AdesBlog.com

Yaro Starak’s online course on blogging - Blog Mastermind seems, was a success. Blog Mastermind is a series of 27 lessons created by Yaro, in order to teach people how to become professional blogger and start earning steady income from blogs. Lessons come in text, audio and video materials. It’s a 6 month program, with one lesson a week for 27 weeks.

Yaro’s first group of students has already graduated, and he has put up some testimonials (actually a lot of testimonials) from them on his youtube page.

Second intake for Blog Mastermind is going to open sometime in July. So, if you want to join, you have to be on the lookout. I say you have to be on the lookout because the first intake was open for a limited period of time only. And during this registration period, all seats were sold out.

I was wondering, why he has to close the registration when he could make more money? Obviously, the more people sign up, the more money he makes. And since, the course costs $77 a month, I thought he could make huge money by allowing more people to sign up for the course.

His reason for limiting the number of students for the course was to keep the number of students just enough - not too big, not too small. So that, he can pay enough attention to each student and help them with their questions. Thus, keeping the quality of the course high. At the end, I think his strategy paid off. Now, as you can see from the testimonials, there are a lot of satisfied students. (At least somebody cares about the quality! And not just wants to rip off people’s hard earned money. Hats off to him for that.)

Who is this course for?

I think the people who will benefit the most from this course are the ones who have just started a blog (or wants to start a blog) and who have yet to take his/her blog to the next level. By next level I mean, where you have a high traffic blog and earning if not steady, at least some amount of money from your blog.

So, if you are interested to be part of next july-intake, check http://www.BlogMastermind.com from time to time for the announcement.

P.S Here is a blog post on Yaro’s blog that lists the full contents of the program.

Two brothers came to prophet Daud (David) and said “Judge between us, we are in dispute”. One of them said “This is my brother. He has ninety nine sheep and I have one sheep. He is now forcing me to give up my single sheep to him”.

So, prophet Daud without listening to the other brother said “He has undoubtedly wronged you in demanding to add your single sheep to his flock. He should return your sheep to you!”. Once he has delivered his judgment, two brothers disappeared into the air. Propet Daud realized that these were two angels and that he was just tested by God and that he made a mistake — he didn’t listen to both sides of the story before delivering his judgment.

So, he fell prostrating asking for forgiveness from God. And God forgave him. (Quran 38:21-25)

When mufassireen (interpreters) of Quran talk about this story they say that Daud after the mistake was a better Daud than before the mistake. In other words, after the mistake he was wiser and more knowledgeable than before.

Moral of the story: mistakes can be a great source of knowledge if we derive lessons from them, and learn from them.

About a month ago, problogger posted a blog-post on his blog asking readers “What is the biggest mistake you have made as a blogger?“. I am not sure if you have read this post and comments under it. There are over 200 comments where readers share their mistakes as a blogger and how their mistakes affected their blog negatively (directly or indirectly).

So, if you haven’t read it, go to the page and go through the comments. There are a lot of lessons to be learnt for everyone.

Guys at MarketLeverage.com are quite creative. They have found a novel way to get mentioned on top blogs like problogger (46K+ readers) and shoemoney (16K+ readers) with a small investment that the team themselves will enjoy wearing. They purchased these two blogs’ t-shirts and wore them and sent a picture of the whole team wearing the t-shirts. Guess what? They got dedicated post on both blogs. That’s what we call a win-win situation. MarketLeverage (win), two blogs (win).

Shoemoney t-shirts are just $5.00 each for both men and women, and problogger t-shirts are $17.99 for women and $23.99 for men. So, LeverageMarket spent about $50 on shoemoney and $132 on problogger (unless they bought double logo t-shirts, which are more expensive). It’s a fraction of what you would actually spend to get publicity on these high-traffic blogs, if you were to go through normal conventional way of advertising.

Moral of the post: Be creative!

Remember the post that I wrote “How to redirect traffic that comes from certain URL to another“? If you have missed that post, it was a post about redirecting users to a certain page on your blog (or to other website altogether) that came from certain URL e.g stumbleupon.com

How you can increase your stumbles, that is - thumbs up’s with this? Well, the idea is simple. Sometimes, if you are lucky some people will mention your blog in their stumbleupon blogs. Which means free traffic to your blog from StumbleUpon. It also works when your blog’s main URL gets stumbled, instead of the particular post that the user actually wanted to stumble.

