Tag: blogging

How a perky housewife from Minnesota gets up to 5,000 responses to her blog each and every day… and how you can do as well, or even better!

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author’s program note. This is the tale of someone who has achieved the kind of astonishing online results and amazing ongoing traffic that you wish you had. Her name is Diane Dohrn and she’s one of the handful of residents from Grygla, Minnesota (population 228)… a place that looks like a suburb of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon… the town where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

For this article, therefore, I selected some music by perennial local favorite Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers. Go to any search engine and find his signature tune “Bubbles in the wine.” Sit back in your recliner and enjoy the effervescence of the lady from Grygla and a success story that’ll make you smile….with all the necessary details so you can match her already great and always growing success.

When I first met Diane…

I first met Diane Dohrn a little over 18 months ago when she came to me seeking my help and advice about how to succeed online. Frankly, she needed all of the assistance I could provide; she was in a bad way just then in her life and fortune. She told me a story so typical on the ‘net as to be endemic… She’d been in this opportunity; she’d been in that. She had paid out thousands and reaped pennies. She had no tools for success… no traffic… she’d never had a moment’s training… and, until my advent, she’d had absolutely no one to assist her. And now she was desperate… with acute family difficulties… and her own disability to contend with. In short, she had nowhere to go but… up.

At bottom, she still had two crucial advantages: 1) me and 2) her own “never say die” determination that I came to know so well — and admire.

She was willing to listen…

People with problems say they want solutions… but in fact what they really want is the opportunity to vent… to bewail their lot in the world, do the “poor little me” thing… then rant and rant some more. In short they don’t really want a solution… they want a willing ear to chew on. But that’s not how money gets made. I told Diane, who came with some of these weepies, that I’d help IF and ONLY if she would focus on a series of online business building steps, including specific traffic building exercises she would need to do daily to grow the all-important traffic.

She agreed… and she kept her bargain, although it was sometimes tough for the lady when I absolutely refused to listen to items from the latest installment of “As Diane’s World Turns…”

She needed traffic… traffic…more traffic… and even more traffic. And that was where I kept our focus, with lessons on the effective use of traffic exchanges, safe lists, forums, and article directories where you develop crucial back links. An avid learner, she did herself the favor of listening to what I said, asking intelligent questions, and doing the tasks. To her surprise (but not mine) she began to generate traffic at once… and more each day. Especially as she began to understand and master one absolutely crucial traffic generating tool, which in due time she was to make her own traffic- generating machine. This marvel was the blog… and right from the start, it proved to be her forte so much so that I quickly saw that Diane Dorhn was not just going to master the blog, develop huge daily traffic from it… but become one of the true blog titans of the ‘net. Now she had my full attention, and we worked together less as teacher and student… but rather as 2 colleagues not just interested in how far the lady could take this…. but obsessed with the desire to raise Diane and her traffic to hitherto unimaginable heights. We were rockin’ and rollin’… Note for the blogless.

If you’re an online entrepreneur of any kind, trying to get huge daily traffic, you MUST have a blog. This is not negotiable. You see, a blog is your personal communications vehicle. It enables you to present and deliver your message. It is 100 percent you, 100 percent of the time. Say what you want, say it just the way you want.

The key to a blog is ensuring that it offers readers the best possible content. “Content is king,” Bill Gates famously said. That’s the kind of content you must have for your blog; content that gets people to read — and respond. Diane was fretful about this point. She worried that she have the time or skills to produce the high level content her blog and readers required daily. What could she do?

That’s where I really entered the picture, as an essential element of her success… for you see, I produce the champagne of blog content, and I produce it in 27 information categories from politics through ecology and just plain good stories; my content is sophisticated, readable, intelligent, timely, well written… and (most significantly) it gets astonishingly high reader response, as Diane came to know at once; right from the start these articles (and I write a new one each day) generated responses… lots and lots of them.

Thus, each day Diane starts by selecting the article of the day, the article that will anchor that blog and be its focus.

