Experts Tips – A Talk With Adam Connell from Bloggingwizard

Dear Readers,
I flattered with your excellent support for my blog, and I am happy to meet you all again with an experts tips category post. I would like to get suggestions from you to improve my blog and want to interact with you through comments.

I come with a set of useful replies from one of the bloggers that inspire me, Adam Connell.

 I would say that he is such a brilliant, active blogger and I am a regular reader of his blog “Blogging Wizard.” I have reached him through his Google Plus profile to provide some valuable answers for you, and he readily accepted my request. I prepared some good queries and sent over them through his mail.

When I opened my inbox in the next morning, I was surprised to see his quick reactions to my questions and am wondering with his passion in blogging. Before reading his nice replies, let me tell you few details about him and his blog.

About Adam Connell

Adam Connell is the founder of Blogging Wizard, and he works as an Operations Manager at UK Linkology, a thriving marketing consultancy based in the UK. He had a Master degree from Staffordshire University in music marketing and got inspired by his lecturer to learn more about marketing in general.

He have been blogging from an early age and built several successful blogs. He launched a video game blog that grew to 15,000+ monthly unique in 2 months. Finally, he landed on a job working for a marketing agency and beat qualified marketers with his innovative practical experiences.

Adam Connell is also a guitarist, fan of Firefly and Chinese takeaways. He can be described in simple words “Marketer by day, blogger by night who lives and breathes SEO”.

Blogging Wizard

Adam Connell started his blog, Blogging Wizard in Dec 2012. He teaches all aspects of blogging like planning, researching, social media promoting techniques, content creating and WordPress information for the bloggers to make a successful blog. Here, the readers could find in-depth posts and excellent tools to have an active blogging journey.

Bloggers can sign up here to get access to his free guide where he shares 9 core concepts that will help them to create a profitable blog. Not only these, but Adam had also contributed so many fabulous guest posts to various blogs, and he has been featured on some incredible sites like Huffington post, Social Media Examiner, Search Engine Journal, Marketing Land, Pro blogger, KISSmetrics and so on.

Experts Tips – Adam Connell from Bloggingwizard.com

Hi Adam,

1. How do you network with other bloggers Adam? Tell me it’s importance.

Networking with other bloggers is important.

VERY important.

If you don’t do this, you’re isolating you and your blog while missing a huge opportunity to build relationships with people who can help you.

The main channels I use to network include:

Social networking websites like Twitter, G+, Facebook and Linkedin

Platforms like Triberr

Blog comments (seriously!)

Email

Skype

I have to admit, the main two that are missing include meet-ups and networking at events – this is something that I just don’t get the time to do, but I plan to do a lot more in the future.

There’s more to networking than just using particular channels.

One of the best ways to build a relationship with other bloggers is to help them out with something.

It doesn’t have to be much, but if you are the first to make the move and help other people, you might find that they help you later on – in ways you might never have thought of.

A great example is when I included someone in a group interview.

A few weeks later they mentioned my post on Social Media Examiner.

It’s not always going to happen like that, and you shouldn’t expect it to.

Do good things and good things happen.

2. After Google Penalized “MyBlogGuest”, there are so many talks and queries in the blogosphere about that matter. What do you think about that and what is ur opinion about guest blogging? 

Google are spreading fear and doubt.

Like a lot of people in the SEO industry, I didn’t agree with the action Google took.

And the fact that Doc Sheldon’s blog (who published one post from MyBlogGuest) was given a manual penalty is just shocking.

Site wide penalty for a single post? Crazy.

And plenty of brands do a lot worse – e.g. GoDaddy with their widgets and Symantec with their SSL widgets (they even have an element on the Norton security website in the footer that describes the widget as a “SEO title” in the CSS).

Shame on Google for not penalizing these brands; brands that spend all that money with them on Google Adwords.

The truth is that guest blogging isn’t dead.

It’s just evolving.

Some people are getting twitchy, though; even Econsultancy.com made the move to nofollow all author bio links – I understand their motivations but if links are essentially ‘votes’ and we publish someone’s post that benefits our audience, surely we should be allowed to vote for their website.

It should be our choice as site owners.

I’m still accepting guest posts on my blog, but I am very picky about what I publish.

I send about 95% of guest post pitches straight to my trash folder.

And as time goes on, I will only continue to tighten up where quality is concerned.

If you are guest blogging for SEO purposes then you will get into trouble.

You need to start thinking about building your:

Traffic

Visibility

Influence

Authority

3. What are your earning sources? If possible, please be detail, so that my visitors could try those ways to make money with blogging.

