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 want business to be in the future. The vision gets broken down into some tangible goals – these are the milestones – things you need to achieve in pursuit of your vision. To achieve these goals you need to have a strategy. This relates to the things you need to do to achieve the goals. A strategy example could be to do regular guest posting. The next step is to look at your tactics – the things you’ll be doing to execute the strategy. Finally, we need to include a way to receive feedback and monitor progress towards your goals.

Next in the podcast, I talk about a few different tools you can use to manage Twitter better. I’ve talked about Buffer App before, and I also mention Social Bro and Triberr.

I then talk about the recent Google Penguin update, and finish with some sales ideas from Dan Kennedy.

Right click here to download the mp3.

Items I mention in this podcast:

• Buffer App
• Social Bro
• Triberr
• Dan Kennedy’s No BS Sales Success

If you want a Triberr invitation, let me know via my Contact page.

I hope you enjoy listening to the very first Blogger Business Plan podcast. It was a lot of fun putting it together and I’m working hard on the next episode. If there are particular things about blogging or business that you’d like me to speak about, let me know and I’ll endeavour to cover them in future episodes.

Subscribe

• Click here to subscribe via iTunes
• Click here to subscribe by RSS

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 Concept fits perfectly with my blog’s message and the needs of my readers.

I was surprised a few years ago when I bought an internet marketing course (which will remain nameless!) which was essentially a series of videos from a conference aimed at internet marketers. I watched as they did a one hour session on the Hedgehog Concept and it appeared to be a totally new concept to the audience. I couldn’t believe that none of them had heard of it before!

If you’ve never heard of the Hedgehog Concept, then read through this article to get a feel for it, and then go and buy Good To Great by Jim Collins and learn more. It’s well worth it!

If you’ve never heard of Good To Great and Built To Last, they’re a series of books that are based on years of research of successful companies. The authors set out to determine what makes some companies perform substantially better than their peers over the long term. The Hedgehog Concept is one of the discoveries they made.

What is the Hedgehog Concept?

The concept is a way of developing your blogging (or business) strategy.

Jim Collins says it this way:

The essence of a Hedgehog Concept is to attain piercing clarity about how to produce the best long-term results, and then exercising the relentless discipline to say, “No thank you” to opportunities that fail the hedgehog test.

It looks at three concepts and how they mesh together:

1. What are you passionate about?
2. What can you be the best in the world at?
3. What drives your economic engine?

It’s best demonstrated in a diagram like this:

There’s a place where these three circles intersect, and that’s the place you want to be.

Let’s go through each of the three questions and learn more about the Hedgehog Principle.

What are you passionate about?

The number 1 piece of advice I give new bloggers is to blog about something they’re passionate about. You must be passionate about something!

For me, I love learning more about running successful businesses and passing that knowledge on to other people. I also enjoy playing guitar and I coach my son’s soccer team.

So I could blog about a number of things.

But what about you? Stop reading for a minute and write down the answer to this question:

What are you passionate about?

Now that you’ve done that, let’s move on to the next question.

What can you be the best in the world at?

This is where you begin to filter through your answers to the first question.

Whilst I love soccer and coaching my son’s team, I know I’ll never be the best in the world at it! But it is possible to break this passion down a bit and look at a niche within it. So I’ll never be as good as Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wegner, but maybe I don’t need to compete in that niche. Perhaps there are opportunities to blog about coaching junior soccer teams or a particular age group?

When it comes to this blog, I knew right from the start that there were many blogs that aimed to teach others how to make money on the internet. It’s a saturated market! But within this market are many niches, and that’s the strategy I’ve chosen to take.

My niche is aimed at people who have blogs that are currently hobbies, but they’d like to turn them into successful businesses that provide sufficient income so the blog can support their chosen lifestyle. There’s a lot less competition in this market, and I’m well qualified to help people in this area.

So can I be the best in the world at it? That’s an aspirational goal and some people would feel that it’s only suitable for big companies to consider. The reality is that those big companies were once little companies who dreamed big.

So if the concept of ‘best in the world’ is a bit daunting for you, change it to ‘can I be recognised as an expert in this area?’ – it’s a bit simpler, but still serves the purpose.

Don’t underestimate the power of the niche! I’m working on an article about this, but differentiating your business is a great strategy to consider. And one of the best ways to differentiate is to find a niche and focus on it.

So again, stop what you’re doing, grab your notepad again and work through your list, looking a niches that you can be the best at.

Now it’s time to bring it together and move onto the third question in the Hedgehog Concept.

What drives your economic engine?

This question may not be relevant to you. If you only want to blog for the joy it brings you, and you have no desire to make money from it, then the answer here doesn’t matter. But if you want to make money from blogging, this question is very important.