Then she follows a daily regime which she has followed, refined and developed over time. It goes like this:

1) Check Kstats first thing. Additionally check it several times each day to see the results on every article she has ever blogged.

2) Prepare today’s article. Select it, copy to Word. Then add all the necessary videos, links, trackbacks, pictures, etc. Diane knows that even great copy is better, more arresting, with such features. (By the way she keeps all this on Wordpad.)

3) She looks up the subject of the designated article in any major search engine. She likes to do this so she can make an intelligent comment on the article.

4) Before she sends her daily blog (first thing each morning), she visits other blogs to get ideas for the improvement of hers. She never assumes she has a monopoly on this subject; she looks for what others can tell her about her blog, the better to improve it. She told me she visits between 35-50 blogs daily, to keep up on developments in the field, get ideas, inspiration, etc. I believe it!

5) She then reads through this daily blog post a couple of times looking for typos and so on. A journalist’s daughter, she is a stickler for mistake-free copy… as a result her blog is clean, without the distracting errors made by other, less careful, blogsters.

6) Her blog always contains a great offer. Diane never forgets that the purpose of a blog is to make money, and so she works hard on her offers… both on the ones she makes in her blog… and the ones she makes when her readers respond. Because of the volume of her responses, she works on this for hours each day… and that really pays off…

One more thing she does…

Diane generously insists on my role in her success. She points to what she calls her “Internet bible” which contains Internet traffic, marketing and business building tips I have given her, live in my online programs and through my huge library of blog articles. She says, “When I need a lift, this is where I go. They are priceless.”

That’s the woman all over…

The truth is, the person who has contributed the most to Diane’s success is… Diane. She’s risen from no traffic at all to getting up to 5,000 responses EACH and EVERY day, without exception. Her own personality and approach to her thousands of blog readers is what makes the critical difference. She’s a small town Iowa girl and has retained the sincerity, empathy and quintessential Midwestern directness and candor of the heartland. Diane is authentic to her fingertips. She likes people; likes to help… and this shines through.

Now thousands of new people will learn about Diane and take heart if, like most online, they have had absolutely no success. That can and should stop now… for the best thing Diane can do is make you understand that the huge results she has already received are fully duplicatable and can be done off the kitchen table. Only one thing is missing from this system… and that is the great heart of the lady herself. That is all her own… and we admire her all the more for what she does with it to help so many for she remembers her roots and the help she got when she needed it most. This is why with her blog, she has not got just readers… but friends.

Write to be read. What you need to know and do to turn every word you write into the word that gets results.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a writing machine. My first article was published when I was 5 years old, 59 years ago; I’ve been a writing machine ever since. I’ve made a fortune knowing how to manipulate the incredible English language.

Sadly, I am in the minority. Having taught writing courses at many institutions of higher learning, including Harvard, I long ago came to the conclusion that most people would rather get a root canal than struggle with the dicey business of writing so people will read, understand and respond to what they write. Needless to say this costs them big bucks, since if you cannot use your own language, the lingua franca of the world,as the essential tool it is for business and life success, you lose much of the value of that language. And that is a crying shame.

I want to help you out, and I’ve therefore created the list below of key points which when mastered dramatically improve the way you write and the results you get.

1) Just because you’re a native English speaker doesn’t know you know anything about writing our complicated, sophisticated, absolutely splendid language. Speaking and writing are two separate, though related, things, and must be seen as such.

Start from the proposition that you are, shall we say, “challenged” by writing in English. There are many reasons why this could occur: you weren’t properly taught. Although teachers unions may strongly disagree, the fact is most teachers are not trained to write words that get results. Thus, they are unable to teach their students, who thereby start off their life-long relationship with writing the right words on the wrong foot. What’s more, most never manage to overcome this poor start; instead of trying to overcome the problem, they find ways to minimize or even avoid writing altogether. That is surely what throwing the baby out with the bath water means.

