With the promotion of Author Plus I did a fair bit of blogger outreach. I’ll be honest, I’m used to being outreached to, rather than doing the outreach myself. After spending a night looking through blogs using Google Searches and my own network for blogs, I was getting nowhere. Instead I tried something a little more structured, fired up Microsoft Excel, and created a Blogger Outreach Spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet I am sharing for you.

What Does The Spreadsheet Do?

The spreadsheet is how I use to track bloggers I have outreached to. I can fill in their details (which I’ve removed from this spreadsheet for privacy reasons – kinda don’t want to post other people’s email addresses on there!), chase up reviews, and also optimise my outreach strategy for future products based on how successful the outreach was. That is how to use it going forward.

However, to begin with, I’ve pre-loaded more than 25 WordPress Blogs and sites that either I have had my products reviewed on, or friends have.

What Tools Did I Use For Blogger Outreach?

Of course this list was constructed a little more constructively than my standard Google Search. To use this for any niche, here are the tools I used.

• SEO Gadget’s Content Strategy Generator Tool – This was a goldmine to get the first list of people, basically well connected blogs out the
• Tweets 2 CSV to find regular tweeters of WordPress news.
• SkyRocketSEO Guest Post Opportunities Tool – This dug up some great services
• Guest Post Opportunities Tool on Twitter
• My Blog Guest – Not as useful as some, but I did use it.

Where To Download This List?

To download the  spreadsheet, click on the button below. That’s it. No signup, and no catch. Though links/likes/tweets to this post would be most welcome!

What To Do With This List?

My strategy for link building using blogger outreach is this. I start at the top, and then every week I contact 3 more individiuals. At the time of writing (26th April 2012), I have passed through the entire list and either got a response or seen other people get a response. I use Remember The Milk to schedule the outreach (usually every Monday), and the whole emailing process takes about 45 minutes tops.

I Want To Include My Blog On This List!

I will be removing dead blogs as I am actually using this tool, so I will update this spreadsheet going forward. If you want to be included in later versions, please contact me.

How To Follow Updates

To get updates to this spreadsheet, the best way is to subscribe to my email newsletter. That way I can update you whenever I make changes to this post. It’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

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I am delighted to announce the launch of Spotify Play Button for WordPress!

Recently, Spotify launched their Spotify Play Features, which are lovely, and you can add Spotify music to your site. As a heavy user of Spotify, I’d love to see how it worked for my WordPress-run sites. As such, I knocked together this plugin called Spotify Play Button for WordPress.

Spotify Play Button for WordPress allows you to easily embed Spotify Tracks & Playlists using the Spotify Play Button into your WordPress Blog. You can either add them as a widget or into the post as you can see below:-

Spotify Play Button Plugin for WordPress by The Blogging Dojo

It’s free (donations appreciated), and supported (email me). Read more about Spotify Play Button for WordPress Here or download by clicking the link below.

Click Here To Download

This is the second part of the “Running a Twitter Competion” Mini Series. You can read Part 1 here.

So after promoting the comptition and raising the profile of the competition, we now move onto deciding the winners when the competition is closed. This used a couple of tools, to help make my job a lot easier.

Collating Entrants – Tweets 2 CSV

The first challgenge was to collate tweets. Unfortunately, there was nothing out there that could do this easily, so I made a tool – this tool is Tweets 2 CSV. Basically you can take a search string and export the resulting tweets & users as a CSV. This allowed me to easily add numbers to each tweet who entered (by entry, I used “people who used the #authorplus hashtag”), before making the draw.

If you are to enter competitions on twitter, here are two tips:-

• Make Sure You Follow Instructions! You’d be surprised how many people tweeted something that was different from the competition string. It’s best to follow instructions to the letter! More on this later.
• Make Sure Your Twitter Feeds Are Public: Most competitions I know collate entrants using search strings. As such, private twitter feeds, despite entering, aren’t actually entered due to private feeds. I recommend if you are to enter comeptitions, leave your twitter feeds public.

Picking Winners – Random.org

After grabbing a feed from Tweets2CSV, I numbered each entry in Microsoft Excel. To draw the numbers, I used the random generator number to generate five numbers. I then matched up the numbers to the numbers on the spreadsheet to check the results.

Why did I use Random.org? It’s largely considered to be the most randomised number generator out there (even “random” numbers aren’t truly random, often “random” numbers are actually just a series of numbers matched to dates). After 5 numbers, I then verified the potential winners.

