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This guest post is by Sean Davis of SDavisMedia.com.

Blogs do not produce income. Simply writing and publishing content does not increase your bank account balance.

The idea that money is a direct result of blogging is a myth that the best bloggers have dismissed, but most choose to treat it as a law of the blogosphere.

What a shame.

Many new bloggers will jump out of their online careers just as quickly as they jumped into them when they realize that it’s not enough to simply create content.

There is, however, another goal for creating content. It’s not until you understand this goal that you will know how to make money from your blog.

The goal of blogging is not to earn money. It’s to earn attention—the attention of those who will, in turn, provide the revenue you’re looking for.

Why you need to focus on attention

“If you build it, they will come.” We can argue all day about whether this is true or not. No matter what, though, we should all agree that just because people come to your blog doesn’t mean that they will buy your product, sign up for your email list, click your advertisement links, or whatever it is you need them to do in order to produce income.

As a personal testimony, I created an infographic about four months ago that seemed to be pretty popular on the internet for a day or two. The blog I published it on was only about three months old, and the infographic brought me over 1,000 visitors in one day. For some, that’s nothing. For me, it was the attention I had been dreaming about.

Take a wild guess at how many email subscribers I earned from that infographic.

If you guessed zero, you’re wrong!

The answer is actually one. One lonely person out of over a thousand visitors signed up to my free newsletter, which, by the way, offered a free gift for those who signed up.

This is when I learned that blogs have the power to bring attention, however, it’s what you do with that attention that matters most.

Introducing Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

If you’ve ever taken a college-level language course or a speech or communications class, chances are you’ve been introduced to the art of persuasion.

Simply put, in the business world, whether it be brick and mortar or internet marketing, you have to know how to persuade people to take action—especially when they are visiting your blog.

Almost a century ago, Alan Monroe of Purdue University introduced a persuasion method that takes the human mind through a natural cycle of establishing a need, developing a solution to satisfy that need, and then becoming enthusiastic about implementing that solution.

There are actually five steps to this sequence:

1. Attention: The first step is to gain the attention of the target audience. You can do this with a story, a thought provoking question, or anything that makes the audience stop what they’re doing with curiosity and focus.
2. Need: This is where you explain to the target audience what their need is. This can be an obvious, well-known need, or a need that you create on the spot. Often, a need is established by giving an extreme example of some unfortunate event that should never happen again.
3. Satisfaction: Now that your target audience understands the need, it’s time for you to fly in like Superman and save the day. Provide a solution to erase that need and prevent the aforementioned unfortunate event from ever happening again.
4. Visualization: Tell your target audience exactly how your solution can be implemented and how it will solve the problem. Also, tell them how things will progress (that is, get worse) if your solution is ignored. This is where you would provide proof—preferably a previous instance in which your solution was implemented—that convinces your audience that your solution will work. Politicians do this a lot when referencing what other nations have (or have not) done, and why it is important that we make the same (or different) decisions.
5. Action: Get the target audience involved. You’ve already explained to them what the need is, how to satisfy that need, and what things will be like for them once the need is satisfied. Now, you have to convince them that they play an important role in making that change happen. In other words, you introduce an action that they can take to implement your solution.

If you take a step back and thoroughly observe TV commercials, political campaigns, sales pages, etc., you will notice that the most persuasive ones follow this sequence. Why? Because it was developed to follow your own natural thought patterns.

It was developed on the basis of human nature.

How to use this persuasion technique on your blog

What if you could use Monroe’s Motivated Sequence in every area of your blog?

From the content you produce, to your blog’s unique design, you can follow the steps in the sequence to lead your readers down a path that causes them to take action.

Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com enlightened me a few weeks ago on why he doesn’t write the typical “17 Things You Can Do To Blah Blah Blah” articles on his blog.

He said that he encourages the reader to focus on one action to take with each of his articles. As a result, his readers leave his blog with something they can actually implement instead of a list of options—something that’s been shown to be less effective at prompting action, by the way.

Considering Derek builds email lists like crazy, it’s safe to say that he understands human psychology and what makes people tick online.

Does he use Monroe’s Motivated Sequence? I don’t know. But imagine the results you could produce, article by article, if you focused each one of them on one specific action to take, as Derek does, and you used Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to do so.

Are the ideas flowing yet? I hope so.

Remember: blogs don’t earn money. Blogs earn attention. Once you have attention, which is nothing more than a visit to your blog, you have to know how to guide the visitor down a path that leads them to an action you’d like them to take.