Can you make money from it? That’s the question that needs to be answered.

The best thing about the internet is that it enables you to reach a huge amount of people globally. Are there enough bloggers in my hometown who want to turn their blog from a hobby into a business? I don’t think so. But I know that globally there are more than enough people who fit that criteria. So my blog ticks all three boxes. Yay!

This is a crucial question to answer. You need to be very clear about how you’ll make money from your blog.

And you need to be realistic about the answer. You must make sure that within your chosen niche there are enough people who are willing to buy whatever products you create that can help them. And, not only do you need to sell these products, but you need to make a profit in the process.

Go back to the Jim Collins quote I posted earlier – he talks about being able to say ‘no’ to things that fall outside the hedgehog concept. So in your business you need to sell products that are profitable and stay away from ones that are not (unless there’s a deliberate strategy there to up-sell those customers).

So, back to your pen and notepad and answer this question:

How will you make money from your chosen niche or idea?

How the Hedgehog Concept has helped me

I’ve used this blog as an example in this article to show you how I’ve applied the Hedgehog Concept to this business. But I’ve also applied it elsewhere.

Around 18 months ago I was thinking about this concept as I was engaging in one of my passions – playing guitar. It got me thinking about starting a blog on guitar playing. It’s something I’m passionate about, with my web marketing knowledge I’m sure I can become well known in the guitar blogging sphere, and I can make money from it. Note that I didn’t say I could be the best guitar player – that’s not the area I’m in. I do think I can become one of the best guitar bloggers – I’ve been playing for over 30 years, I can write and I know enough about internet marketing and social media to promote my blog.

So I’ve been working on a guitar blog. At the moment I’m just concentrating on adding content, but I’m also looking at product creation and promotion as a means to make money from it.

The point is, that playing guitar is something I love doing. If I could quit my job today, I’d happily sit at home in my home studio playing guitar and recording. I’m passionate about it.

• What are the things that you’re passionate about?
• Are you blogging about the right things, or do you need to stop doing things you’re not passionate about and change?

What do you think about the Hedgehog Concept? Please leave a comment below and let me know if Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept is something you can use as part of your blog strategy.

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 as simple as this one does. It also provides some templates to enable people to share your posts via social media.

Do you need OptinSkin?

OptinSkin is a means to an end – it makes it easier to build an email list. If you’re not interested in building an email list, don’t bother with OptinSkin. If you are interested, then read on!

I’m mentioned numerous times that my HTML and CSS skills are very limited, so the thought of producing a cool looking optin box scares me to the point where I’ve been putting it off for months. Up until now I’ve been using the Aweber template as well as PopUp Domination to build my subscriber list. It’s worked ok, but I’ve been looking at the optin boxes that other bloggers had created, and wanted to do something similar.

The OptinSkin plugin makes it easy to build good looking optin boxes.

Using OptinSkin

Once you purchase the plugin, you install it the same way you install any WordPress plugin. When you use it for the first time, you need to register it – that’s simple.

You can then get to work building your own optin boxes.

You have the choice of 18 templates to begin working with. Simply choose one of the  templates and start customising it. You can change the titles and text as well as the fonts and the text size. Don’t like the colour of the sign up button – change it!  You can change a whole stack of the design elements and you have complete control over the colours as well.

It integrates very well with all the major email list providers – I use Aweber and it was as simple as entering my list name into the plugin and OptinSkin does the rest.

It took me around 5 minutes to design my first optin box.

Where does it go?

You’ve got a few options around where the finished optin box goes.

As part of the set-up, you can choose from some standard placements such as below a post, at the top of your posts, below the first paragraph or floated to the right of the second paragraph. Knowing Glenn Allsop (the creator) like I do, he’s tested placement of optin boxes for a while and these would be the ideal locations.

You’ve also got the option to leave these options blank and instead insert the OptinSkin shortcode anywhere you want in your blog.

OptinSkin Review Video

I spent a while tonight recording this video review of OptinSkin. I show you all the main features and also how you can customise all the key parts of the plugin.

If you’re reading this in an RSS Reader, here’s the link to the OptinSkin Review Video.

First Impressions

I like the plugin because it’s made it simple for me to produce good looking optin boxes.

I haven’t started to look at the social sharing options and how I could combine that in the optin box, but that opens up some interesting possibilities.

Overall, I think this plugin is good value for money.

Visit the OptinSkin website for more information. They also offer a 60 money back guarantee, so if it doesn’t work for you, return it.

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) want to use it.

What Is Buffer?

The Buffer App website says it best:

Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule tweets. Work out all your tweets at one point in time during the day. Then fill up your Buffer with your tweets and Buffer schedules them for you. Simply keep that Buffer topped up and you will then be tweeting consistently all day round, all week long.