Making money isn’t my main goal right now.

I am currently focusing more on helping my readers than anything else.

One particular thing I do is write detailed blog posts to answer specific questions my mailing list subscribers have.

A great example is actually this blog monetization post on making money with your blog – it ties in with the question quite well too!

That being said, I do earn money using the following tactics:

Affiliate marketing – I promote particular products that I have great experiences with that my audience might find useful.

Offering services – I also offer blogging/marketing related services to clients in my spare time.

Offering services is one of the most consistent tactics you can use while you are starting off and the better you are, the more money you can charge.

I speak to a lot of bloggers who ask me what services they can offer and this is completely dependent on your skill set.

You need to think about what you do well and who might be interested in paying you to do it.

4. Just share your great mistakes/roadblocks in your blogging journey and how did you overcame them?

One of the biggest challenges that I’ve had is staying focused.

I have too many ideas and not enough time to implement them.

That situation actually hasn’t changed but how I deal with it has changed in a huge way.

I’m more focused and more goal orientated.

That all started because I started planning where I wanted to be in 5-10 years’ time and what I wanted to accomplish along each step of my journey.

I also have a dream board that I created in Power point – it contains vivid imagery of everything that I want to have in the future.

I’ve had some challenging times over the last few years and this has definitely helped me to stay on track.

5. Newbies always struggles to get traffic to their blog. Tell a simple/practicable method to drive lot of traffic to their blog posts. Also tell something about your traffic achievements/secrets.

One of the most effective way of generating traffic that I have used involves researching key influencers within your niche, mentioning them in blog posts and letting them know about it.

It’s something I talk about on how to reach target audience by influencer marketing. 

Here are a few achievements that I can remember off the top of my head:

I created a video game blog and gained 15,000+/monthly unique visitors within 2 months with no SEO/link building

I’ve dabbled in using Reddit for traffic, one share once generated over 7,000+ visitors

Last year I emailed a popular web host and asked them to share one of my blog posts – I didn’t think they would but soon after they shared my post to their 85,000+ Facebook fans

I put together a group interview last year which generated 1,200+ Tweets, 700+ G+1’s and almost 5000 saves on Pocket.

Another of my posts on UK Linkology made it on to the Buffer suggestion list – we received 2000+ Buffers in 1 day

In comparison to some bloggers, these aren’t huge achievements but it shows what’s really possible if you work hard and use the right tactics.

6. Google algorithm is constantly changing. One day we heard that ‘guest blogging” is dead, other day ‘SEO’ is dead. Even I recently overheard that “Is link building dead’? What is going on? What bloggers need to do and how to tackle these issues. Also do share, if you have any bitter experience with Google animals.

Guest blogging isn’t dead, link building isn’t dead and SEO definitely isn’t dead.

The sky isn’t falling, although that’s probably what Google would want you to think.

As bloggers we need to divert our focus to creating detailed posts that users within our niche actually want to read and share.

The important step is then to effectively promote your content.

One mistake I see a lot of people making is thinking that clicking publish is enough – but it’s not.

We spend incredible amounts of time creating great content but we owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to let people know about that content.

I’m happy to say that I don’t have any bad experience with the likes of Panda or Penguin.

There’s a very good reason for this.

I don’t just look at what works now; I look what what’s going to work in the future.

My aim is to future proof my blog and my business – it’s not always possible to do but just opening your mind to the possibility can work wonders.

Your suggestions/advice for bloggers

There are a number of pieces of advice that I would like to leave for you:
Passion is the key to sustaining your blog and pushing boundaries

Give your readers a great experience and they will love you for it

Create content that is valuable and offers great insights – just doing that will help your content go further

Keep the quality of your content high and you will reap the rewards

If you mention someone in a post – tell them about it and ask them to help you share it (ask them nicely of course)

If you have a blogging related question that you would love to get answered, check out my public FAQ section. And if you don’t find an answer to your question – I might be able to answer it for you!

Thank you so much, Adam!

I am delighted with your precise replies, thanks again for accepting my request to provide some valuable answers for my lovely readers.

I am grateful to you for spending your quality time for contributing your real answers to my expert’s tips category post.

@ Readers

If you wanna learn blogging basics, marketing techniques, SEO and WordPress, I suggest you to visit the tremendous blog of Adam Connell.

It has been created to make you a successful blogger and to overcome your blogging challenges. Connect with him on Google Plus. Hope you’ve well involved in this expert’s tips post with Adam Connell, share your views through comment.