2) Admit you have a problem that’s not going to get better on its own.

As a business writer for my entire (now long in the tooth) adult life, one of the saddest things I see is respected business leaders not only unable to write the Queen’s English proficiently but proud of themselves because they mangle it in both its spoken and written manifestations. Yes, proud of themselves… each embarrassing misusage and mistake proving their warped satisfaction that they are therefore “people of the people”, thereby immune from proper usage. Just to state this proposition is to prove what a zany idea that is… yet it is common.

3) Force yourself to write more and better.

Like so many things in life, the more you write, the better you’ll get. Most business people are poor writers because, being VIPs, they delegate such “minor” tasks to others. What seems at first glance to be something rational and efficient, upon second glance proves to be nothing more than a means to slough off something you strongly dislike. Now hear this: even if you are the Chief Poobah of the world, indeed because you are that self-same Poobah, you need the ability to write the right words to get the results you must have to expand your clientele and business altogether.

This means no longer delegating all writing projects which ordinarily accrue to people of your dignity and position, but accepting at least some of them, not least to give yourself necessary practice… with the clear understanding that practice does most assuredly make perfect.

4) Less is always more.

Brevity, it is said on the highest authority, is the soul of wit. It’s also the key to ensuring that what you write will be carefully read and easily understood.

Poor writers are prolix writers; they write too much, edit too little, and manage to kill any fruitful results that might come by burying the objective in verbosity thereby suffocating the writing and ensuring its failure.

When you sit down to write any document whatsoever, your objective, 100% of the time, is to

state what you aim to achieve

Then, succinctly, marshal your arguments, with the preeminent and clear focus on what the recipient gets from you by taking the promptest possible action.

This means that if you want results, your invariable focus must be on the “you” you are writing to; getting this person’s attention, interest, then action is what all good business writing is about… such writing may never win the Nobel Prize for Literature… but who cares? It can make you rich.

5) Use numbers to structure what you write.

Good writers, particularly good writers in a hurry (are there any others?) use numbers to ensure readership and clarity. Thus,

“I have three reasons for contacting you today….”

“There are 6 major reasons why you must respond today….”

“Here are the 5 reasons you’ll want to take advantage of this offer now….”

Get the picture? Numbering provides structure, and it makes both writing and reading of what you write easier. Remember, you do not need to win prizes for your prose; it need only be good enough to get the results you desire.

6) Always write for the “you” receiving your writing.

Good writers, and by that I mean fast, efficient, easy to read writers, know a secret which, until now, has been unknown by you: that English prose sings when you make it “you” centered, the you in question being the person you are addressing your words to.

All people are egotistically and I-centered. Don’t fight City Hall on this one; take advantage of this fact, to your substantial advantage. The words you write should always be about, for, directed at and done (whether explicitly or not) for “you”, the person you must never forget you are writing for.

7) Read your words aloud… and save your breath!

Want to know whether what you’ve written will achieve your purpose? Read it aloud to yourself. If you find yourself meandering through dense thickets of words and punishing verbosity, difficult “show off” words and elusive meaning and directions, you need re-write (as every Hollywood director knows).

Sentences should never be longer than you can comfortably read in a single breath, no fudging either.

Key points should be made, emphasized, stressed… but always in short sentences.

Your writing should have a cadence which reading aloud will demonstrate. The best writing is writing that moves you briskly through the subject at hand, without a single superfluous word.

Start today.

As you implement these steps and begin to see tangible results which will only improve, you will be glad, even blissful, that the bugaboo of being a poor writer is now gone… never to return.

What will fill its place is one result after another achieved by deft use of the written word you feared at the beginning of this article… and now rejoice as one of the absolutely essential tools for enhanced business success. And that’s a fact you can write home about!

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About The Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is ., where small and home-based businesses learn how to profit online. Dr. Lant is also a syndicated writer and author of 18 best-selling business books. Details at http://homeprofitcoach.com/associates