Ms. Ileane: Well, thank you so much; it s my pleasure.

Welcome to the Virtual Office Center. I am Electra Ford and this audio is my interview with Ms. Ileane. Ms. Ileane, founder of Basic Blog Tips, shares blogging and social media tips that support aspiring bloggers to achieve their personal and professional goals. Her contribution to the blogging community includes making valuable content available on various platforms and giving presentations. This year she was one of the instructors at the content success summit hosted by Social Media Examiner. In this interview, shares her process of becoming a professional blogger and advises how to achieve success in this field. Ms. Ileane has a wealth of information so prepare to take notes and sign up for her content on Basic Blog Tips.com. During this interview listen for Ms. Ileane s three Cs and use this advice to develop your own. Electra: Thank you again Ms. Ileane for agreeing to do this interview. I m looking forward to talking with you, a professional blogger, about developing an online blogging business. Ms. Ileane: Well, thank you so much; it s my pleasure. Electra: I remember I learned about your website because was looking for some information. I went to your YouTube channel and your Facebook page. I was excited from the first moment I saw your site and started connecting. It was great to get someone at your level to immediately engage with me. Ms. Ileane: Wow, that s a great story. I m so glad I did all of that. Ms. Ileane: It s been a pleasure meeting you and knowing you. You are so professional and you even ended up being a contributor to my blog. You didn t just hang out you became a contributor. Your article is still getting comments and traffic so I appreciate it. Electra: Another testimonial [I have] is that the article I did on your website [led to] someone contacting me to write a couple of articles for their blog. Ms. Ileane: Wonderful Electra: I ve read some of your interviews and learned that you started blogging accidentally while making the effort to support your daughter s blog. Can you share a little of your story with our audience? Ms. Ileane: Ok, let me say that I actually have a full-time job. In that job I work for a publisher and this year makes my thirtieth year with that publisher so you know I love my job. Working in the publishing industry, believe it or not I never really got into blogging. I really didn t know too much about going on the Internet getting RSS feeds and subscribing to them. My main exposure to the Internet before I started blogging was The Internet Movie Database because me and my girlfriend are always looking up movies and Wikipedia; that was it. So when my daughter, God bless her I love her to death, she went to school for finance. She actually graduated from Temple University with a degree in finance and she decided she wanted to start a blog. Back then people were blogging on WordPress.com. When I heard she had a blog, I said, I have to go read what my baby is blogging about (she s not a baby, she is a grown woman but she will always be my baby). Anyway I have to go check out what she s

blogging about. I wanted to sign up because I knew you could sign up but I didn t know how to do it. I thought I was signing up to subscribe to her blog but I was actually signing up to start my own blog. That was the happy accident because once I finish filling in this form (like I said it was WordPress.com back then) it asked what are you going to name your blog. I decided to name it Ileane. So I had Ileane.wordpress.com. This is how I started blogging accidentally. My blog was about anything and everything. I started looking for tutorials. Back then they didn t have an organized set of tutorials for WordPress.com in 2009 like they do now. I started writing tutorials myself as I learned. I went to Lynda.com and YouTube. That s when I met my mentor, Lisa Irby, of To Create a Website. I started watching her videos. I decided to write about what I was learning on my blog. That s how it all started. Electra: I see what peaked your interest. Ms. Ileane: Well, I can add a little more to that Electra: ok Ms. Ileane: As I mentioned, my friend and I were always into writing. We were writing emails back then that was big during that time. We wrote long emails. We used to live in the same city, Philadelphia but she moved to Atlanta. So when she heard that my daughter and I were blogging she told me she heard about this thing called Blogger. I m going to start blogging there because I heard it was better than Wordpress.com. she said. I said ok, I will start a blog there too. She agreed saying yes and you can tell me which is better. So I decided I would compare Blogger to WordPress.com. This was another thing that peaked my interested because I really did want to know which platform was better. It is so funny; when I look back I see I was naive about the whole blogging world. But it was all about the discovery and that s what made it fun because it was like a challenge. Electra: The same thing was going on in the virtual assistant (VA) industry. Ms. Ileane: Yep, Electra: What were some of the struggles you experienced when you started blogging? Ms. Ileane: I was very hard headed and I still am; I learn things the hard way. So everyone advised to have a niche. Identifying a niche was a big struggle for me. I felt like everybody should read my blog. I was trying to appeal to everybody. Ms. Ileane: I felt like everybody should care about what I want to write about Electra: I heard that

