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A blog about Technology, new invention and ways of looking.

This is my review of Missinglettr, a service I love and swear by. If you are short on time, the TL;DR is that it’s a great service worth using to promote your blog on social media.

Contrary to popular belief, social media has not replaced blogging. Social media is huge but blogging is still an excellent tool to create an audience, advance your career, and content marketing to sell products (to name just a few).

The problem with posting your blog posts on social media once

As I cover in my book, social media is complementary, not a replacement for blogging. You should promote the long content you produce on your blog on your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The trouble is that you’ll typically only do it once per post. And guess what? These social media platforms will only show your status update including your blog post to a small percentage of your followers/friends. So let’s say that you are fairly popular and have 4,000 followers on Twitter. When you post about your shiny new article, Twitter might show it to, say, 20 people.

If they really engage with it by liking and retweeting it, then the post will have a wider reach on Twitter, otherwise, only a small fraction of your followers (and an infinitesimal percentage of the rest of Twitter) will ever see it.

Some content might have a short lifespan. For instance, a sale that will end at midnight or in a few days. The overwhelming majority of your content, however, will be evergreen or have at least a year’s worth of life in it.

So it’s a shame that it’s only shown to a handful of social media followers.

Repeatedly sharing on social media is tedious

The obvious solution is to promote the same blog post on social media multiple times. Sure, you’d want to space it out a little and not post the same article every single day, but it’s a great way to expose your blog content to more of your followers.

This approach maximizes the number of people that will come to your blog from social media, without aggravating anyone. After all, social media algorithms will not show your posts to the exact subset of followers each time and you are not promoting the same post every day.

Furthermore, if you don’t post too much on social media in general, this will help your social media properties look a little more active, making them more appealing to prospective new followers.

The problem lies with doing this in practice. If you try to do it manually, you’ll burn out quite quickly. Let’s say that you have 10 articles that you want to promote regularly and that you want to post each article 10 times. You are looking at writing a different description for each, adding the right link, perhaps a different image (if your post as multiple)… 100 times.

Let’s say that you publish 10 articles in 2 months. You are now tasked with handling another 100 social media posts while in the middle of posting the existing 100. It quickly becomes untenable.

Missinglettr comes to the rescue

Missinglettr has been a godsend for me. I try a lot of social media tools every year. The majority I find somewhat useful and then quickly forget about. They are useful to an extent, but I don’t really extract enough value out of them to justify investing time let alone money.

This is not the case for Missinglettr. It’s the most useful social media service I use and I’m so glad to have come across it.

What Missinglettr does is take your feed and creates repeated, spaced out social media campaigns from your posts. You have full control in determining what these posts will look like and say, as well as how frequently they’ll be posted.

I use it for both my Programming blog and my Plant-Based diet blog and it has brought me thousands of extra visitors to them.

How Missinglettr works

For each site I added to Missinglettr, I connected their respective social media properties. For example, I connected Programming Zen to my Twitter and my LinkedIn accounts, while I connected Plant-Based.org to its Twitter account and Facebook page.

Every time I publish a new post on either of these two sites, a draft campaign will be generated on my behalf on Missinglettr and I’ll receive an email to approve, make changes, or reject it.

First, a series of hashtags will be autogenerated from the content. I usually end up keeping some, deleting others, and adding a few, sticking to 5 hashtags or so in total. These hashtags will appear beneath each social media post for this particular post’s campaign.

Next, you’ll get to customize how each post will appear on social media. The description, image, or image made out of a quote extracted from your post are all customizable by you, but they are also automatically generated to save you time.

So if you don’t like the quote image on Day 14, you can flip through other quotes extracted from your post, or enter your own. Or you can switch to an image instead.

The embedded Tweet below shows an example of a quote image:

By default, Missinglettr gives you a good mix of quote images and images extracted from your post, but again, this can all be customized to your liking.

The tweet below shows one instance in which Missinglettr picked up a photo from the post:

Usually, I only need to do minor changes. You can change the length and frequency of the campaign, but in my case, I set my social media posts to go live on Day 0, 3, 7, 14, 30, 90, 180, 270, and 365 of the post being published. As a result, I get nine pre-populated social media posts that I can either approve or customize and then approve.

This is extra traffic on autopilot, while still ensuring that the content on social media is presented in the way I approve of!

Statistics are provided for each campaign while they are in progress and once they are completed so that you can see how effective they have been in reach your existing social media followers and new audiences.

Missinglettr Review
Missinglettr statistics (each post receives hundreds of extra clicks)

At $7 a month (if paying annually, otherwise $9) this is a no brainer and I would highly recommend it to any serious blogger.

The post Missinglettr Review appeared first on Technical Blogging.



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A blog about Technology, new invention and ways of looking.

