For those of you who don’t know or have never heard of Colin Wright, you really should subscribe to his blog. It’s a series of entertaining, never-ending antics that take place on a global scale. Colin lets his readers pick what country he should live in next. Despite my attempt to send him to Somalia, Colin was kind of enough to spend 45 minutes chatting with me and packing this interview with a ton of useful tips for you guys.
- How to Develop an Archive of Resources for Projects You Are Considering
- How to Use Comments to get Your First Several 100 Subscribers
- Why Shouldn’t Take The Shortest Path to the End Result
- The Importance of Getting out to a Broader Audience Outside of the Blogosphere
- How to Comment in a Way that can be as Valuable as a Guest post on a Blog
- The Myth of “blogging is not that much work”
- His Ebook Networking Awesomely
- How a free ebook got 55,000 downloads
- An amazing upcoming road trip between 3 bloggers
- How to leverage the relationships you have to effectively market your ebook
- The influx of unexpected opportunities that result from blogging
Colin is the author of the blog, Exile Lifestyle. He is currently living in New Zealand dealing with the woes of connectivity issues. You can follow him on Twitter @colinismyname.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 40:52 — 18.7MB)
Thanks for that awesome interview, you both.
I can totally identify with Colin's approach on blogging and making money from it – if you are coming from the creative part, it feels very uncomfortable to use tactics like those “spammy” internet entrepreneurs. It just doesn't feel right. And creating premium ebooks and selling T-shirts is a kick-ass way of starting/strengthening ones digital empire.
I also like he's approach on getting outside of your niche (Colin, I don't think you have one) and writing guest posts for way different blogs. I remember reading one of his posts on a travel blog, and it was about story telling.
I bought his networking book and it's really aaaawe-some – cool design and pics, and even better value & content.
Grrreat personality man, watch out for me
From an observation standpoint, the broad key pieces to growth of a blog from my vantage point seem to be:
1) Quality, remarkable, unique content
2) Being mentioned on other sites
3) Gust posting
This is a generalization as with blogging there are no rules. Ev at FBTS grew from interviewing, being mentioned and quality content, Mars does it by commenting and being unique and networking, Tyler Tervooren did it by a combination of all three…it really seems to be about achieving that momentum and velocity where you gain a large enough audience that you begin to grow organically. The goal of any blogger seems to be to get to 1000 daily readers and 1000 subscribers.