Ms. Ileane: So identifying a niche was a big struggle for me. I didn t even like the word and I still don t. However, you pronounce, I still don t like the term but I understand it now. I wanted to write about what I wanted to write about and I didn t want anyone to dictate my goals. In fact, at one point my tag line was This blog is about life, love, music, math and anything else that comes to mind. Ms. Ileane: I was all over the place. In fact, I encourage people to experiment. My daughter has expertise in finance. As I mentioned her degree is in finance. She worked for Vanguard but she disliked it and her blog didn t survive. She didn t like being in the finance industry. It is recommended to have a level of expertise when you start a blog. But it is also advised to blog your passion and this is true. Although, I started writing about anything and everything, writing these tutorials teaching myself how to blog became my passion. My posts were well received and I did a good job. I recognized I liked writing these tutorials. I found ways to do something easier or learned a new aspect and I felt excited. This is how I overcame the struggle of identifying my niche. This satisfied me and it served the blogging community. As I started to grow my blog and meeting other bloggers, some were more advanced and some were less knowledgeable. I realized that I was helping people and that excited me. This is how I got passed the idea of I don t have to have a niche because you kind of do. I know that now. I like that my niche is wide. I don t just teach blogging. I teach social media, I teach YouTube and now I m doing podcasting. Although I m still teaching on various platforms it all relates to content marketing, Internet marketing and related topics. I m not blogging about my love life anymore. Electra: I understand. You reminded me of something else that happened through finding your website. I learned about Lisa Irby through your YouTube channel and subscribed to her as well. Lisa talked about the importance of doing your passion. She said that a lot of people that followed her started their own YouTube channel to do videos but they didn t have the passion for it. They thought they wanted to have the same niche but they didn t have the passion they experienced all these obstacles and problems. Electra: How long did it take your website to achieve over 1,000 visitors? Ms. Ileane: I do look at my Google Analytics and teach the importance of knowing your stats. But in terms of knowing when my blog reached 1,000 visitors which was your question, I didn t know so I researched it this morning. That was fun. Electra: Good. Ms. Ileane: I use two sources for my statistics. One of them is WordPress.com stats. I do want to be clear. I migrated to self-hosted WordPress, which is WordPress.org in 2010. And that s when I started the blog I have now, Basic Blog Tips. The company, Automatic, created a plugin called JetPack but I use a version of this plugin called JetPack Light. It enables me to connect to WordPress.com stats. I like this because I can get a quick overview in my dashboard. Probably since, I came from the WordPress.com environment I am still wedded to these stats. I reviewed them this morning and in May 2012 I averaged over 1,000 visits. In December 2012 my visits doubled. I know this growth came because I understood my audience and traffic better. I also went to my Google Analytics account. These reports show that November 2012 was the last time my website visits averaged less than 1,000. Since that time my website visits have been consistently

over 1,000 and steadily increasing. I attribute this growth to having a constant flow of content that is valuable and that people are searching for. Electra: Yes, I understand. Relevant content is the way to continue to strengthen your website on the Internet - having that relevant content that people find useful; that s how I found you. That kind of answers my next question, which is, what were some of the strategies that led to your current success? It sounds like content is a factor, anything else? Ms. Ileane: Yes, there is. I wrote an article over a year ago about the three Cs of your blogging success. Let me state before I go any further, that everyone needs to judge the success of their blog by their own parameters. What makes my blog successful for me may not be the same for someone else. You don t have to look at the number of visits if you don t want. You don t have to look at the number of subscribers. But if it s your goal to set up a blog for the purpose of getting an email list and you want to reach a certain level of subscribers, that s fine. Nothing is wrong with that; I feel it is important for people to establish their goals. For example, in your case, you are doing virtual assistant services so you want your blog to showcase your services and attract clients. This is what I want people to always keep in mind when they are looking at success. A lot of times people will compare themselves. They think I don t have as much of an audience as this person or that person. Don t compare yourself to others, compare yourself to yourself. But first you have to determine, what is your goal? Also, keep in mind that your goal can change. I don t like people to get boxed in with all this terminology. However, with all that said, content is not one of my three Cs. My three Cs are collaboration, connections and confidence. It s funny because even some of the guests have posted on my blog (because I do have a lot of guest authors) recently have been about making connections with influencers. These blog posts are about what s the way to get your article in front of influencers. After they post on my blog they will post on another saying see I connected with Ileane Smith. I think to myself that s nice, I feel like an influencer. I think it s important to make those connections. People say what do you mean content isn t king. But if you really think about people that you see online you wonder why they are so popular. To you there content might not be that great. But they have the connections with the right people. These people get the links they need. They are getting interviews like this and they are always being featured. People are always talking about them because they are either connected or they have collaborated on projects. The reason I say collaboration is because for example, I wouldn t have all that content [on my blog] if I wasn t collaborating with over 100 guest authors. There s no way. Remember, I have a full-time job. There s no way I would have all that content without collaborating. See how content has taken a back seat to connection and collaboration. And my third C is confidence. Once you have those connections and collaborate, people start referring to you as an influencer and an A lister it starts to build your confidence. These are my three Cs that I live by but that doesn t mean that you have to. You set your goals, your parameters or barometer for your success. Electra: Excellent. You are giving some great information. I m sitting here holding myself so I don t shout through the interview as if I m in church. Ms. Ileane: Amen, let the church say Amen. Electra: Amen. As a VA you learn the same thing; networking matters.