Buffer App is really very simple. It works on the premise that a lot of the time, the Tweets that we send aren’t seen by our followers. This is because of the way that Twitter is. Twitter, like Facebook (well at least, like Facebook used to be) is based on a timeline. So your tweets appear as they happen in someone’s Twitter stream. If they have a lot of friends, then they may not notice your tweet, particularly if they aren’t looking at Twitter around the time that you make your tweet.

So if we accept that a lot of our tweets aren’t getting the biggest audience that they could, we need to figure out how to change that.

And this is where Buffer App comes in.

Buffer lets you schedule your tweets at a time that your followers are more likely to see them. I’ve written before about how I live in Australia and most of my followers are in America and Europe. So I’m asleep for a lot of the time that they’re active on Twitter.

The way I get around this is that I automate some of my tweets, using TweetAdder. But whilst Tweetadder is good, it doesn’t give me as much control over the timing of my tweets as Buffer does.

How Do I Use Buffer App?

Schedule Your Tweets For The Maximum Audience

Buffer is very simple to use.

Firstly, you register on their site and enter the details of your Twitter account.

Next, you go into the ‘Settings’ tab and enter your preferred Tweet schedule.

I’ll add another blog post soon about how to determine your ideal tweeting schedule.

Next, you download the Buffer App browser extension. I use Firefox, so I downloaded the Buffer App extension for Firefox. Once the Buffer App extension is downloaded, you’ll see a little Buffer App icon sitting at the bottom of your FireFox window.

The rest is so simple. Whenever you’re on the web and reading something you want to share with your readers, you click on the Buffer App icon at the bottom of your Firefox window. This will open a pop up box that has the title and description from the web page.It also automatically shortens the URL. You can also add your Bit.ly details in the Buffer settings if you want to use Bit.ly as your URL shortener.

You’re able to change any of the text around to suit what you want to say (HINT: always try and add the Twitter ID of the person who’s content you’re tweeting. If you do this they’re more likely to see that you’ve re-tweeted their content).

When you’re happy with your Tweet, just click on the ‘Add To Buffer’ button at the bottom and the tweet is added to your buffer.  It’ll be sent sometime in the future, depending on how you’ve set up your Buffer account.

It’s that simple.

There are some other ways you can add content to your buffer – I’ll explain these in a later post or alternatively, head on over to the Buffer App site and see what else it can do.

What Is Buffer App – Is It For You?

I’ve blogged before about how some people are comfortable automating some aspects of their Twitter use, and others aren’t. That’s fine. Figure out what suits you and do it.

If you’re not comfortable with automating any aspects of your Twitter use, then Buffer App isn’t for you. But consider this – Buffer App isn’t just mindless automation with no quality control. You determine what goes into your buffer. The only bit of the automation is when the tweet is sent.

If you are happy to automate some of your Tweeting, Buffer App has its place.

Buffer App – Pricing Plans

I’ve been using the free version of Buffer App. It gives me the ability to add one Twitter account and one Facebook account. I can have a maximum of 10 tweets in my buffer.

There are two other paid plans that give you the ability to add more Twitter and Facebook accounts and have more space in your buffer. Whether you need these extra features depends on how you think you’ll use the Buffer App.

My advice is to start with the free version, get used to it and work out whether you need one of the premium versions.

And if you refer other uses to Buffer App, they give you one extra space in your buffer for each new user you refer. So use my link please!

Other Options

I mentioned earlier how I use TweetAdder for some of my automated tweets. It does the job, but doesn’t allow me to schedule specific times for the tweets to go out. It also does a bunch of things that Buffer doesn’t, so it’s not fair to compare the two.

Hootsuite is my main Twitter dashboard, and it gives me the ability to schedule tweets. The only problem is that it’s more complicated to do this than Buffer App. Buffer is set up to send tweets at the times I’ve pre-set. With Hootsuite I’ve got to enter the date and time in every time I want to schedule a tweet.

The concept of Buffer App is excellent. No-one wants to send out Tweets that don’t get seen, and Buffer App helps you increase the visibility and effectiveness of your tweets. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more companies copy the Buffer concept. I just mentioned Hootsuite – it’d be a relatively simple thing for them to add some customisable tweet schedules like buffer. Or alternatively, perhaps the Buffer App starts to talk directly with the other Twitter apps out there so the scheduling happens automatically.

My preference is to have all my tweeting done from one interface, so using Hootsuite, TweetAdder and Buffer App is not the ideal, but it gets the job done.

I’m convinced in the merits of using Twitter to connect with other bloggers and people who would be interested in the topics I write about. Buffer App is another tool that I can use to make sure I’m getting maximum leverage out of Twitter. Go ahead, sign up for the free plan and see what you think.