Verifying Entrants – DoesFollow

To verify the second part of the competition, I needed to make sure that the user was actually following the Blogging Dojo Twitter Account. To do this I used a tool called DoesFollow. This allows you to check if account one is following account two. Easily it was the best tool I tested for this sort of thing, as a lot were either innacurate or required you to sign up to their service. DoesFollow is completely free, and well worth checking out.

Once each winner was verified (one wasn’t, naughty!). I scribbled together a blog post & contacted each winner.

Prize for entrants – Discount Code

This was where amazing value came from. I offered a discount code to all entrants to the competition if they dropped me a message to the contact form. Surprisingly, three people took me up on the offer, two of which lead to sales. So for running the competition, I actually saw a profit.

Conclusion

Overall, I was delighted how the competition ran. I got plenty of traffic and a few sales, which was lovely (and unexpected). However, there were ways I could improve it.

• One Week – too long? I felt towards the end of the competition that it became hard & harder to promote it beyond the initial buzz. A week was a little long, I thought.
• Get Partners On Board Before The Competition Began – I was lucky that a couple of my mates retweeted the competition a few times, this lead to a few more entrants without any asking. I’d like to get a few people on board next time early on to promote it the second of the launch.
  
• Prizes for 1st, 2nd & 3rd - With 5 prizes, they were fairly similar. I think next time I’d like to run a staged prize competition, with a nice prize for first, one for second & one for third.

What are your thoughts? What did you make of the competition? Any tips on what I can do better? Leave them in the comments!

Last week I announced the winner of a week long twitter comptition to win one of five copies of Author Plus. The plugin is currently undergoing some rennovations and feature additions, so I thought it’d give a few copies away to generate interest in the site and the blog. Furthermore, it’s easy content as I can talk you through the process of giving stuff away and what I learnt and didn’t learn. To get next week’s wrapup post, please subcribe via email to this blog, you can do this below. Don’t worry! We’re going nowhere, and we’ll be back when you’ve signed up.

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Deciding the Prize & Entry Requriements

Deciding the prize was easy enough – it would be a copy of Author Plus. I made the concious decision to not include installation along with the plugin (the Author Plus Installation Service is the “upselling”, if you will, of the plugin), largely due to time constraints at the moment with my life. Instead I offered more than one version to hopefully generate more entrants. In hindsight I probably should’ve offered a first prize which included the installation.

To decide the entry requirements to win the plugin, I wanted to make it simple, easy yet beneficial to me. I have run competitions before and seen competitions ran before and seen that entry requirements, even for big prizes, need to be quite simple and a low amount of work. Nevertheless I don’t want it to be a complete waste of time, so I thought a “tweet and follow to win” (yes I did check, more on that in part 2!).

Clicktotweet made the process of tweeting even easier for entrants.

When writing the competion posts was careful not to include “over $xxx+ of prizes!”, I felt it looked tacky. Instead I introduced the prize, why it was worth winning and how to win it. I included a direct twitter link so people could easily click on a link to tweet the competition tweet (this was provided by Click To Tweet). Surprisingly I got very few tweets that deviated from it! More on why I didn’t accept these entrants in the next post.

Promotion

To promote the contest, beyond the initial “me tweeting it and getting a few people entering”, I did use some of the following tools, services and techniques to get some pretty decent coverage:-

• Calling in Favours & Bargaining Chips – I’m lucky to know a few active twitter users in person, so a quick tweet with a smiley face (or even a bought beer with another of my mates) worked well to get a few more retweets and entrants. I also seemed to receive an obscene amount of people asking for help with various things. I assisted, but asked for a tweet in return. Many were happy to oblige.
• Targeted DM’s - As I’ve blogged about on here before, whilst retweets can lead to a massive amount of traffic, actually asking for them in public followed by “Please RT” can lead to very few retweets. I know people who activel block the phrase “Please RT” in their twitter client! Instead, sending targetted DM’s, even inviting them to enter the competition, does work a lot better.
• Blog Engage – Probably my biggest refferrer throughout the competition, and easily the source of the most entrants, Blog Engage is a Digg-like site aimed at bloggers. With a bit of persuasion and downright begging, I got onto the “recently popular list” for about 24 hours. It sent me a lot of traffic and a few entrants. Marvellous!
• Win WP Stuff – Probably my third or fourth biggest referrer but the source of more entrants than those two combined. Win WP Stuff does exactly what it says on the tin – you can win WordPress Stuff. It’s a fantastic concept and one that I am going to subscribe to. If you give away WordPress plugins or run WordPress based competitions, you need to subscribe to this!

Stumbleupon Paid Discovery was a little disappointing.

