columbia J School in 2008 where I concentrated in broadcast. I work at ABC News in DC now (the network) and I am working on this idea of Job Hunting and the Internet--pretty much exactly what you posted in your blog below. I am wondering if maybe we could talk on the phone about this idea."
One email a day, with five links to five blog posts: do you think that will work?
(3) Comments Sections Of Other Blogs
Like minded blogs. Celebrity blogs. If you are passionate about what you are passionate about, it is not possible you don't regularly read at least a dozen blogs that share your passion. Engage your favorite bloggers in their comments sections. Link to your blog from their comments sections. That helps jack up your Google rank. And that is a good thing.
JP, Confused Of Calcutta, is a big shot. I have never met him, but I think of him as a friend. He is CIO of British Telecom. I once came across a list in some magazine where Google CEO Eric Schmidt was number six, and JP was number 12. I really like his blog, that is why I visit his blog and participate in his comments sections. But that participation also jacks up my own blog's Google rank. I am not complaining.
I grew up watching Amitabh Bachchan. This here is me in 1993. Amitabh just so happens to be the most recognized face on the planet. His blog lets me interact with him and read his mind the way a handshake will not. In his comments sections, I have hope I will meet him one day. And, by the way, Amitabh was in Calcutta before he moved to Mumbai.
I am a New Yorker. I take pride in the New York Times. It is a good idea for me to leave comments in some of their blog's comments sections and hyperlink my name to my own blog.
I really like it that when I link to an article on the Google Blog, my blog shows up at the bottom of that post at the Google Blog. I am flattered, what can I say?
Mark Cuban is a loud mouth. I think that is a good thing for my blogging.
Huffington Post does Facebook and Mashable does Disqus. They don't make me create a separate account with them or fill up basic info before I can leave a comment. And they both have huge traffic. So it is a very good idea to participate in their comments sections. Read a post, then say what you have to say, and leave a link to one of your blog posts that might go with the theme. Or just leave a link to your blog.
But primarily, you are looking to make friends in comments sections. Passionate bloggers with small traffic might have time for you. Get to know them.
Another way to figure out which comments sections to visit is by using Blogsearch. Make a blog post, then search the key term for your blog post. Relevant blog posts will show up. Read and comment and link back to your blog post. The weirdest part of the exercise though is that most blogs out there don't do Disqus, at least not yet. But the nice ones just ask for your name, email address, not to be published but required, they say, and website address. The not nice ones expect you to register with them. I almost always walk away when I see that red flag.
The reason you want to follow everyone who follows you is because the Direct Message option is a great one. It is like a politician saying hello to you on the campaign trail. That is not shallow. He/she is not pretending to be family.
Twitterfeed is as grand as TweetDeck. Thanks to Twitterfeed, as of yesterday, my Netizen blog, this blog, BusinessWeek, CNet, and Digg will all feed my Twitter feed without me doing anything about it. Manual feeding is history.
(5) Facebook Notes
My blog is integrated with my Facebook account. So a new blog post shows up as a note in my Facebook stream. And I like to tag friends to those notes, so I show up in their Facebook stream as well. That is a fancy way of saying hello.
(6) Feeds
Don't allow feeds access to your full content. Give out the first paragraph. Let people show up at your blog if they want to see the whole thing.
Web 4.0 isn't on wikipedia yet. Nice write up on 3.0, which isn't here yet. Start the wikipedia article, blog about it or invent it. There really isn't much value unless you do the latter.
Attacking me for my primary physical location is about as insightful and effective as your laughable, pitiable effort at self-promotion by discussing a topic that is not only cliche, but even so, seems also beyond your ability to offer value in discussing.
I don't subscribe to people posting meaningless self-promotional non-insightful blogspam without bringing some sort of value -- did that really need to be spelled out for you? Web n.0 has been beaten to a bloody pulp, and your piece offers nothing new in that arena. Really, it's not even that good at covering the same ground covered many times before.
Message 5: Paramendra Bhagat
You mean other than that 90% of the traffic at this discussion forum is less conceptually meaningless?
Instead getting into name calling, why don't you try a different tack? You could say you don't subscribe to the Web 2.0 terminology, or that you do, but you don't see why anyone would build on it, as in thereis no room for Web 3.0 and beyond concepts, or that you see room for all that but you think my classification is off the mark, and you could try and say why.
Then we are talking. Right now we are not.
Message 4: Andy Badera
There's nothing new or original or insightful here, so why are you posting it?
Message 3: Paramendra Bhagat
Andy. My Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web 5.0 classification sounds vague, nebulous, amorphous, pie in the sky, abstract, cloudy to you. To me it feels rather concrete. Let me ask you something. There are people who think even the term Web 2.0 is pie in the sky. There is a web, and that is all. There is no 2.0. How do you feel about that? Is Web 2.0 a term you use? Or what? And if Web 2.0 is real to you, what is your disagreement with Web 5.0, for example.
I feel like there is a comprehensivity to my classification that makes it rather poetic.
Message 2: Andy Badera
Another nebulous Web n.0 piece, fantastic. Was there something of particular value here you were trying to share with us, or is this just a link to another run-of-the-mill pie-in-the-sky pointless Web n.0 enumeration piece?
"One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years. I like to say that I have a pretty good idea what I'll be doing a million seconds from now, no idea what I'll be doing a billion seconds from now, and an excellent idea of what I'll be doing a trillion seconds from now."
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