Blogging has given me a lot over the years. A job, extra income each month for well over a decade, the downpayment on a house, many freebies, to name just a few.

Still, when I look back for a moment, an unusual benefit sticks out. I’m talking about the gift of connection.

Maybe, it’s the busy way of modern life. Perhaps, it’s because I moved around a lot throughout my life. Or maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly easy to form meaningful connections in this day and age.

Though, I suspect I’m not alone. Consider this joke on Twitter.


I find that quite funny and relatable.

Yet, blogging has allowed me to connect with so many people over the years. Many became professional connections, several online acquaintances, but a few actually become good friends. Geography is still an issue, mind you, but the friendships are real nevertheless.

Now, I’m not telling you to start a blog or resume your existing one for the specific purpose of making friends. (Though, there would be nothing wrong with that.)

Instead, I’m suggesting friendship that goes beyond professional networking is a possible, even likely, outcome. And I consider that a great benefit for bloggers.

The key is to be approachable. Letting people know you can be reached by email or whatever channels you prefer. Respond to comments and interact with those who engage with you.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the amazing people reading your words unbeknownst to you. Over time, some may become invaluable friends.

The post An Unusual Benefit of Blogging appeared first on Technical Blogging.



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How to Future-Proof Your Blog Against Google's Algorithm Changes

A couple of days ago I was giving a presentation on chatbot building and the business opportunities that they represent (also the subject of a free chatbot course I created).

I was very fortunate to have an engaged audience that asked many great questions. One of which is particularly relevant to this blog. An attendee asked, “What is the impact of chatbots on SEO?”.

What’s the impact of chatbots on SEO?

My answer was that chatbots are so new it’s unlikely Google has already put algorithmic changes in place that are specifically targeted at chatbots.

All we have to go by are the SEO rules we already know. From these rules, we can deduct the likely impact of chatbots on SEO.

Google does not interrogate chatbots like a human would, in order to crawl their content. So you should have the same information available on the site in traditional pages as well.

Provided you do that, chatbots are a net positive because they increase engagement and time on page, while lowering bounce rates.

All great signals of a quality site, which Google will reward with better rankings in the result pages.

How do you future-proof your blog for Google?

The question, and the answer I developed on the fly, led me to consider the more general question of how to future-proof sites against Google’s constant algorithm changes.

Google fine tunes its algorithm with minor updates hundreds of times per year. Once in a while they’ll roll out major updates that drastically change results and in the process impact millions of site owners.

You might be familiar with classic updates such as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird.

We can predict the future with a higher degree of accuracy if we first study the past.

The general trend that Google has shown over the years has been “serving the end user”. They have increasingly rewarded sites that provided value to the user, and penalized those that did not.

For example, Google loves long content because it is more likely to provide the answer that the user is looking for, or to inform them thoroughly on a given topic.

When users click on a result and stay on the site for a long time, it’s an indication that the site has something valuable to offer to the user.

Speed helps the user. A responsive design that works well on mobile phones and tablets helps the user.

Artificially repeating the same keyword the user searched for 50 times on the page does not help the user in any way. This so-called “keyword stuffing” approach worked when Google’s ranking algorithm was much simpler, but today it’s something that will actually penalize your site.

Do what’s best for the user

Your North Star, and the only way to future-proof your blog against Google’s algorithm changes is to do right by your readers. When making a choice that could affect rankings down the line, ask yourself, how will this help my users?

It would be very uncharacteristic of Google to penalize you for helping your users further. If anything, you are likely to be rewarded to a greater degree for this, as the algorithm becomes even more intelligent and refined.

At any rate, it’s the right thing to do, so do it anyway and trust that Google will take notice in the future.

The post How to Future-Proof Your Blog Against Google’s Algorithm Changes appeared first on Technical Blogging.



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Serious blogging takes effort, so it’s understandable that bloggers tend to expect some form of monetary reward. Sure, blogging can be fun and its own payoff, but most bloggers have certain expectations, or at least hopes, when it comes to their blogging income.

Sadly, many people find themselves disappointed by the results. One of the key reasons for this is that they approach blogging monetization differently than pro bloggers do.

The difference in traffic is a huge factor of course, but the RPM (Revenue Per Mille, or per thousand page views) among pro bloggers is also much higher than your typical blogger. So all things being equal, the big guys tend to milk their traffic far more.

In this post, I’ll discuss how pro bloggers make money by doing essentially the opposite of what most bloggers do.

The wrong approach to blogging income

An overwhelming majority of bloggers who try to monetize their blogs, will take the path of least resistance and opt to simply place AdSense ads on their blogs. Doing so doesn’t take much effort and in turn, it typically leads to… not much in return. Perhaps a few dollars a month, unless they have monthly six-figure page views or they cover a very specific niche that happens to have extremely high advertising costs (and therefore payouts).