Ms. Ileane: It sure does. Now with all that said I don t want people to think content can suck. You can t have lousy content. How about that? You still have to have some good content that has value but it doesn t have to be the greatest. It can be average. Electra: Yes, there are other components to it. What were you doing when you were attracting subscribers? Ms. Ileane: I want to clarify that when I started I didn t know about RSS feeds. Most people have or they encourage people to subscribe to their blog through RSS. They use the orange icon to make it easier for visitors to subscribe to their blog. Other people use email subscriptions. I use AWeber for my email marketing. Some other companies are Mailchimp and if you are making a lot of money, you may want to look into Infusionsoft because I hear a lot of great things about it. In terms of subscribers, experts were advising to build a list. I didn t pay much attention [to this advice] in the beginning. I kind of wish I would have started earlier. In other ways I m glad I started when I did because it gave me time to figure out what I wanted to send my subscribers. It took me a while to decide what I was going to send my email subscribers. Some people send their RSS feeds to their email list but I didn t want to use that method. I wanted to send my email subscribers different content. I started that in November and that has been fun. You can set up autoresponders; three or four emails that people can receive when they subscribe to your list. So they are getting content at regular intervals from you. I think a great way to grow your list is by setting up autoresponders. You can set up your autoresponder to send subscribers something the first few weeks or few days and they are seeing you have something to offer them outside of what you have on your blog or website. This is working really well for me. I have a healthy open rate meaning people are opening my emails and actually clicking on the links that I provide [in the emails]. Electra: I read one of your articles on Guest posting when you shared that you sent a blogger a guest post they declined to use it. You posted it on your blog and it propelled your blog s to a higher level of success. How do you decide which articles to keep for yourself and which ones to send for guest post consideration? Ms. Ileane: My strategy is different now than it was back then; to familiarize people with that story, I was still on WordPress.com. Guest blogging back then was not as popular as it is right now. It was popular but not like it is now. I had this article and it still gets traffic, it s titled Do Twitter Backgrounds Attract New Followers. I showed people with the top Twitter accounts at that time. They were Ellen Degeneres, Pete Cashmore, from Mashable, The White House and Kanye West. Each of these Twitter profiles had the names cut off and the artwork cutoff. It was really funny and I ll send you the link. Electra: ok, and I will include it in the transcript with this blog post. Ms. Ileane: This was in 2009 and one of my examples I thought was funny, was the White House. At the bottom instead of it saying White House it said, White Ho.