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.

BHAGs for Bloggers

Most bloggers have some goals for their blogs (at least I hope they do!). And as part of your business planning for your blog you’ve probably sat down this year and written down some goals you’d like to achieve.

Lets say you’ve been getting an average of 500 visitors a month to your blog. A simple (and achievable) goal could be to increase this amount to 600 visitors a month.  A BHAG is much bigger than that. A BHAG would be all about doubling your traffic – go to 1,000 visitors a month, or how about 2,000!

Another example could be newsletter sign-ups. Maybe you only get 10 people per month signing up to your newsletter (it could even be less for some people – don’t worry!). A simple, ‘safe’ goal would be to increase this figure by 20% or 30%. That’s achievable, realistic and possible – it meets all the criteria for a good goal.

But a BHAG takes this and smashes it! Why don’t you aim to double your newsletter sign-ups – go from 10 a month to 20. Or why not make a BHAG to go to 100 per month?

Can you see where I’m going here? A BHAG isn’t a normal goal – it’s a goal that will massively stretch you, but is still achievable.

One last example – revenue. Maybe you sell a few affiliate products (promoting other people’s products). Maybe you make $100 per month. A simple goal could be to make one or two extra sales a month and increase your revenue to $150 pm. A BHAG would be to increase it to $1,000 per month.

BHAG’s are scary things, but they’re great.

Why are BHAGs Great?

BHAGs force us to step outside our day-to-day business reality and dream a bit.

What if I could increase traffic to 2,000 people a month?

What if I could earn $1,000 per month?

A BHAG is all about helping you think about what could be, rather than what is currently happening.

The reality is that these things are possible. You can go from 500 – 2,000 visitors per month, it’s been done before.

Here’s the thing to realise with BHAGs:

The things you’ve been currently doing won’t be enough for you to achieve your BHAG – you’ll need to do things differently!

Think about that last line for a minute. Re-read it again and again. You need to change what you’re doing to achieve your BHAG.

Some Practical BHAG Examples

Now that I’ve got you thinking about BHAGs , here are some ideas that relate back to the three examples.

Traffic BHAG

• Guest posts work. Write guest posts for other bloggers and engage with their readers.
• Keyword research. Get a program like Market Samurai and do your keyword research. Find some keywords that you can rank well in and increase your organic search engine traffic.
• Improve your use of social media. Drive traffic to your site from Twitter and Facebook.
• Put your content elsewhere. Once you’ve written a blog article, submit it to article directories. Make a video about it and put it on You Tube. There are plenty of places to put your content.
• Write to your subscribers more.
• Write more content. Give readers more ways they can find your content.

Email Newsletter Conversions BHAG

• Let’s say that at the moment for every 100 visitors to your site, 2 of them subscribe to your newsletter. If you can double your traffic, you could double your subscribers every month.
• What about conversions? Could you increase that 2% sign up rate to 10%? How would you do that?
• Consider a plugin like Pop Up Domination which can boost conversion rates.

Increase Revenue BHAG

• Sell more of whatever you’re currently selling.
• Consider using Google AdWords and social media.
• Find other products to sell or promote.
• Promote more to your email list.
• Create your own product and sell it!

I bolded that last one because it’s so simple and easy to overlook, but the best way to achieve a revenue BHAG. Stop only selling other people’s products, take the time to create your own and get other people to sell that for you. If you do this, a BHAG of going from $100 to $1,000 (or more) per month is very achievable.

What’s Your BHAG?

I challenge you to think of one BHAG for 2012. What’s one thing related to your blog that would be amazing to achieve? Remember, don’t limit yourself by your current reality. The BHAG comes first, then you work to find the ways to make it happen.

Good luck in 2012. I’ve got a number of new articles I’ll be posting to help you achieve your BHAGs.

I love getting your comments. Let me know what you think about BHAGs – in fact share your 2012 BHAG in the comments below.

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 show you a site’s pagerank, links to the domain etc. But it’s stopped sorting by pagerank.

One of the ways I like to use SEOQuake is outlined in my old blog post. I like to search in Google for sites on a topic (or pages in YouTube), and then sort the results by pagerank so I’m able to see all the high pagerank sites. I can then click on each link and leave a comment.

Lately, SEOQuake has stopped sorting by pagerank and I’ve noticed more people landing on my site because they’ve found my old article, and they’re looking for answers.

I sent an email off to the SEOQuake folks, and here’s their reply:

This is a known issue, due to a recent change Google has made in its results display pages.  We are working on a fix, and will have it out in the near future as an update.

It seems to be a problem with the way Google displays its results. Hopefully there’s a fix and an update soon, because this is one of the main features I love about SEOQuake.