What didn’t work

• Stumbleupon Paid Discovery – In all honesty, whilst it drived me a bit of traffic, it didn’t send me loads (a comment high up on this post from ViperChill brought more!). Furthermore, the traffic was least engaging of all traffic. I’m tempted to try Stumbleupon Paid Discovery again (got another idea for it), but it didn’t really work for the competition.

Anyway that wraps up part one. Part 2 will be posted next week with how I decided winners and final thoughts. To get a copy of it when it is published, please subscribe to my blog below.

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Thoughts? Questions?

This was my competition and what I think is important to share with you. Have you any questions on what I’ve said so far or want anything explaining? Please let me know in the comments!

More to come next week!

Anyway, onto the winners. The first five verified names drawn out of the hat were the following:-

• @bizmind
• @mayman
• @funbu
• @avitricksgroup
• @TheRealBoydo

Congratulations on the winners! I have followed you and will drop you a DM shortly with details on how to claim your prize.

For those who haven’t won, don’t worry, as a consolation prize I’ve a 20% Off Code for Author Plus. There are too many of you to email/tweet (and it’ll look spammy), but if you wish to claim it, please drop me an email with the twitter account you entred the competition.

Thank you!

Author+ is currently undergoing a few feature upgrades, so in order to help promote the new features (which will be introduced in a couple of weeks), I have decided to give away 5 copies of this top selling plugin.

How to Enter

I have made the competition incredibly easy to enter.

1. Follow @bloggingdojo on Twitter.
2. Tweet “I’ve entered the @bloggingdojo competition to win Author+ WordPress Plugin  - http://bit.ly/apcompo  – RT to Enter #authorplus” (or you can just click this link to tweet it)

Dull Stuff

Entries must be received by Midnight GMT on 21^st March, with the winners announced on this blog on 23^rd March. Five winners will be picked at random from all correct entries. Please note that this plugin is just for the plugin, not the installation service. One entry per person.

Good Luck!

Stock Photo Credit – “Where The Wild Things Are” by Sande2

My Blog Guest is awesome. A resource where struggling bloggers can go for content. Bloggers who are looking to promote their blog regularly trawl the site looking for opportunities to blog on other blogs. One of the most common ways to find opportunities to blog is by placing a request in the forum, list your niche and see who replies to you – you often get a few messages in your inbox.

However – whilst you get a few messages, they are generally pretty limited, and often you get the same few people respond to messages. Also it can be easy to miss messages (something I’ve done numerous times, with weeks occurring between messages). Even if you get some great opportunities, you are limited to those who browse the forum.

However there is another way to find guest posting opportunities using one of it’s other features – The Article Gallery.

This requires a bit of work though to set up though, so bear with me.

First of all, select your niche at the top of the page. You will be presented with a list of articles located within that niche that have been uploaded to the gallery. Blog owners can visit the site and find an article to place on their blog for when they are short of content. These blog owners place offers for the content, and the blog owner either accepts or rejects the offer.

Now, this is the thing: unlike traditional guest posting where the blog writer can be rejected by the blog owner, in this method the blog owner can be rejected by the blog writer. This means that the blogs these articles end up on are often a lot stronger than those found in the forum (a big reason for the premium version of My Blog Guest – something I do recommend you invest in).

But how do you find these blogs?

Well, you head to Google Alerts. Do an exact match search for the title of the blog, make sure you search for the exact title of the article (by surrounding the title in quotation marks), search for all results and email you “once a day” (you don’t want to be receiving emails every minute, trust me). Click save and wait a day or 5.

Note: I like setting up 5 at a time, to get results quicker.

A Day or Five Later

You will receive an email like this.

Your blog post that you created an alert for has been indexed in Google. Furthermore, the website that article is on – webhostingmasters.com – has a domain page rank of 6 at the time of writing. A nice strong link!

Now What?

You should build up a list of websites that are strong blogs. You can then approach these blogs direct for guest post opportunities. You will find a bunch of great blogs that use My Blog Guest, that are not your usual suspects that are promenant in the forum.

Try it yourself!

Last night I released the latest version of WP Email Capture.

For those of you who know anything about me before starting Blogging Dojo, I did used to meddle around with WordPress Plugins before the release of Author Plus. One of my most successful was WP Email Capture, a plugin that allows you to collect email addresses the second you start a blog.

Anyway, I neglected it for a bit whilst I worked on other projects, however recently I was contacted by a plugin developer who needed French integration to the plugin, and together we made the plugin i18n compatible (the standard for internationalisation).

I also have made a website, twitter account & facebook page associated with it (it will likely be my next paid plugin), so get following those!

