From the monthly archives:

September 2009

The Complete Guide to Hiring and Managing Blog Writers

by Kevin Fleming on September 25, 2009

One of the first, and most important things I figured out when I started blogging full time is that hiring a team to write for you can be much more profitable than doing all of the writing yourself. Two or three writers can manage to crank out way more content than I could flying solo. The best part is that the writers begin to pay for themselves very quickly, here’s why:

  • Having multiple writers allows me to increase the content of my sites at 2 – 5x the rate that I could when writing articles myself (depending on how many writers I hire). More content and more frequent updates equals more traffic which leads to more revenue.
  • I now have more time to spend on marketing and promotion. Many successful bloggers will tell you that when first starting a new site, 70% or more of your time should be spent on marketing and promotion.

Many people decide not to hire writers because they worry about the quality of the writing. My philosophy has always been that if I can do it myself, I can probably hire someone to do it better than I can, for less than the cost of my time. The trick is to give the people that work for you all of your expectations up front, and not to settle with anything less than what you outlined initially. If the writer ends up writing on the wrong topic, make them rewrite it. If the article isn’t formatted correctly, make them reformat it etc.. There are always going to be bad hires out there but most people do just fine with clear instructions.

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How To Choose The Best Web Hosting

by Kevin Fleming on September 23, 2009

It's important that your site stays up  when you get a large influx of visitors.

It's important that your site stays up when you get a large influx of visitors.

When starting a new website or blog the one thing you want to get right the first time around is hosting. One of the biggest headaches I had when my sites started to take off was finding quality hosting that had good support and could keep my sites up with a growing number of visitors every day.

 This could have been completely avoided however I didn’t do the proper research and paid for it dearly.

I signed up with a really bad host called MindOnTheNet (I’m not even going to link to them) which I’m convinced is run by some guy out of his moms basement. My sites would be down for an hour or two almost daily and support was almost non-existent. 

During the downtime, one of my sites was being featured on the front page of Digg and even got picked up by Slashdot. Needless to say the host couldn’t handle that kind of traffic (he couldn’t keep my site up with no traffic at all, let alone 40,000 visitors a day.) and I lost a ton of free publicity. I then spent the next 2 months trying to find a quality host. I must have switched hosts about 4 times before I found a decent one.



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Mindset is Everything.

by Kevin Fleming on September 22, 2009

 Your mindset is the most important driving <br>force or engine behind your business.

Your mindset is the most important driving
force or engine behind your business.

For those of you that are friends with me on Facebook, you may have noticed I have a little saying under my profile picture:

“Every morning I wake up with guns blazing, ready to take on the world – if need be.”

I’m a firm believer in keeping yourself motivated and believe that to be successful with whatever venture in life you’re perusing you first need to have the right mindset. When you’re an entrepreneur you need to be ready to fail (possibly many times) before you succeed. You need to expect to fail, and have to continually be persistent, which requires a different mindset then you would have at the standard 9-5 job.



What The Right Mindset Has Done For Me


I guess I should start out by sharing what having the right mindset has done for me, since this is my first post for the site and some of you don’t know me personally. I attribute most of my success to my mindset. Right now I’m 22 years old and I have enough money in the bank to go wherever I want and really do whatever I want (within reason). I have a supportive family but wasn’t given anything from a financial perspective, besides a computer from my grandfather when I was 12 years old – which changed my life (but that’s another post).



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