Joe the Plumber was a guy made famous by John Mccain and Barack Obama during their presidential campaigns. They both kept referring to how they were going to help Joe, and the people like Joe, to have a better life. Whether you enjoy politics or not, I think Joe can teach us several very important lessons about blogging, that we can implement on our own blogs.

Branding

Joe the Plumber is an incredible brand right now. Everybody   who watchs the news at all, knows who he is, and if he wanted to create a company, or a blog now he could get lots of followers simply because of his name. Joe the Plumber is a very unique name, and is different from everybody else.

Blogging Tip from Joe
Being unique in blogging is an essential thing to have, and also it’s a very marketable term.  He could easily create a little plumber logo, and he would be in business. Have a new, fun, unique, brand is really important, because it’s a way to separate yourself from everybody else.

Patience and Perseverance
I highly doubt that Joe the Plumber expected to become famous when he started his plumbing business. He just patiently continued to do his job, and persevered through the tough times. He didn’t try and create something he couldn’t do on his own. He was patient, and continued to do what he did best, and success came along.

Blogging Tip from Joe
In blogging we can spend hours of time, and thousands of dollars, trying to force something to work. Often it just needs a little patience for the ball to start rolling. We can’t try and force things to quickly, especially if we can’t afford them. There is a place for risks in online entrepreneurship, but if you can’t afford the online company you’re trying to start, then trying to force it will just make you lose your money. The patience to allow a project to come to completion, and the perseverance to bring it to that point, are essential for anybody to succeed online.

Luck
There’s always an element of luck in everything. 99.9% of plumbers will not become famous like Joe, why did it happen to him? He was in the right place at the right time, and it just happened. You can plan out everything, have a great company idea, and have it not take off. Sometimes people just get that little bit of luck to kick start everything, but other times it doesn’t happen.

Blogging Tip from Joe
You can’t rely on luck, but you have to accept that sometimes, things will succeed that just don’t seem right.

Viral Effect
This is the most important point I think, if you didn’t apprecaite the power of the viral effect, appreciate it now. Joe the Plumber is the king of the viral. The most ironic thing about Joe, is that he is a famous nobody. He is famous because he’s a nobody who’s famous. Joe the Plumber went to bed a nobody, and woke up the next day a celebrity.

Blogging Tip from Joe
Word spreads quickly around the internet, and if you can create something fun, interesting, and totally new. It can take off over night. In blogging anybody can succeed, and it can happen anyday.

I hope these lessons from Joe can help you on your blog, and help you succeed online. For more Blogging Tips from Famous People check out Barack Obama can teach us about blogging.

Have you ever wondered how the top bloggers like Problogger and John Chow could post every day? The answer? They can’t. Yes even the great Darren Rowse and John Chow don’t spend hours everyday posting for their blog. So then what do they do? There is a handy little WordPress program called WordPress Timestamp. This program makes it so that you can post a post, anytime that you schedule it for. And the best part is, it comes standard with all WordPress Versions 2.6.5 and up. When you’re posting it’s right above the “Publish button and it looks like this.

You can easily set up the date and time, and this allows you to write posts weeks in advance. This is invalualbe if your scheldue is anything like mine, in which you can’t write every day, you don’t have the time. But you have blocks of time where you can post. But you can’t post five times in that one day. Using this tool you can write the week’s post in one day, and then the rest of the week you spend marketing them. What a time saver! Now you may be thinking, I thought this post was about “How to Post Everyday.” Well I’ve already written about how to overcome writer’s block, and get the post ideas. Using this tool in combination with that post, you’ll be able to have posts everyday, without even having to write every day.

One Word of Caution.

Your WordPress clock may be set to a different time zone. When I first used this, I realized my WordPress clock is an hour ahead. So I said for it to post at 12:00 but on that clock it was already 1:00. So if I hadn’t realized that the post would not have posted on time. So just make sure either they’re both set to the same timezone, or you just line up the times right.

One Word of Advice

I don’t know if you’ve quite grasped this or not, but if you think carefully about what I just said, this is an incredible opportunity to get traffic. I just said that Problogger and John Chow use this, so that means that thier posts come at a certain time Everyday. Maybe you haven’t done any comment advertising yet, but the first comment on a popular post can get lots of traffic. For example, check out this post by How to Make my Blog on how much traffic he received from a comment. He got 239 visitors over a period of four days, for a five minute comment. So there is certainly great potential here. Now imagine you know what time they’re going to post everyday, and so you can go on the computer five minutes before refresh the page, and be the first one to comment. I’m not going to promise you 240 visits for every comment. But at least for me, it’s given me in the 25 visit range which isn’t very much, but it’s all been from Problogger and so it’s highly relevant traffic.

Steps for using this Information

So simply add these top blogs into an RSS reader. They post everyday, so check your reader and see approximately what hour they posted. Then the next day watch that hour. Once you have this information, you can be the first to comment, giving you some highly relevant traffic. Now this can help no matter what niche you are, just find the top blogger in your niche and implement the same tactics.

Disclaimer

Now, considering the rant I just had about spam commentors, I can’t just leave you with that, telling you to spam these top bloggers. Listen, if you’re going to contribute to the conversation then don’t worry about it. I’ve found several times where I’m the first one on the site, but I don’t end up being the first comment, because I spend sometime writing a quality comment. Don’t just write a quick good post. That won’t help you anyway because you won’t get traffic. People will click on your comment if it’s quality. So build the discussion, and then you’ll help everybody out.

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I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t know very much about affiliate marketing. I won’t sit here and pretend like I’ve made thousands of dollars on it, because I haven’t. But I have enough common sense to realize some basic strategies, and ideas that will be helpful. I’ve realized something today about Affiliate marketing that people seem to have missed. It seems very obvious but the past weeks have proved to me that people haven’t heard it yet.

Tip #1 (Very Important!!)

Don’t Follow the Crowd

Phrase it however you want, “don’t just copy what everybody else is doing.” Why does this have importance you say? Because all of the Affiliate Marketing and Make Money Online sites are copying each other. Now I realize you’re trying to make money, and yes it’s probably a great product. But I’ve already read a bunch of other reviews on it. I’ve read at least four articles in the last couple days on the OIOPublishers 90% sale, and Blogging to the Bank 3.0. (Notice, I didn’t put referral links on those, now that would’ve been sly…) And yes I realize you’re trying to make money from referrals. But seriously why would somebody buy it from you, if ten other sites are all saying the same thing. I’ve got nothing wrong with bloggers trying to make money, and go for referrals if you want. But either be the first one, or go for some originality. Try to find older products that new bloggers might not have heard about. The blogosphere grows by the thousands every day, there’s a high chance a lot of your readers won’t have heard of it. So try something new, don’t just advertise the same products as somebody else. I’ve even seen advertisements for both of these products on the same blog, only a couple days apart. Honestly, you make yourself look desperate. I don’t know how much it effects your readers or not, but I’m sure it annoys a lot of them. I bet you if you were selling a great product that wasn’t very popular yet, you’d make a lot more money in the long run.

Basic idea right? Well we’ll see… Comment if you’ve seen more like these. Aweber had it’s streak for a while, but I’m sure there are tons of others you’ve seen. They come suddenly for a couple weeks everybody’s blogging about them, and then they’re gone.