The Smart Income Blog

In the fifth installment of the “Bloggers You Should Follow Series”, is the incomparable niche community master, Thom Chambers.  Thom has been building niche communities for more than four years.  His newest venture, InTreehouses, is a free online magazine that helps teach bloggers, entrepreneurs and start-ups how to build profitable niche communities.  Here’s Thom:

There’s this line, right, in the film Dan in Real Life where a teenage boy tells Dan (Steve Carell) that “love isn’t a feeling, it’s an ability”. It’s a trite line in a mostly excellent film, but despite being rather lame it’s a line that’s stuck with me. Why?

Because when you say that love is an ability, it means that you can get better at it and impact it and be the actor rather than the recipient. It’s not something that just happens to you.

And neither is success online. (more…)

I am constantly learning as a blogger.  I would say I’ve only been blogging as a year.  I got my feet wet on my other blog, The Uncanny Kevin Douglas. (For the comic book nerd in you.) My writing is still, okay, but I’m learning more and more each day.  In the past, I thought that if I read more, my reading would get better as a result. (Yes, young Kevin was a naïve soul. God bless him.)  But, eventually, I got it that in order to be a better writer, you have to WRITE more.  There is no such thing as osmosis, here. The brilliant Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best selling book Outliers: The Story of Success, (required reading for all entrepreneurs) talks about this.  Well, not writing per se, but anything people are good at doing takes practice.

Gladwell states it usually takes about 10,000 hours of a chosen vocation, (writing, playing hockey, studying math, learning a computer language, etc.), to be considered an expert, or Olympic level athlete.  So, in order for me to, say be considered a top-tier writer, I would need to have practiced writing 10,000 hours- MINIMUM! So think about it like this.  Say it takes you 1 hour to produce a quality 500-750 word blog post (on average).  You would need to write 10,000 posts to be considered an expert blogger.  Now, I’ve written a lot of essays and reports for school.  But, I don’t think I’ve written 10,000 hours or if I ever will.

The point of the matter being, if you ever want to be successful in internet business, you’re going to have to practice, practice, practice.  Rinse and repeat.

P.S.  This is an oldie, but it never gets old.  If you’ve never seen the video of NBA basketball superstar Allen Iverson and his infamous rant regarding practicing with his Philadelphia 76ers team before games, treat yourself to it now.  This is classic.

I decided that in order to start becoming a player in the blogging and internet entrepreneur realm, I had to get off the bench. (Sorry.  Sports metaphor.)  What I mean is, I had to reach out to people who are already doing it and doing it well. What’s the worst that could happen?  They’ll say no?

Listen up, cupcake, in case you didn’t already know this, you’re going to hear a lot of rejection when you choose to become your own boss.  It will never be a cakewalk. Something I remember dear, old Mother Douglas telling me as a young lad,  ”A close mouth never gets fed.”  If you never ask, for fear of getting rejected, you’ll never get anywhere.  And also, remember, there are dozens of reasons why people aren’t able to write you a guest post.  They’re doing YOU a favor.  Not the other way around.

Here are a few more tips for you to remember when you start reaching out to people for guest posts: (Most of my interactions are through Twitter and email, so that’s what I’ll use as my points of contact) (more…)

As an internet entrepreneur in pursuit of passive and residual income, and you want to get your brand noticed, you absolutely need to be involved in social media; in some form or another.  Twitter and Facebook, right now, are the most popular social media tools on the Web.  I’ve begun branding my Smart Income Blog through social media and it’s really cool and fun.  But at the same time, I hate meeting someone and they introduce themselves as a “Social Media Consultant” or “Guru”.  My BS antenna immediately goes up.   Not for everyone, because there are some really great consultants out there.  But, the bad ones are making the good ones look bad.

Some of the “gurus” will tell you- “more followers, more influence.” One flawed assumption that people make on Twitter is that just because you have thousands and thousands of followers, you have influence.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  A large number of those Twitter followers are automated “bots” that are following you based on certain keywords you use in your tweets.  They feel they can build your brand’s profile by providing you with a service that you can do for yourself.  If you take the time to do it. (more…)

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) that bloggers, professional freelancers, and major corporations would use to manage their site’s content. It’s what I use for this and other blogs I own. I’ve tried other CMSs, but WordPress has always been the easiest to learn and maintain. There are thousands of WordPress blogs out there, but those that really stand out are the blogs that utilize plug-ins designed to make the user experience friendly, productive, and secure online. Many developers all over the world have contributed their own WordPress plug-ins, but there are only 10 plug-ins that have stood out from all of the rest based on their usefulness, their effect on people’s blogging experience, and their abilities to up the quality of the blog.

Let’s have a look at these top 10 plug-ins for users writing on WordPress: (more…)