I’ll keep you posted on when an update occurs. In the meantime, if you know of any other plugins that enable us to search by pagerank, leave a comment and let me know.

UPDATE : 23 December 2011. There’s an updated version of SeoQuake available and the problem is fixed! We can search by pagerank again.

photo credit: aussiegall

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 offer on Groupon. This is where the trouble begins.

She offered a 75% discount on a box of her cupcakes – selling them for £6.50 instead of the usual price of £26. Here’s the problem – she was making a loss on every box she sold at the discounted price. The article I read said she was losing £2.50 per order.

As you can guess, she was swamped with orders and had to stop the Groupon deal once 8,500 orders were received. If you’re making a loss of £2.50 per order, that’s a lot of money you’ve just lost.

In addition, she had trouble keeping up with the demand and had to hire 25 extra staff to work around the clock making the cakes.

So, what can we learn from this story, and how does it apply to bloggers?

Lesson 1 – Understand your profit margins

Rachel seems to have understood that she was selling these boxes of cupcakes at a loss. I’ll cover the pros and cons of selling at a loss in the next point, but the important take-away here is that she knew what it cost her to produce her product.

The process of working out the true cost of a product can be a bit easier in a manufacturing environment like baking, where you’re very aware of the cost of the ingredients and the labour. It’s more difficult in blogging, where the cost is more time-based.

Whatever you do, make sure you’re aware of the importance of making a profit and understanding the true cost of your product.

photo credit: ms.Tea

Lesson 2 – Loss leaders are okay, but you need a strategy to make money

My local supermarket frequently has specials where it sells products at a loss. Why does it do this? To get people in the shop!

That’s the carrot they’re dangling in front of you to get you in their store. Once you’re in the store, you may buy the item that’s being sold at a loss, but you’ll probably buy more things that they’re making a nice profit on.

So, they’re happy to make a loss on one item because they know they offset that loss from the profits they make from other products.

They have a strategy to make money!

I have no idea why Rachel decided to sell her cupcakes at such a deep discount. I’m sure a 75% discount sounds great, but surely a 50% discount would also have been attractive, albeit to a smaller number of people.

What concerns me is that there appears to be no strategy in place to sell more products to these people at a profit.

You must have a strategic plan in your business that details how you will make money.

Lesson 3 – Build loyalty and repeat business

photo credit: scatteredView

From what I can understand, Rachel has no strategy to build loyalty from these customers.

The way I see it, she’s spent money to acquire these new customers, and at the moment she’s spent more than the profit she’s made from them. But that can change.

If you take a view of the lifetime value of a client, you’ll begin to understand that sometimes it’s ok to make an initial loss if that’s made up over the lifetime of a customer.

Rachel’s business has a great looking website and I understand these orders were lodged over the internet. The article says she sold 8,500 boxes of cupcakes, so now she has 8,500 email addresses from people who have bought once from her.

If I were her, I’d send an email up now saying thanks for your order. I’d then offer a follow up offer of 50% off the price of their next order. I’d be making a profit from this. The email costs nothing, unlike advertising through Groupon. The email is sent to hot prospects – people who’ve just made a purchase from you.

I’d then look to develop some sort of loyalty program – perhaps a discount after a certain number of purchases. Maybe she could use a Facebook page and feature pictures of her creations. What about a regular email newsletter that highlights her cakes and special offers?

The way I see it, she’s spent a significant amount of money on acquiring some new customers. Whilst she’s made a loss, she has the opportunity to increase the loyalty of these customers and make them into very profitable customers.

Lessons for Bloggers

You know that I’m passionate about helping bloggers turn their blogs from hobbies into businesses. To do that you need to think like a business.

• What are you currently doing that you’re making a loss on? For me, it’s writing articles like this that are free.
  
• Is there a strategy to make money? How will you make money from people attracted to ‘free’?
• If you make a mistake, how can you leverage it?

I’m interested in your feedback on this story. What other ways do you think Rachel can leverage this opportunity and begin to make money from it?

photo credit: clevercupcakes

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 I’ve been using it since it was released in 2009. I’ve mentioned in previous posts how easy Headway is to use, and how it gives you a lot of extra options.

As an example, I used to use one of the WordPress SEO plugins to help customise my post SEO. Once I started using Headway I could stop using the plugin because Headway gave me all those options.

The thing I like most about Headway theme is how easy it is to customise the look of my site. I’ve set up my own templates for blog posts, the main page and other pages. I’m not stuck with a standard look (like you are with other templates).

I’ve created pages that look completely different to other ones. For example if you subscribe to my email list, you’ll be taken to a download page. That page doesn’t have a sidebar so it looks different to the other pages. Was this hard to do? No. I simply took my standard template, removed the sidebar and extended the width of the content leaf.

So, what’s changing in Headway Theme 3.0?

