I’m extremely excited to finally be able to share with you my first book, The Blog Business Funnel. Written and refined over 6 months (since June 2009), it’s an outpouring of knowledge on everything I know and have learned about how to run a thriving freelance business supported only by your blog.

In July 2008 I was studying full-time and freelancing part-time as a writer, copywriter and consultant. In that month, I earned more than $8,000 through my own Blog Business Funnel. Every single cent was earned through jobs that came through my blog.

Was I a veteran freelancer? Nope. I took my first ever client in September 2007, only eleven months earlier—a freelance blogging job. I figured I would start with what I knew!

When I added up my earnings and stared in shock at the final figure, I knew I had stumbled across something incredible.

If I’d known then what I know now, I’m confident I could have cracked the $10,000 mark that month.

The book was borne out of the question: Why do bloggers struggle so much with advertising and affiliate programs, when there is clearly a better way?

While others have written brief articles on the topic of using blogging as the foundation for a freelance business, nobody else has outlined a complete blueprint in book form, sharing everything there is to know. If you don’t have a freelance business yet, you’ll learn how to create one.

Whether you’re a blogger, freelancer, or neither, you’ll learn everything you need to create a Blog Business Funnel system.

See Inside

The Blog Business Funnel is a beautifully designed 93 page eBook with 8 substantial chapters. Click the thumbnails to see a one-page excerpt from the beginning of each chapter.

Chapter 3: Trust and Targeted Traffic

Chapter 4: Turning Readers Into Clients

When you have a healthy and thriving blog, the next step is to start funneling readers into your business. You’ll learn how to properly promote your services to your readership.

(See first page)

Chapter 5: Using Business Launch and Re-Launch Formulas

People are always talking about the importance of product launches, but what about a proper launch for your freelance business? This chapter shows you how to create exciting launches that will fill your client list for months to come.

(See first page)

Chapter 6: Advanced Blog Business Strategies

Get a measurable and profitable return on investment with online advertising for your services. Clever tips that some of the world’s biggest companies still don’t know.

(See first page)

Chapter 7: Scaling Up!

The book finishes with three strategies that your competition simply don’t know about: 1. How to charge your dream rates 2. How to create low-maintenance partnerships you can profit from (without actually doing any work) 3. Productizing your business to sell in your sleep.

(See first page)

It’s More Affordable Than You Think

Most eBooks that teach you ways to run a business online require a serious investment. $97 for one eBook is considered cheap. And for other products, the price keeps climbing. $199. $247. $499!

This product is different - I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible, so that the book isn’t out of reach of anyone. If you walked down the aisles of any bookstore you’d never pay $100 or more for a single book. Why should an eBook be different?

The Blog Business Funnel is $29 USD if you buy it now.

If you do one single hour of billable work as a result of reading this book, it has paid for itself.

Of course, it’s my hope that the book will help you land thousands of dollars worth of clients, all while doing what you love.

This book shows you how to do work that makes you happy, and earn a great, independent living in the process.

The Blog Business Funnel (eBook), 93 Pages

By Skellie

Written and perfected over six months, this book outlines an easy to follow process for funneling clients into your freelance business through your blog.

You’ll learn how to create a thriving popular blog your target market loves, how to sell your services to your target market and how to optimize your business and charge dream rates. Filled with Skellie’s clever tips on blogging, freelancing and personal branding, you’ll learn dozens of things you never knew and will be landing clients on autopilot in no time.

It’s time to earn a living online doing something that makes you happy.

Photo by Cia de Photo.

This is the third and final part to a series on choosing a topic for your new blog. In it, I’ll discuss how to grow your blog even when you’re pioneering a topic that hasn’t properly been covered before. Read Part 1 of this series, Read Part 2 of this series.

The best aspect of launching in an under-served niche is access to an undivided market. If you’re the first quality blog on a topic a lot of people have been searching for, you’ll generally become the biggest blog in that niche because you were the first — as long as you stay consistent. ProBlogger.net, arguably the first blog about blogging, is still the biggest. FreelanceSwitch, arguably the first blog dedicated to freelancers only, also continues to remain the biggest in its niche.

While it’s increasingly rare to find a blog that is the only one of its kind, it’s still possible to find yourself in an under-served niche (meaning there aren’t enough blogs to meet demand). Because there’s less competition, it’s easier to stand out as one of the best. As long as your leading position in the niche is unchallenged, you’ll grow at a rapid rate. Tapping into an under-served niche is what many bloggers dream about when brainstorming blog topics.

While the potential gains are great, surviving in an under-served niche can present a host of difficulties. Though the challenge is a tough one, it’s certainly not unbeatable. In this post, I’ll show you how to succeed in a tough, frontier niche.

Read More…

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography.

This is the second part to a series on choosing a topic for your new blog. In it, I’ll discuss how to grow your blog even when there are a lot of other blogs on the same topic. Read Part 1 of this series.

Starting strongly in a crowded niche will involve emphasizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses. You can use the other blogs and websites in your niche as footholds to growth. Here’s how:

Let your peers provide a platform. Let’s begin with the obvious: your target audience is reading other blogs in your niche, so that’s where you should try to attract them: by commenting, guest-posting, pitching links or becoming a contributing writer on one of your niche’s most popular blogs.

