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.

Just finished reading Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround by former IBM CEO Louis V.Gerstner. He was the CEO of then struggling IBM during the period from 1993 to 2002. Since the book was written by Gerstner himself (not some ghost co-author) it was an interesting read, I quite enjoyed the book.

As you can see from the graph to the right, during his tenure at IBM Gerstner did a good job. When he retired in 2002, IBM’s share prices were ten-fold higher than when he joined IBM in 1993.

Turning around huge organization like IBM is not an easy task, and as Gerstner says the most difficult part was changing the organization culture.

The book generally covers the events from his recruitment to his retirement. However the events do not follow strict chronological order, it’s written more like a story - telling important ones and skipping some. His strategies were mostly bold, clear, open, well communicated to everyone and most importantly based on common sense. Here is one such example from the book, excerpt:

Over the prior decade, IBM had amassed a large and important fine-art collection, most of which was stored in crates out of sight from anyone. Some of it did show up now and again in a public gallery in the IBM tower on 57th Street in Manhattan. We had a curator and a staff who maintained this collection. In 1995 the bulk of it was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $31 million. Unfortunately, the sale was condemned by many people in the art world. For some reason, these people felt that it was fine for IBM to fire employees and send them home, as long as we kept some paintings in a gallery in New York City for people to view them occasionally.

As he writes in the book, there was a lot of resistance in the organization when he was implementing various strategies e.g discontinuing nonperforming products, selling of non-core businesses, changing the organizational structure from regional to product based, changing the organizational culture from “inside-out” to “outside-in” i.e customer oriented etc.

So, the book talks about how and what Gerstner did to overcome these resistances and successfully implement his strategies. Thus saving the Big Blue.

I highly recommend the book if you are interested in strategic management. This was not meant to be a full review of the book. I just wanted to give you a brief overview of the book. I hope you found it helpful.

Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com has released a very useful wp plugin called My Top Commentators. This plugin will show your top commentators under your Dashboard for different periods: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Current Month, Last Month, Current Year, Last Year or a Custom Period. This is exactly what I was looking for.

Because as you know I publish list of top commentators at the end of each month. And there was one time when I missed one month’s top commentators, because, I forgot to save the names of the top commentators before the counter was reset to zero (it does so at the beginning of each month).

But now with this plugin all I need to do is to just select “Previous Month” from the drop down menu!

Even if you do not publish top commentators on your blog, this plugin will allow you to identify who are your blog’s regular commenters. And eventually you will be able to get to know them personally. Enjoy!

Plugin Page: www.dailyblogtips.com/my-top-commentators-wordpress-plugin/

This is a guest-post by Rajaie AlKorani of www.rajaietalks.com. In this post Rajaie discusses how to get private advertisements to your newly launched blog.

Unless your blog brings in thousands of visitors its first day of launching, you’re going to have a pretty tough time attracting new advertisers and filling all those ad spots on your blog. And having eight of them (i.e 125×125 buttons) with “Advertise Here” in bold definitely will not make your life any easier.

To start pumping in the money, you need to provide your sponsors with reasons as to why they should pick your blog from the millions of others. No, they don’t care about your mission or about helping pay your bills. The only thing on their mind is getting the best bang for their buck, and if you can’t help with that, than you’re out of luck.

What if your blog has been bringing in some impressive results for a while which happen to be sky high, and yet the image ads are still empty?

That’s it! When advertisers see all those empty spots, their brains will automatically tell them that - something is wrong with your site! What can you do to get out of this everlasting cycle?

1 - Testimonials
Ask your existing customers for a testimonial. To make your testimonials more credible; include person’s name, the name of the company he/she works for, and the position he/she holds at the company. Also provide a link to their company website and if possible get a picture of them. I’d say that this is the best way to boost your chance of selling anything since it’s real proof given by other people.

2 - Hold A Contest
Everybody likes free stuff, so hold a contest where readers can win free ad spots, this will help fill up the empty spaces. And hopefully they will turn into regular advertisers.

3 - Do A Banner Exchange
Do a banner exchange with someone in your niche, you link to their blog and they link to yours. It is a win-win situation if both of you have empty slots available.

4 - Become An Affiliate
Most websites that sell products have an affiliate program where you earn a percentage of every sale you make. Usually they will provide you with the banners so you’ll have nothing to worry about. So instead of having 8 buttons with “advertise here” word on them, display affiliate banners and make some money at the same time.

5 - Start Exploring
If you have the idea that your sponsors are going to search for you, then think again. It’s your job to hunt down potential sponsors, not theirs. Special promotions and discounts are always welcome ;-)

6 - Be A Nice Guy
Why not just email a friend telling him that you’ve added his site to your “blogroll” or that you’ve given him a free ad spot for the month. This usually pays off in the long run where it helps develop a relationship between you and him.

7 - Don’t Be Irrational
If you just started your blog a couple of days ago, then asking for $500 a paid review isn’t very reasonable. If you want to be taken seriously, then present yourself seriously!

I believe that those are the best ways to start selling private advertisements on your blog. What are some ways you used to sell private advertisements when you first started your blog?

Popular keyword research tool Wordtracker is giving free 7 day full-access to its system.

I think 7 days is a plenty of time for me to research my keywords, I just have to remember to cancel my subscription within this period.

Please note that you will have to supply your Credit Card details when registering, so if you do not want your card to be charged, you will have to cancel your subscription within 7 days.

How to use Wordtracker? You can use Wordtracker to find keywords that are relevant to your products and services, how people are finding things that are similar to your products and services.

For example, let’s say you sell wordpress templates, so you optimize your site for this keyword - “wordpress templates“. But using Wordtracker you might find that equal number of people are finding your competitors’ sites, searching for keyword “blog themes“. So, Wordtracker will tell you what keyword you should target to attract more visitors to your website.

Below is the screenshot of one of the tools of Wordtracker. If you want to try it out for 7 days for free, you can register here.

Page: http://www.wordtracker.com/trial

For those who read AdesBlog.com through RSS Readers: a while back I have introduced miniblog on AdesBlog. It is located on the homepage just below navigation menu (see screenshot). These are posts that are usually short (i.e not more than 3-4 lines), they could be updates from AdesBlog, links to various websites that might be useful to you but do not need a full review in the blog.

Mini posts are not published in RSS, mainly because I do not want to fill my RSS with short posts. So, if you do not want to miss these posts, check back adesblog/miniblog once in a while. Because you might miss something that could be really really useful for you… ;)