I’ve been using the Beta version of Headway Theme 3.0 for the past month on a test site. Whilst I’m still getting used to it, it’s a huge step forward over version 2.0 (and I’m very happy with Headway 2.0!).

The main change is that they’ve moved to a grid system. In the past Headway has used content ‘leafs’. These leafs could be positioned on your page and would display text, pictures etc. With version 2.0, Headway introduced columns. This enabled you to position your leafs within a column structure – this was great and made positioning of leafs a lot better.

With Headway Theme 3.0, they’re introducing a grid system. This is so easy to use, and makes designing a site so easy.

With the Headway grid system, you simply click and draw your box on the grid, and then select the type of box you want – is it a header or navigation bar? Perhaps it’s content or a picture? It’s so simple to quickly position a bunch of boxes on your page.

Here’s a screenshot of the grid system found in Headway theme 3.0.

Headway Theme 3.0 showing the grid layout system

And once you’ve got that page looking the way you want it to, you can easily change the look of it. What fonts do you want to use? What about the font size? Header fonts and sizes? There’s so much that can easily be changed.

Make each page different in Headway 3.0

Sometimes you want your pages to look different. You may want a home page that’s got a lot of content summaries on it with the intention that readers click through to read full articles. That page will probably look different to your About page.

And maybe you want to produce a squeeze page. You probably don’t want a sidebar on that page, or any distracting navigation options. You probably just want a page full of text and images. It’s easy in Headway. Tick a couple of boxes to remove the header and navigation and the rest is easy.

How about the ability to customise individual blog posts? I haven’t looked deeply into this but it looks like a winner. You’ve probably got a few blog posts that get a lot of traffic. Maybe you could add some extra content boxes to this individual blog article – perhaps an affiliate offer or an extra sign up box. You can do this at the individual article level in Headway 3.0.

And of course there are the Headway ‘hooks’. These enable you to insert content in various locations throughout your pages. I’ve got my financial planning website and need to put a disclaimer under every article. I could include it when I write the article, but then it forms part of the article text. Instead, I include it as a hook. A while back the disclaimer needed to change. Instead of having to manually edit each article (over 50!) I simply changed the hook. It was a one minute job and instantly updated the disclaimer throughout my site.

Here’s a short video from the Headway developers showing some of the features of Headway Theme 3.0.

Headway Theme 3.0 Pricing

Headway Theme 3.0 is released on the 25th November. But you’ll need to buy it before then. Here’s why.

Up to now, Headway has operated on a once-only fee to purchase the theme. There’s a Personal option and a Developer’s option, but either way, there’s a one-off cost to purchase the theme. Once you’ve got your licence, you get unlimited support and access to their forums (which rock!), and upgrades for life.

Once Headway 3.0 is released, the pricing changes. To upgrade to a Developer’s licence will cost more, and they’re moving to an annual renewal fee to cover access to upgrades and support. The way I understand this, is that if you buy after the 25th and don’t pay the annual fee when it falls due, you won’t get any upgraded versions and won’t get any support.

So, if you’ve sitting on the fence about buying Headway theme, it’s time to make a decision.

If you purchase before Headway 3.0 is released on the 25th, you’ll be able to buy it under the ‘old’ pricing structure – a once only fee and access to upgrades and support for life. If you buy it on or after the 25th, you’ll be paying an yearly fee if you want upgrades (and you will want them!).

I’ve been very happy with Headway. I’ve learnt a lot about customising it with only a limited knowledge of CSS and HTML but even that’s not necessary to build a good looking site. The drag and drop concept allows you to build good looking sites without any programming knowledge.

Head over to the Headway site today and buy your copy before the 25th and beat the price rise.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below and I’ll answer them.

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 to use it so I’ll tell you what I think of it in this CommentLuv Premium review.

What Is CommentLuv Premium?

You may have seen the CommentLuv plugin on some sites over the past few years. It was a plugin that gave the commenter a link back to their most recent blog post. When you entered your blog’s URL as part of leaving a comment, the plugin would retrieve your RSS feed and place a link back to your most recent post, with the post title as the anchor text.

CommentLuv Premium takes it to the next level, and adds some features from the other plugins that the CommentLuv creators have made. When you purchase CommentLuv Premium, you get access to four plugins:

1. CommentLuv Premium
2. Twitterlink
3. GASP
4. Keyword Names

We’ll look at each one in more detail.

CommentLuv Premium – How it works

When you’ve installed the plugin, there’s a comprehensive dashboard that enables you to tweak it the way you want it.

You have the choice to use it on Posts, Pages, or both. At the moment I’ve only got it set up on my Posts, as I don’t have comments on Pages (easy to do this using the Headway Theme!).