To download WP Email Capture 2.1, visit either the official site or the WordPress.org page.

If you spend as much time poking around WordPress.org as I’d do, you’d see some plugins (such as Yoast’s excellent WordPress SEO) have banners. Enviously, I’ve looked on, wanting to know how to add banners to my plugins. Of course, you can Read The Chuffing Manual and find out how to add banners. However, it is quite well hidden and I only figured it out when Polevaultweb told me. So you can thank him by downloading InstaPost Press – an Instagram Plugin for WordPress.

To those who don’t like digging to the bottom of manuals, I’ve created this handy guide to show you how to add banners to your WordPress.org plugin pages.

Disclaimer: This post does require a working knowledge of SVN. If you know how to upload WordPress Plugins to the repository, then this is good enough.

Step 1 – Create The Image For Upload

I’ve used sxc.hu for my image. Create an image and open it in a graphics program (I use FireWorks). Chop and resize the image to 772px wide by 250px tall. Save the image as either a png or jpg file and name the image banner-772×250 (with either the .png or .jpg file extension).

Step 2 – Create a Directory In The Repository Called “Assets”

Within your plugin SVN repository, create a folder called “assets”, this should be the same folder level as branches, tags & trunk. Place the file you created in Step 1 within the assets folder.

Step 3 – Commit!

Commit the bloody lot, wait 15 minutes and you should see the results on your WordPress Plugin Page.

For example, here it the WordPress Plugin Page for eBay Feeds for WordPress

Extra Step – Testing How Your Banner Will Look

If you want, you can test your plugin by uploading your banner to hosting and going to your plugin whilst logged in to WordPress and adding “?banner_url=A_LINK_TO_YOUR_IMAGE” to the end of your plugin URL. That’s what the guide says, I didn’t manage to get it working when trying it myself.

Anyway, eBay Feeds For WordPress gets about 5-10 downloads a day at the moment, hopefully with the banner this will increase the conversion rate, leading to more downloads!

It’s that difficult time of the year – the year end whereby like the inevitable march of death you await the new year to start things anew. Also during this week, people like myself cannot be bothered producing epically epic blog posts that we usually produce. Instead, as a great way of generating content, people look back on the year, and as such, the dreaded list post makes it’s appearance. You know, the ones that are good for page views? In my opinion, they’ve been overdone – there have even been “Top 10 Blog Posts about Top 10 Blog Posts” (which is easily my favourite). Anyway I thought I would share a blog post that inspired me this year. But first, a story.

My issue with my freelance stuff (and yes I include this as my “freelance stuff”) is I spread myself thinner than the butter on a Premier Inn muffin. Often I get projects that are profitable and project and projects that are fun. The ones that are more fun (such as You’re Supposed To Be At Home) I spend more time on.

Anyway, Blogging Dojo started as a partnership with a guy on a “Forum That Won’t Be Mentioned”, but after a string of disagreements, the project became solely mine. It lay effectively dormant, as I didn’t really know what to do with it. I had a few ideas, but nothing concrete.

And then I read “How To Create a Million Dollar Business This Weekend” by Noah Kagan of AppSumo*.

I can’t remember exactly what about the post inspired me, maybe it was the competition that inspired me – I like Mexican food after all (and I could be dangerous with $1k of AppSumo credit), so I grafted my bollocks for two weeks to make something useful. It was long nights and constant browsing of Stack Exchange to get it done. After a week, I didn’t want to stare at another piece of code.

But after one week, and about $200 spent, Author+ was finished.

After the deadline of the competition, I entered. I was down $200, but the whole process taught me a heck of a lot of actually creating something for yourself – creating something you can sell, marketing it, dealing with support queries (boy don’t I know about this), iteration and updates, upselling and affiliates.

I sit here two months down the line. Author+ has made a profit now (not a million dollars, but enough to justify the couple of week’s work), and continues to get sales every now and again (averaging about 2 a week at the moment). That’ll do me.

It has inspired me to drag WP Email Capture out of what was effect Development hell with a new lick of paint, a new version (which should get released very soon), and a premium plugin which will hopefully be ready by next christmas. I’ve also got a couple of other projects on the back burner which will hopefully be the focus of 2012.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is get things done. It doesn’t have to be perfect (especially with software – the first version of Author+ was lacking a lot of features and the documentation was lacking and confusing, but it does need to be something you can build on. People are very forgiving, and whatever you decide to make is probably a lot better than the tat you can buy at christmas.

Try it, you’ve nothing to lose.

*Affiliate link, what of it?

Photo Credit – Kriss Szkurlatowski