A smaller percentage will then seek higher RPM ad networks (either because of the nature of the ads or because it’s a network specific to the topic covered in their blog). This will typically improve one’s blogging income a little, but it will still be quite limited for sites that don’t receive massive amounts of traffic.

Another small percentage of bloggers will try their hands at affiliate marketing, typically with a program like Amazon Associates or eBay. Assuming they are accepted, and they do a good job reviewing or discussing specific products in their blogs, these bloggers will generally start to see some extra revenue in the form of a percentage commission of every sale generated by their referral within a given period of time (e.g., 24 hours).

Some, but not many, will seek high paying affiliate programs where the commission will be substantial (e.g., $50+) or recurring each month if the buyer remains a subscriber of whatever product/service the referral was made for. Having huge traffic becomes less necessary when a single person buying the product (e.g., a hosting package you recommend) can generate $50 or more for you.

Whether people visiting your blog have the right intention (e.g., are they looking for hosting recommendations?) and whether you are a credible source of said recommendation, become much more important factors. But of course, the more traffic the merrier still applies.

A tiny percentage of bloggers will end up creating their own product that appeals to their audience. Think an ebook for $39, for example. Those who do a good job by creating a genuinely useful product and then market it correctly to their readers, can start to see income that would take decades to accrue with AdSense at their current traffic level. Think five (and more rarely six) figure income, depending on how successful they are.

An even smaller percentage of bloggers will add a final high ticket item to their marketing funnel. This is typically an expensive course (in the $397-$1,999 price range) or some exclusive, direct mentorship offer for an equally substantial fee. The sky’s the limit here in terms of income.

The inverse pyramid of blogging income

There is an obvious correlation between the effort required, the economic reward, and how popular each approach is.

The least rewarding, AdSense, requires the least effort, produces the least amount of revenue for the blogger, and in turn is the most popular monetization method among bloggers.

The most economically rewarding option, creating your own high price items, requires the most amount of effort both in terms of creating something of so much value, and marketing it (e.g., $397 is definitely not an impulse buy for most people). But you can make scary amounts of money from it.

The real problem is that most bloggers looking to monetize their blogs tend to follow the pyramid as presented above. Many will stop at the first four steps, at best, never venturing into making their own product.

The secret to increasing blogging income is to invert the pyramid and focus your efforts and priorities accordingly.

The Inverted Pyramid of Blogging Income

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t have AdSense, but you should prioritize the high reward items, as they are the ones that are most likely to make you serious extra income – even if you only get a few thousand visitors a month to your site.

In fact, I’m reminded of Stephen Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame (killer book, by the way, for personal growth). In it, he argues that if you try to place large rocks last in a jar filled with sand and pebbles, you won’t be able to. But if you prioritize the large rocks first, you’ll always be able to squeeze in the pebbles and sand. He was talking about time management and prioritizing goals and tasks, but it applies here as well.

In our analogy, your own products are the big rocks, affiliate commissions are pebbles, and ads are sand.

How serious bloggers make money

That’s how serious bloggers make money! They create what is essentially a funnel that’s laser-focused on getting readers to buy the useful product they’ve made.

They attract a lot of visitors with great free content that is relevant to their blog topic. Content that both helps people and establishes the blogger’s authority on the subject at hand. Then they will typically offer some sort of valuable freebie, like an email course or a PDF guide to turn their site’s visitors into email subscribers (this freebie is known as a lead magnet).

They’ll continue to provide value to their subscribers with great content, for free, as well as making them aware of some kind of offer related to their products (remember, people love sales). Some will even first sell the inexpensive product (e.g., a cheap ebook or course) and then upsell true believers to their more expensive products and/or services. If you are familiar with Tony Robbins, that’s what he does. But pretty much anyone raking in big bucks through digital sales adopts a similar strategy.

There is a reason for the common mantra, the money is in the list. Nothing beats having regular readers you can continue to communicate with directly. You’ll be able to provide them with useful information on a regular basis and sell them valuable products that will help them, and in turn, help you achieve your financial blogging goals in the process.

It’s worth noting that depending on the reasons that you personally blog, direct monetary gain might not be your main interest. And that’s okay. Your career itself might be the high ROI “product” in that case.

It’s important to understand that in most cases blogging is a content marketing tool for business, but it is not the business itself.

It all boils down to this. If you want to maximize your blogging income, sell a product through your blog. That product can be an ebook, course, private membership, or software, as long as it’s extremely useful and relevant to your readers.

The post The Inverted Pyramid of Blogging Income: How Pro Bloggers Make Money appeared first on Technical Blogging.



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