You also have a couple of CommentLuv badges to use, and you can make them clickable with your affiliate link (you can see the example in the comments section below).

The rest of the options deal with the messages and enticements that people receive. It can get a bit complicated, but I’ll try and simplify it for this CommentLuv Premium review.

The free CommentLuv plugin shows the most recent blog post someone has made. The CommentLuv Premium plugin can be set up to give them 10 blog posts to chose from (or some more options if you’re a CommentLuv Premium owner).

It can be set up to automatically give new posters the choice of their last ten posts, or you can structure it that they need to have a certain number of approved posts before they get access to their last ten posts.

On Blogger Business Plan, I’ve got it set up so that when you have three approved comments, you’ll then get access to your last ten posts for every subsequent comment you leave. I’ve set it up like this because I want to reward people who keep visiting and commenting on my blog. If you’re new here, I wrote this post last week on how to set up a blog commenting system using Google Reader – you should read it and bookmark my blog!

So, if you’ve never left a comment here, CommentLuv will automatically post a link to your latest blog post when you leave a comment. Go ahead – try it. And as you’re doing it, you should see a message that tells you that you’ll get 10 posts to choose from once you’ve got three approved comments.

I can change these settings. If I wanted to make you have 10 approved comments before you get access to your last ten posts, that’s easy to change from the dashboard. If I wanted to change the text you see about how many blog posts you need to get approved, that’s also easy to change.

The next option is about whether those links are DoFollow links or not. Before you get the required number of approved comments, the links aren’t DoFollow. But once the 3 approved comments are in place, you can tick a box so all subsequent links are DoFollow links.

Get social with CommentLuv Premium

The next set of options are all about social networks. As a further enticement, you can give people another option to get ten recent posts to choose from when they leave a comment. If they +1 the post in Google, Re-Tweet it or ‘Like’ it on Facebook, this can also give them access to their last ten blog posts. This will over-ride the need to have a certain number of blog posts approved.

Once again, you can set this up so the links can be DoFollow or not. You can also customise the text around this area on the comment form. You can see this on my comments section. Go ahead – use these social enticements to see how they work and get ten posts to choose from in the process.

One of the other things I like about the social enticements is that if someone Tweets about your post, the tweet will include your Twitter username, and they will also get asked whether they want to start following you on Twitter.  This is a great bonus as people in their Twitter stream will see their tweet and possibly click on your name within that tweet to start following you.

The benefits of being a CommentLuv Premium owner

There are some extra benefits for those who own the plugin.

One is that ability to set up an ‘info box’ that tells people more about who you are and what you blog about. When you comment on someone else’s blog, people can hover their mouse over the link to your last blog post, and the info box will appear on the page. This box shows a picture of you, has a bit about you, and also shows links to more posts.

You have some choice in what displays here. You can show your five most recent posts, some of your favourite’s, or a mixture.

The ‘Favourites’ section is interesting. It allows you to pick five posts or pages from your site that will display in the info box. I’ve added my ‘About’ and ‘Subscribe’ pages as well as three other blog posts that I want to promote.

The plugin will also show some recent posts that you’ve commented on.

The idea of the Info Box is great – it’s a good way for people to find out more about you, and gives people more options of content to click on.

TwitterLink

TwitterLink is a separate plugin which is included in CommentLuv Premium. It’s quite simple – it allows people to include their Twitter username which will then appear as a clickable link on their comment. This is a great way to encourage people to follow each other on Twitter.

G.A.S.P.

No-one likes spam and one of the problems with the free CommentLuv plugin was that it seemed to attract spammers. It was simple to search for CommentLuv powered blogs and leave spammy comments in order to get a backlink with anchor text that in some cases was a DoFollow link.

The GASP plugin was built to counteract that. I’ve been using this plugin and had no problem with spam.

You’ll see in my comments section I’ve got the tick box that says ‘Confirm you are NOT a spammer’. You can change this text if you prefer to make it say something else.

CommentLuv also includes a hidden email field that can only be seen by spam bots. They’ll see this field and enter an email address. The plugin will then know that a spam bot has entered the comment, not a real person.

It’s simple, but it seems to work.

Keyword Names and CommentLuv

The final plugin is the Keyword Name plugin. This is an improvement from the KeywordLuv plugin.

It allows people to put keywords after their name when they comment.

You can adjust the rules around this – you nominate how many comments they need to have approved before this option is made available, how many keywords they can use, and whether they’re NoFollow or DoFollow links.

It’s very simple to set up, and is an additional incentive for people to comment – they get a backlink with pertinent anchor text.

CommentLuvPremium Review – Summary

I’ve found CommentLuv Premium to be very easy to use. I’ve noticed they’ve put out several updates over the past few weeks – always a good sign that they’re listening to feedback and trying to improve. I had to lodge a support ticket and they responded within 12 hours with a solution.