Ms. Ileane: I thought this was hilarious and felt it would be a great guest post but the blog I sent it to for consideration was about blogging. At that time, blogging and social media were not wedded together like they are now. Twitter was just starting at that time. Back then a blog on blogging was only on blogging. The reason I bring this up is because people need to do their homework. I now have a different strategy. I don t guest post as much. Last year I did two and this year I did one guest post. In order to guest post you start with your pillar content. This is an article full of valuable information and details. Next you take a specific point from that article and do spin off that would be a guest post. Next you backlink to the pillar content. Another thing I do when I guest post now is I include a video with it. That audience may not be familiar with me and might not want to listen to too long so I post short videos of 1.5 minutes. The last guest post I did was on Google Chrome extensions because I get a lot of traffic from that subject. I wrote an article on Google+ and talked about extended share. I knew that would be good for a guest post. I already had the video and knew it would be easy to write this post around the video. This is how I maximize my time. Electra: Ok, that is a SEO strategy to backlink, when possible, to previous posts. That is one of the major strategies for SEO right now. You were one of the pros this year for the content summit. Do you attend conferences? Did you start attending the first year you started blogging? Or, did you make more connections at live events compared to online? Ms. Ileane: It was called the Content Success Summit. My presentation was Thursday night about podcasting and it s hosted by Social Media Examiner. It s interesting, if anyone is familiar with Social Media Examiner they may know they name Mike Stelzner. He is the CEO over there. The man is a millionaire from putting on conferences even though the blog is very popular. They have over 100,000 subscribers to their email list. He [Mike] was researching a project when he stumbled upon my podcast. He liked it so much that he invited me to be a guest at the Content Success Summit. I am there with Pat Flynn, Amy Porterfield, Mark Schaeffer and the list goes on and on. There were 22 instructors and the summit is still going on. I received great reviews and feedback from the podcasting presentation. When the event is done, I will probably post it on Slide Share and redo the audio for everyone. The only events I ve gone to have been local. Remember I mentioned how much I love AWeber? I really mean that because I attend their events. AWeber is fifteen minutes from my home. AWeber hosts meetups and trainings and I have attended their events. Lynette Young has 1.5Million followers on Google+ and I met her at one of AWeber s events. It was a real honor to meet her. Lynette has a group on Google+ called, The Women on Google+ so you may want to check that out. AWeber also had a day called 1k in 1 day. The goal was to get 1,000 websites up in one day and I was a volunteer at that event. I had the opportunity of meeting people that were just getting their websites started. AWeber support knows me by name. When I call support sometimes, the person says, Hay, its Ileane! Electra: So you do see the value of attending live events whether they are local or going out of town. I know Social Media Examiner is going to host a conference this year as well.

Ms. Ileane: I definitely see the value in it even though I ve only attend local events. It s always better to have in person meetings when you can. For example, my daughter is now creating websites for people and doing social media [for people]. It was ironic. My daughter called me one day and said she was ready to learn about Google+ now. I said what? Fantastic, you are taking me to this event at AWeber. I knew Lynette Young was giving a presentation. It was great because I didn t know that much about the local use of Google+ and all the Google+ local accounts and I would not have been able to answer my daughter s questions. She was starting with a new client that had a limousine service and she had questions. In fact, she still has that client because she is doing such a great job for them. My daughter had the opportunity to have a conversation with Lynette Young because of my networking with Chris Lang one of my buddies. When I met Lynette at this event, I automatically said we have a mutual friend, Chris Lang so that brought me up on her radar. When Lynette learned my daughter had specific questions, she waited until after her presentation and gave 15 to 20 minutes of her time to my daughter. It was like having a free consultation that she would not have had the opportunity [to experience] if we had not attended that live event. Live events are definitely worth their weight and goal. Electra: That s a great demonstration of the power of face to face meetings. What was the first monetary compensation you received as a professional blogger? Ms. Ileane: You know I can t pinpoint the first one but I can tell which one was memorable for me. It was when I got my first payout from click bank. If anyone knows about affiliate marketing, ClickBank is a great resource for affiliate products. In fact, Lisa Irby has a couple of her books and training programs listed on ClickBank. One particular program I m doing well with is the SEO Pressor Plugin. You are familiar with that Electra because you have seen it on my blog when you guest posted. Electra: Yes. Ms. Ileane: It was doing well for me. They have thresholds that you have to achieve but I inched and inched and inched. When I did reach the payout level it wasn t a whole lot of money but I was so happy. I felt like, finally! After that first payment the momentum got going and I received a payout every month, even though that first one took about one year and a half. Electra: Ok, that gives listeners that are interested in professional blogging [and affiliate marketing] a type of gage. One of the things I didn t have when I started my VA business is where I should be in one year or two years. So that is a great gage that listeners can use. Ms. Ileane: I also want to mention Adsense. I know I m not one of these people that goes crazy with Adsene on my blog but I did monetize my YouTube channel. When I monetized my YouTube channel it blew my Adsense earnings away. People are click happy on YouTube so they were clicking those ads left and right. I finally got a payout on Adsense as well. And that encouraged me to make more YouTube videos. Electra: Yes, video right now is the top medium on the Internet. You have given so much great information and advice and I know listeners are going to be busy taking notes. Thank you Ms. Ileane for sharing your wealth of knowledge with us today.

To receive more blogging tips, visit Ms. Ileane s website at basicblogtips.com. I highly recommend you subscribe to her newsletter, podcast and YouTube channel.