202: Advice from a Veteran Blogger (Chris Garrett) on How to Build a Successful Blog

Veteran Blogger Chris Garrett on How to Build a Successful Blog Today’s episode is #202 and in it I have my good friend and co-author of the ProBlogger book - Chris Garrett on the show to talk about the changes in blogging since we wrote the book. Chris and I wrote the first edition of the book in 2008 and it went through 3 versions - the last one being 5 years ago in 2012 - so I thought it might be interesting to get Chris on to talk - among other things - about how we’d update the book if we were to do another version. The book still holds up pretty well and continues to be available on Amazon but a lot has happened in 5 years! Chris and I cover a lot of other ground too: Chris tells his story of starting blogging in 1996 and describes how he first monetized what he was doing - in many ways it was ‘content marketing’ years before anyone used that term. We talk about the two main reasons bloggers start blogging - because they want to express themselves and because they want to make money - and try to work out which is best We talk about the biggest challenges facing bloggers today We talk about staying motivated over the long haul with your blogging We talk about how to balance creating great content for your blog while also trying to develop products to sell And much more. Today Chris has his own newish blog called Maker Hacks which we talk about in this episode but he is also the Chief Digital Officer at Rainmaker Digital - the company behind CopyBlogger and StudioPress (the most popular WP theme collection on the web today) so we also talk a little about that at the end of the episode too. Links and Resources for Advice from a Veteran Blogger (Chris Garrett) on How to Build a Successful Blog Our Facebook Group Our Dallas Event Our Australian Event Chris’s Maker Hacks Blog StudioPress (affiliate link) ProBlogger Book on Amazon (affiliate link) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com - a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to increase your audience, to write amazing content, and to build some profit around your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do to help you as a blogger over at ProBlogger.com. Now, today’s episode is number 202, and in it, I have my good friend and co-author of the ProBlogger book, Chris Garrett, on the show to talk about the changes in blogging since we wrote the ProBlogger book. Chris and I first wrote that book – the first edition of that book in 2008, so coming up on a 10-year anniversary. It’s gone through a few different versions. A third edition is currently up, but that was published in 2012, so it’s been five years since we wrote the last edition of the book. I thought it might be interesting to get Chris on to talk about, amongst other things, how we would update that book, if we were to do another version – not that we’re planning on doing that. The book, I think, still holds up pretty well at its core, but there are some things that have obviously come about in the last five years, that we would add to that. If you’ve read that book in the past or if you want to read it, this is a good companion episode, I guess, for that. We cover a lot of other ground as well. Chris tells his story of starting blogging in 1996 – not that it was called “blogging” back then, but essentially that’s what he was doing. He also talks about how effectively he monetized that blogging through what we would now call “content marketing,” years before that term was invented. We also talk about the main reasons that we see bloggers starting to blog, either because they want to express themselves very organically, as Chris and myself did,