Energize Your Blog – Here’s How!

Today’s post is going to be a little different. Recently, Lynette Chandler at BlogEnergizer.com offered to write exclusive blog interviews to tell the world about how her site helps you energize your blog quickly and easily.

Question 1: Ok – let’s start with a nice easy one. What is Blog Energizer and why should a blogger care about what it offers?

In a nutshell, we help you find stuff to blog about and connect you with other bloggers. We actually do many things so I’m going to break down to a couple of things our members enjoy that any blogger can too when they join us:

1. Members are notified when another blogger is seeking guest authors. Guest blogging as I’m sure you’ve been told is a great way to get exposure for your business, blog, website and also to build your brand. So, we give you a little helping hand, save both parties some time.

2. Inversely, we also let you know when we find bloggers who would love to be a guest on your blog. This is helpful because you know we would love guest authors but sometimes we get too busy or let’s be honest get complacent and don’t actively seek them out. We’ll help you out and bring them to you. From then on, you decide if they are a right fit and to contact them.

Every week, we will also send you blogging resources like who’s holding a contest you may want to participate or let others know is on, where to find and get free share-able items your readers might like to get their hands on. These can include ebooks, print magazines, reports, music, printables, checklists and even software. This is helpful because sometimes we just want to give something away without any ties or making readers jump through hoops. Just something you know they will enjoy, help you add yet another post and also people appreciate you for sharing great finds.

(Note from Angela – This part of the service, by the way, is FREE! Check out the free membership here: Blog Energizer)

On the flip side, Premium members are encouraged to create and let us know of these freebies to build their brand, expertise and traffic. Submit it to us and we will let all the other members know and work on getting them to share. In other words, you get to borrow our influence.

Premium members also enjoy 90 blogging prompts every single month with suggestions of related product and services they can refer to in their posts to help monetize their blog. Where possible we also give you ideas how to present the affiliate offer in a non-salesy, in-your-face manner. This is really useful for a very new blogger to get into the habit of blogging and at the same time develop the skill of selling through their content.

Question 2: I work with many clients and customers who’s plates are completely FULL. Can you tell me 3 ways Blog Energizer can save them time so blogging is not another overwhelming to-do task?

That’s the nice thing about what we do. We don’t add on to your plate at all. Here’s why. If you are already blogging, you have to come up with content no matter what. We just provide additional tools or resources that could help you come up with that content. If you don’t like it, or don’t find it relevant, just ignore until something else comes up.

As business owners, if you are already creating share-ables we talked about earlier, you can never have too many people talking about them and sharing it. Why not let us help you. Same thing goes when you are looking for places to guest blog at or people to be your guests. There’s nothing to learn, no software to figure out, no do-this-or-your-business-will-die thing. Think of us as a blogging research assistant.

Question 3: While letting blog readers know about great content and offers out there is great, the main goal of almost every blogger is to increase their profits. What practical tips do you have for us to use content such as that from Blog Energizer to increase the return on time and money invested?

This is where Premium members get a leg up because of the suggestions we talked about earlier how bloggers can use the topic we suggest to promote a product (or even their own products).

As for other peoples resources we share, these are meant to supplement your regular posts, break things up a little bit for your readers. Also, many of these resources have affiliate programs you can sign up with.

Here’s another thing I’d like to impress on people. You don’t always have to take the resources at face value. Does it remind you of another similar offer that you are an affiliate of or does it give you an idea to do something similar for your products? Then write about that instead of the one we suggested. There are many ways to step outside the box.

Let’s take this resource we shared not too long ago, where Wrigley’s is giving away free samples of gum in off the beaten path flavors. If you write a business blog, you could talk about what a great and free way this is to test the market, something companies used to pay gobs of money to do. Then at the end maybe suggest your services if you have one, to help others do market tests for their products. Another angle could be a short history about gum for a foodie blog. From there, you can put up an image that links to your affiliate link for a gum ball machine or… get this a book. Yes, there are children’s books about the invention of gum and a book title “Don’t swallow your Gum!: Myths, Half-truths and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health”.

It’s just one topic that at face value seems only valuable to a mom blog or not even valuable at all but I hope I’ve managed to supply ideas how one topic can be seen through many lenses and that in turn supplies original content for you that you can monetize or use to build your expertise.

Question 4: Fun Question – What are your top FIVE favorite blogs of all time (business or pleasure – doesn’t matter!)

Oh you’re really putting me in a spot trying to choose five amongst like hundreds. Most of the time business and pleasure merge into one for me but here are the ones that I have tagged read-first.

• Nettuts+
• Lifehacker
• MakeUseOf
• Web Worker Daily
• CopyBlogger

Question 5: Serious Question – For the ‘future blogger’ who is really interested in what we’re talking about here but yet to get started, what first steps do you recommend?

I assume you are talking about those who are in it to earn money or a full time living right? (Angela says: right)

Don’t just start a blog for the sake of it and think you’d be a pro blogger earning a million bucks in a year.

Get organized, have a game plan. Pick a market (a group of consumers/topic) where people have proved to spend money and where there are companies making profits in. But don’t go into it yet. Ask yourself if you will have the interest and knowledge to write quality, useful content for readers in that market, not just for a month or two but for as long as you have your blog, day in, day out. Can you live with the topic like a spouse? Will you be able to converse and intelligently debate with others on the topic? If not, find something else.

Once you do, get a domain. This is so so crucial. Never build awesome content for other people’s domain. Even if they promise you can redirect traffic to your own domain later it’s not the same.

Get the blog set up but don’t go live until you have a bunch of content posted and a bunch more on standby waiting to publish. Schedule a healthy dose of them so you are ahead and stay ahead as you add more. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, pick out mentors who have done it before, follow them and hang on tight for the ride.

Did you find this interview helpful? Then do give Angela a thumbs up by voting for her at http://blogenergizer.com/teip-vote/