Since your blog’s main page is always changing, you want the users from StumbleUpon to see your best content. Therefore, if you redirect the users that come from stumbleupon to your best article, your blog will have a better chance to get stumbled again.

Please note that when someone stumbles your particular post, it works just fine i.e it won’t be redirected to another page. Here is an example where Caroline stumbled one of my post. If you click on the post title, you will be taken to that post.

On the other hand, if you go here and click on the link that takes to the main URL of my blog. You will see that instead of going to AdesBlog dot com you will be taken to this article.

So if you like the idea, you can see the steps here on how to set it up on your blog.

P.S I know that some of you are not familiar with .htaccess. I will write an introductory article on .htaccess soon, so stay tuned.

In strategic management, in order to have a sustainable competitive advantage in a resource based view, you need to have a resource(s) that are valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and difficult to substitute. If your resource has all of the above mentioned characteristics, then you can be sure to have a sustainable competitive advantage, at least for some time. Because sooner or later your competitors will start to imitate. And if you do not keep innovating, your competitive advantage will be short lived really really fast.

How can we relate this view to blogging? Well, blogging needs a strategy too. And you can easily find where you are in terms of your competitiveness against the other fellow bloggers with this table. Based on your answers you can find your competitiveness level on the right.

Of course, you should be targeting for the all-red line - sustainable competitive advantage. In other words, if you are in all-red, it means that your posts are

• beneficial to the readers,
• they are difficult to find on other blogs,
• your writing style is unique (difficult to copy),
• you have a personality that is charismatic
• you have an expertise in certain field that nobody else has.

If you find yourself anywhere in 1 to 3, then you should identify where you are lagging behind, and then come up with a strategy to target that weakness. Of course, if anyone is in the first line (competitive disadvantage) then he is just wasting his time blogging. Because if you are in competitive disadvantage, you better do something really fast or just stop blogging.

That said, we also have to note that it’s really hard to have a sustainable competitive advantage in blogging. Only blog that I can think of that might have sustainable competitive advantage in the blogosphere is doshdosh.com. Any other blogs you think that have sus. comp. advantage?

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Not always you will be in this situation, where you don’t want people to visit your site (that come from certain site). Because usually everybody wants traffic to their site, the more the better.

But last week I was in an awkward situation where I didn’t want traffic that came from certain domain name. Regular readers of my blog already know this, I had sold one of my sites to someone (don’t want to mention his particulars out of respect). I had forgot to remove my personal information from the website.

Basically the site contained an introductory text that said “this is my project, purpose of the project, my name and my other sites”. Unfortunately, the new owner didn’t want to remove the info, and tried to push adware to the people who wanted to download free icons.

Obviously, I was furious, and sent numerous emails to him. At the end, he removed my particulars. But during this one week time, much damage was done (especially to my reputation). I had received emails telling me that I had cheated them, instead of giving them free icons I pushed them adware… basically, dissatisfied users! And they thought I am doing all these. That was the worst part. So I had to do something.

So, one of the solutions before the new owner removed my personal info was to redirect the traffic that was coming from this website to a particular page. A page that contained all the info and explained the user that the site was sold and no longer belonged to me. I also explained that it was unfortunate that the new owner took this direction for the new site. Lastly, I provided a direct download link to the free icons.

So how this is done? This redirection is done through .htaccess.

Redirecting users that come from certain URL to another

Here is the main code that should be put in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} referrerURL\.com/
RewriteRule ^$ www.redirectedURL.com [R=301,L]

Now let’s do some explanation.

This code RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} referrerURL\.com/ detects the traffics that come from different websites. If the traffic comes from referrer dot com then the second command is true:

Second command says RewriteRule ^$ www.redirectedURL.com [R=301,L] , i.e if the previous command is true then redirect the traffic to www.redirectedURL.com. Please note that you can be specific about this, you can even point it to specific page eg: www.redirectedURL.com/specific_page.html etc.

Conclusion

I hope you won’t be in this situation, but if you do then remember that there is a solution for it. At least temporary one.

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