Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck – Reporters vs Experts

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).
If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.
I’ll be frank – you want to be the expert.
Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.
Most Bloggers Are Reporters
The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).
There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.
Don’t Replicate Your Teacher
If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.
The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.
Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.
How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.
If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.
Report on Your Process, Not Others
The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.
It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.
Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.
You Are Already An Expert
Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.
Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.
Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.
Reporting Is A Stepping Stone
If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.
Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.
Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.
This article was written by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

Create Cool Images With a Wet Floor Effect Maker

Ever since the beginning of “web 2.0″, designers started creating logos or images with reflections that look pretty cool. Most of the time these images are done by professional in-house web designers which most of us bloggers don’t have the skill or access to. Fortunately there are two sites I came across that can add this effect to any image you’d like to apply it to.

The first one is called Wet Floor Maker which has several options such as angle, camera height, brightness, reflectivity, and more. Just upload your image and adjust the options to your liking and voila….you’ve got a cool new wet floor effect image. Here’s the end result of one test image I created:

The second site is called Image Reflection Generator and it doesn’t have nearly as many options as Wet Floor Maker does. The final image did look a bit more professional, however but you have no control over the angle of the reflection which I don’t like. Here’s the same image but after converting it with Image Reflection Generator:

These are convenient and quick ways to create images with a wet floor effect without any photo editing experience. The one thing I don’t like about both of these sites is you can’t preview the image before you click the “create image” button. Several times the end result image wasn’t exactly what I wanted so I had to go back and start over again. Kind of a pain but since the service is free, I can live with it. Try both out and let me know which you like better!

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Add a Cool Slideshow of Picasa Photos to Your Blog

Abdullah recently asked a question in our Blog Forum about how to add a Google Picasa Web Album Slideshow to his blog. This was a great question so I thought other people would be interested in how to do it as well.

Picasa is a free photo management product by Google that I actually use for all my photos. The software organizes and can adjust your photo albums on your computer and then easily uploads them to your Picasa account. I love the ability to quickly upload pictures from my trips, etc and just send the url to my friends and family.

So if you already have a Picasa account and have pictures you’d like to include on your blog, you should check out this widget. If you don’t have Picasa yet, I highly recommend you download it for free by clicking on the link below.

After you select the photo album and settings you want to use, it gives you some code to paste into your site. You can either paste it into your post or add it to your sidebar by creating an html/javascript widget. Then just paste the code into the widget and save.

Here’s a screenshot of the widget being setup:

Notice how easy the setup process is. It provides the code to paste into your blog and then you’ll have a flash slideshow rotating through all your photos! Pretty cool. I was going to include a working demo but once you login to your account and start building a slideshow, it shows you real-time how it works. It’s worth checking out….enjoy!

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A Quick Solution to Protect Your Blog From Spam Harvesters

Are you tired of getting a ton of spam everyday? I am too but unfortunately there is no solution to eliminate it 100% but there are smart ways to avoid and reduce spam. The method I’m going to talk about is aimed at bloggers and how they can easily implement a preventative measure to reduce the amount and chances of spam being sent to them.

With the popularity and ease of setting up a blog, the number of people blogging increases daily. This is great but one main problem is most of these people aren’t usually educated in proper techniques such as spam prevention.

Did you know that putting your email address anywhere on your blog or website is an open invitation for new spam? Yes, you heard me right. Little do you know that trying to be nice and provide a method for your readers to contact you only causes you more harm than good.

Let me give you an example. The usual way to include your email address on your blog is to use the mailto: tag. This is the case if you use Blogger and any other blogging platform. Unfortunately for you, spam harvesters use “web spiders” to troll the internet and look for email address links on websites and blogs. When they come across your site they will look at the html code and grab your address.

Prevent Spam Harvesters From Getting Your Email Address

The best way to beat spam bots as well as giving your readers a way to contact you is to use a contact submission form. That way your email address is never displayed and a script handles the entire mailing process. This is a great option if you use WordPress but for people using Blogger, it’s not an option.