I’m using the plugin because I want to encourage more comments on my blog. I want people to feel that they’re getting something a bit more special than the usual backlink to their site. When you look over the comments section and see the latest blog post names, you may see something you like and click through. You’re probably more likely to do that when you can see the anchor text that CommentLuv provides.

It’s not for everyone. It works on blogs like this one, because most of the people who read it own blogs. They understand the benefits of links back to their own blogs and are more likely to comment.

I read one article from someone who uses this plugin on a blog in a completely different niche. Very few of their readers actually had web sites, so the plugin became more confusing to those commentators.

My advice is to think about your target market. If they have blogs and would like to get meaningful backlinks, then CommentLuv Premium will probably suit.

Hope you learnt a lot from the CommentLuv Premium review. The plugin is currently in pre-launch stage – you can register at the site to get access to it in a few days. And don’t forget to leave a comment below and see how it works!

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.

Why bother commenting on blogs?

Early on in my blogging life I read about blog commenting. The original stuff I read talked about visiting other people’s blogs and leaving comments. There were two benefits:

1. You become a contributor to the conversation going on on another blog. It’s part of building a community and being social.
2. You get a link back to your site. This link may or may not carry some link juice (depending on whether the blog is a follow or no-follow blog), and some people will click on your link and actually visit your site. When you’re just starting out, any traffic is good traffic!

As I read more about internet marketing and blogging I came to the realisation that some people were commenting on blogs in a manner a bit different to how I was doing it. They were using automated tools to find blogs that allowed comments, and then they flooded them with spammy comments or comments that didn’t add any value – ‘nice post, well done!’

Now, there’s nothing illegal about doing this – I don’t think you’re breaking any laws, but it’s not something that I’m comfortable with.

I’ve been slack in blog commenting over the past few months but I’m starting to do more of it. I’m getting back in the habit of making an effort to comment on articles that I’m reading.

One of the things I’ve always found difficult to do is to keep track of when blogs put up a new article. I used to bookmark a bunch of sites in Firefox and visit them, but I’d frequently miss new articles or visit days late.

I tried following people on Twitter, and whilst this is a good way to keep track of things, sometimes they’d get lost in the Twitter stream. Also, a lot of bloggers (myself included) will Tweet about older blog articles so it can be difficult to determine if a tweet is about a new article or an old one.

The best way I’ve found to make my blog commenting focussed, is to use RSS feeds into Google reader.

Blog Commenting – google Reader

Google reader is one of many Google applications that I use. It’s a web based tool that I use to display all the RSS feeds that I subscribe to.

Whenever I find a blog that I like, I click on the ‘Subscribe To This Page’ link in Firefox. It them asks if I want to use Google for the feed – this is the option I select. It’ll then open up that feed within Google Reader.

The best way to use Google Reader is to set up multiple folders and place your feeds within those folders. This makes it easier to find the feeds you want.

I‘ve got one folder set up with all my favourite guitar site RSS feeds going into it. I can easily find this folder in Reader, and click from feed to feed reading my guitar news.

When it comes to blog commenting, I’ve done something similar. If I find a site that I want to comment on on a regular basis, I place it into a folder within Reader called ‘Blogs To Comment On’.

This is easy to do. When you’ve got the feed displayed within reader, click on the ‘Feed Settings’ button on the top of the feed box. This will open up a list of options, one of which will be to add the feed to a pre-existing folder, or to a new folder. Call you folder whatever you want to call it, as long as it makes sense to you.

The good thing about Reader, is that you can easily see if there’s new content to look at. On the screenshot above, you can see that there’s 6 new articles in the ‘Blogs to Comment On’ folder.

If I click on this and open it, it’ll list all the blogs, line by line and I’ll be able to see at a glance which ones have new content. From there, it’s simple. Click on the articles I want to leave comments on, open them up on the actual blog’s website, read the article and comment.

Using Google Alerts in Google Reader

Here’s another quick bonus tip!

I have a number of Google alerts set up. Want to know if people mention me, my business, or a couple of specific keywords I’m targeting. So I’ve set up Google alerts for these terms.

Instead of getting emails from Google alerts, I’ve set it up so the RSS feeds go into Google Reader, into a folder called ‘Google Alerts’. I can quickly see if there’s anything new to look at, and it easy to mark it all as read.

Blog Commenting with Google Reader – Your Thoughts

So this is how I do my commenting on blogs using Google reader and RSS feeds to make the process simpler.

What do you think. Is there a specific method you use to help with commenting on blogs? Could the method I’ve outlined work for you?

Leave a comment below (ironic, considering it’s an article about commenting!) and let me know what you think.