A crowded niche indicates a strong demand.Make the most of this. If no-one is doing quality blogging on a particular topic, it might be because the target audience for such a topic is incredibly small. An empty niche does not automatically indicate an under-served niche.

Read More…

Photo by Untitled blue.

Many things go into building a house before the first drop of concrete hits the soil, and before the first brick has been laid down. Surveyors pore over a prospective construction site and take measurements, confirming that there’s enough space for the construction, and that the ground is steady. They consider the surroundings, the views, and other environmental factors long before the building tools leave their pouches.

If you’re thinking about launching a new blog (or your first ever blog) I want to suggest that you should approach choosing its niche in much the same way.

Read More…

Image from ajourneyroundmyskull.

There are no new ideas. When we create, we dig into our well of knowledge and experience, grab a handfull of stuff, mash it up and recombine it in new ways. But the idea is still built out of other ideas that came before - ideas we’ve consumed.

The quality of our ideas depends only on what we build them from. What we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, what we’ve felt. To have better ideas, we need richer experiences. But most importantly, like stoking a fire, we must constantly add more fuel to keep the fire vigorous. When we stop, old materials build nothing but old ideas.

What does this mean for the mantra we hear humming beneath all the advice we read online? The mantra that says: “Don’t watch TV, don’t spend too much time reading, don’t play games, don’t waste time on Twitter. Stop consuming other people’s ideas and creativity - if you want to be successful, you have to produce.”

If you want to have stale ideas, follow this advice. Put nothing in, get rubbish out. Get burnt out. When you burn more creative fuel than you add, what do you expect to happen?

But if you want to build something truly creative and meaningful, do the opposite. Great stuff in, great stuff out.

Watch breathtaking movies and mind-bending TV shows. Read incredible books. Listen to great music, with the volume up loud. Play exhilarating video games. Study your idols. Drench yourself in ideas. Go somewhere you’ve never seen. Walk to the top of a mountain and breathe in strange and wondrous air. Consume, consume, consume, and do so unapologetically. Become a connoisseur of the best things other people have done. Absorb everything the world has to offer you. Do this for as long as you can bear.

Only then will you have collected the raw materials needed to produce something you can be proud of.

One thing at a time.

Most important thing first.

Start now.

Photo by 416style.

I am always the first person to advocate studying blogs you admire to learn their techniques. I’ve dedicated a lot of time to spreading the word about blogs that are doing things right, and how you can emulate them.

But in this post, I want to talk about how we can learn what no to do from the evolution of popular blogs. Because they’ve learned from their mistakes, we have the opportunity to learn without ever having to make the same mistake they did. I’ll show you how, here.

Read More…

Photo by Irargerich

(If you enjoy this blog, there’s some big news at the end of this post.)

The best thing about the internet is the wealth of free, in-depth information on almost any topic. If there’s something we want to do, but don’t know how, the internet is often the first place we turn - and so it should be. The rising class of self-taught experts is impressive to behold, and the number of self-styled teachers is staggering.

If you read blogs in this niche often, you probably know a lot about how to do things just like the experts: how to make money blogging, how to attract a storm of traffic to your site, how to spread your work far and wide through social media, how to launch a product and how to write the world’s best blog post.

But whenever we outline the perfect way to do something - the ideal process that all the experts use - we also outline a dozen wrong ways. Pitfalls to be avoided, common mistakes, amateur errors. As the information on doing everything right becomes more and more prevalent, there are fewer and fewer excuses to do anything wrong - to be less than perfect.

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Photo by brilliantdandy.

In a few days this blog will be two years old. In internet terms, it’s not young anymore, and nobody would consider me a ‘new’ blogger. Now that the buzz of being discovered and rapid growth is moving into a new stage of maintaining and trying to build upon what has already been established, I’ve started to reflect on some of the insights I’ve gained through the successes and failures I’ve experienced as a blogger.

At its most basic, I believe what it takes to reach your full potential as a blogger is split into three key areas, or what I call ‘The Three Ds’. Like me, you’ll probably find that you’re strong in some areas and weak in others - and if you’re not hitting the goals you would like, it is probably these weaknesses that are holding you back.

I hope that you will go beyond reading the theme word of the post and assuming you know what it means, to digging deeper into the content. You might find some unconventional tips and ideas inside!

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Photo by vramak.

In the past hidden talents have commonly been defined as things you are great at but nobody knows about, or things that you would be immediately great at if you tried them, skipping beginner and progressing to intermediate in an instant. The first definition is useful mainly in movies, the latter is not really useful at all (arguably more myth than reality).

Your hidden talents are the things you could do that would make you happy. But you don’t know it yet.

This is not just about work, but speaks to the whole content of your life. I’ve already written about the psychological evidence that shows that when people do work or activities that make them feel good and involve skills, either mental or physical, live happier lives.

This is just common sense, and it’s probably nothing you haven’t already heard before. But I don’t think many people actually take the next step and give themselves the opportunity to discover all of their hidden talents.

Read More…