You don’t know how many Blogger blogs I’ve come across and just rolled my eyes. There it is…their email address listed right on their site. Look out spam, here it comes! So my quick solution to protect all blogs (especially Blogger users) from spam bots is to replace your email address with an image.

There are several sites out there that can create free email icon images for you but I like using this email icon generator site because it provides several cool options. My favorite is the branded email image based on your email host provider.

Here are some examples of email images I created in a few seconds:

As you can see, it supports all the popular email domain addresses as well as an option to create your own custom email address. It even hosts the image for you if you don’t want to copy and upload it to your own server. I recommend uploading it to your Blogger site so you’ve always got it available regardless.

Make sure after you use these images you do NOT turn them into a mailto link. If your email address is anywhere in the html code, spam harvesters will find it. I had a friend that I shared this trick with and he replaced his email address with this image but didn’t remove the mailto link! He might as well of not even used the image.

Damage Control – Where is My Email Address Today?

Ever wonder if your email address is publicly available today? A good test to see what sites publicly list your email address is to just Google it. If your email address is sjobs@mac.com then you’ll see that there are over 500 results in Google which is obviously a bad sign (I hope Steve Jobs has one heck of a good spam filter). There should be zero listings of your email address when you do a search. If not, you should go down the list of sites and ask them to kindly remove your email address because they are just feeding it to spam harvesters!

I usually Google my personal email address a few times a year just as a safety check. Just last year as I was doing my check, I noticed there was one site listing it! I was so mad and immediately contacted the site owner to take it down. It was an article submission site and they were carelessly publicly listing all their users email addresses. That’s just bad business. Eventually they took it down and I told them they should do the same for everyone else in their system.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing to take away from this article it’s to remember to never ever ever list your raw email address on your blog. It’s a guaranteed way to get spam faster than you can say “spam me please”. If you don’t believe me try setting up a new temporary email address and don’t use it for anything except this test. Now paste it on your blog and see how long it takes before you start getting junk email.

I hope the end of spam comes in the near future because just like you, I’m tired of wasting time in my day filtering and deleting junk email. Google or someone, please come up with a solution soon!

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5 Reasons I’m Not Upgrading to WordPress 2.5

First off, I want to clarify that I love WordPress and without a doubt, it’s the best blogging system on the market today (for free I might add). The features and expandability it allows such as being open source, allowing custom plugins, etc is more than enough reason to rant and rave about this product.

Now that we’re clear, let’s talk about upgrading WordPress in general. I always upgrade my WordPress blogs to the latest version whenever a new release comes out (especially a security fix) but this time I’m holding off on upgrading to 2.5 because I really don’t like it.

I know, you hear all the positive reviews about the cool new features which I like as well but there are a few reasons I don’t want to upgrade quite yet. Here are my top 5 reasons why I’m not going to upgrade to 2.5 and will wait until a newer release is available:

1. I don’t like the new narrower interface which is left aligned and too compact. I wish there was an option to change it to fluid width.
2. I want to make sure all my plugins are updated to be compliant with 2.5+.
3. Usually after a major dot release, there is a smaller dot X release less than a month later. Why upgrade now when you’ll have to go through it again soon?
4. I have several WordPress blogs and it would be a huge undertaking for not a big difference in features.
5. I’m too busy now to spend time getting used to a new interface. I can quickly cruise around and get things done with WordPress 2.3.3.

Some of my reasons are personal and would change my daily work flow environment per se, and a couple reasons are just related to the WordPress product itself. Now if these issues don’t bother you at all then by all means go ahead and upgrade to 2.5. I’d at least recommend installing it on a test site first (localhost will do) and test it out yourself. That’s what I did and I’m glad I did.

I’m a guy who likes to have the latest and greatest versions of everything so not upgrading to 2.5 makes me annoyed. What is even more annoying is the message that appears in the header and footer of the admin section of WordPress telling me “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now“.

Thanks WordPress but I don’t want to upgrade quite yet so leave me alone. I did some searching for a way to disable this feature (which is only available in 2.3+) so check out my other post on “How to disable the WordPress update message“.