Author Archives: Allan Ward

Allan lives in Adelaide, South Australia with his wife and two boys. He is the founder of Blogger Business Plan and loves helping bloggers learn how to transform their blogs from hobbies into sustainable businesses. When he's not blogging or working in his financial planning business, you'll find Allan playing guitar, reading or coaching his son's soccer team.

BBP 01 : Elements of a Blog Business Plan, Twitter Tools, Google Penguin and Sales Ideas

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  In this first edition of the Blogger Business Plan podcast I cover a lot of ground. I start off by talking about the basic elements of a blog business plan – a vision, goals, strategy and tactics. I explain how these element work together. The vision is the ‘big picture’ view of where you…

The Hedgehog Concept for Bloggers

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The Hedgehog Concept has been around for a number of years in business circles. I was introduced to it when I read Jim Collin’s books Good To Great and Built To Last. My blog aims to introduce business concepts that work in the business world to the blogging world so an article on the Hedgehog…

OptinSkin Review – My First Impressions

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I discovered a new WordPress plugin called OptinSkin today and wanted to write a quick review giving you my first impressions. What is OptinSkin? OptinSkin is a plugin that makes it really simple for you to produce cool looking optin boxes for your blog. There are a few similar plugins around, but they don’t make it…

What is Buffer App

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Buffer App – you may have heard about it over the past few months. Lots of people have been talking about how they use the Buffer App to Tweet more effectively. You may be wondering – What Is Buffer App. In this article I’ll explain what it is and why you may (or may not)…

What’s Your Blogging BHAG?

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I’ve been spending a bit of time over the past couple of weeks planning my blog strategy for the next 12 months and I’ve been thinking about the concept of a BHAG – a Big Hairy Audacious Goal!

The term was first used by Jim Collins in his book Built To Last. It’s become more popular in the business world in recent years and is something worth thinking about when it comes to strategic planning for any business.

Wikipedia defines a BHAG in this way:

A BHAG encourages companies to define visionary goals that are more strategic and emotionally compelling.

In many cases a BHAG is a long term vision / goal but it can also apply to the shorter term.

SEO Quake isn’t sorting by PageRank

A while ago I discovered a great Firefox plugin called SEOQuake. I wrote an article about how to use SEO Quake to find high pagerank sites and it’s become one of the most popular articles on my site. But lately, I’ve been having some trouble with SEOQuake. It still does the basics well – it’ll…

What Bloggers Can Learn From This Groupon Mistake

Cupcakes and Blogging

I read this great article today called ‘Cupcake Calamity‘ about a baker in the UK who had an offer in Groupon that worked a little too well! Rachel Brown runs a business called Need A Cake that makes great looking cakes for all occasions. She wanted to grow her business, so decided to publish an…

Headway Theme 3.0 Review and Sneak Peak

Headway Theme 3.0

This is a review of the Headway theme 3.0 – due to be released on November 25th 2011.  Headway 3.0 is a complete change to the Headway theme. The guys had already produced an innovative WordPress theme, now they’ve completely increased the functionality and the value this theme provides. This blog uses Headway theme and…

CommentLuv Premium Review – Get More Blog Comments

We all want more comments on our blogs but how do you encourage people to leave comments? I’ve recently started using the CommentLuv Premium plugin in my blog. I’ve seen it used on other blogs and jumped at the chance to get a copy during it’s recent 7 day pre-launch. I’ve now had a chance…

Commenting On Blogs Using Google Reader

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In this article I’ll explain my strategy for commenting on blogs and how I use google reader to be more effective with my blog commenting.