Whatever your goals for your blog, you can start using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence right now. Simply break something you want your visitors to do down to one single action, and then follow the steps of the sequence.

Take a few moments to think about communications you encounter every day and how they follow this sequence. And imagine the possibilities for your blog if you can master this technique.

Sean Davis is an internet entrepreneur dedicated to constant growth and helping others. Check Sean out at SDavisMedia.com and follow him on Twitter @SDavisMedia.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Use Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to Call Your Readers to Action

Google and Motorola Mobility both revealed on Saturday that they have received Chinese regulatory approval for their proposed merger and expect to soon close on the deal.

Once a week, we catch you up on Macworld's biggest stories from the past week, in case you missed them. This week, we ruminated on the futures of iOS and OS X, covered Hotkeysgate, and offered a slew of reviews.

This guest post is by Neil Davidson of My Web Presenters.

In November of 2011 David Hsieh, VP of Marketing at Cisco famously stuck his neck out by proclaiming that 90% of internet traffic will be viewing video in three years’ time.

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The actual figure is already 51% of traffic, and it’s climbing fast. For bloggers like you and I, this has consequences. You can either bite the bullet and get started with video, or you can hide under the sheets and hope the storm passes.

For this post, I am going to assume that you are firmly in the “get on the train” camp.

At first sight it may seem that moving into video content production from textually based content is very difficult, as it requires a very different skillset. Also you may need to speak out loud or, worst of all, show your face on camera!

However, getting into video production and marketing is actually a natural progression for a blogger. Here are some ideas on how you can get started.

1. Video production Use smartphones for impromptu interviewing

Hands up if you’ve got a smartphone. Many smartphones now have high-quality video cameras built in—some even have HD video. These can be highly effective for taking advantage of unusual situations…

Imagine that you’re at a blogging event and you find yourself standing next to Darren Rowse. You strike up a conversation that gets interesting. Suppose you were to pull out your smartphone, ask him a few questions on video, and post it to your blog. If the “interview” went well, chances are that Darren would be happy to tweet and share that content for you.

Suddenly you would be catapulted out of nowhere into the limelight—all through a chance five-minute meeting. A traditional interview would take a lot longer to capture, as well as to prepare and write up, and the chances are that busy people, like Darren, may well have to refuse an interview request. Compare these two approaches:

• “Oh, wait a moment, I am really enjoying this conversation and I know the readers of my blog would love it too, do you mind if I just video you answering that question again?”
• “That’s really interesting, do you mind if I just go and grab a pen and paper and note down the conversation that we are having?”

Use screencasting videos to show how something is done

Another very accessible form of video is screencasting. Essentially, this technique makes a video of your computer screen and films the actions you’re taking on it. This is very similar to the concept of a screen grab for obtaining a static image of your screen.

Screencasting videos are fantastic for making “how to” videos. They allow you to visually and verbally take your viewers through a process to show them how something is done. Here are some ideas from Camtasia, the makers of video software, on how their technology can be used. In this video, they explain how the tool can be used practically:

Camtasia costs $99 for lifetime usage so it certainly won’t break the bank! Perhaps the second most popular screen casting tool on the market is ScreenFlow, which this costs the same as Camtasia and has pretty much the same features. The best thing to do with these products is to download them (both offer free trials) and practice using them to make videos.

One tip that will help you get up to speed more quickly is to write down a list of the steps that you will follow in your video and have it on the desk in front of you whilst you are making the video. With a written blog post it is natural to pause and think, and to go off researching something mid article, but with video, the research must be done beforehand. You need to film to a plan.

Be strict. If you’re not happy with your video, delete it and start again. It gets easier and easier—you will be very surprised by how quickly you speed up and improve your abilities. Before you know it, you will actually be enjoying it, wahey!

2. Video publishing

There are two places on the net where your video really needs to be:

1. on your blog (or website)
2. on YouTube.

Initially, you should publish the video to Youtube. If you use Screenflow to make a screencast video then you can publish straight from the platform to your YouTube channel. From Camtasia, you can go straight to Vimeo.

The reason that it is important to publish to Youtube is not just because it is so much larger than the other platforms and is so closely tied with both Google search and Google+, but also because it easily enables your video to be openly used by other bloggers through the video embed code shown here:

Once your video’s on YouTube, anyone who has a website can grab your embed code and plonk your video on their website. This gives you additional exposure via their audience and also gives you a link back to your YouTube video. A side note here is that the number of embeds of a video is factored into the ranking algorithm of videos on Youtube and Google.

When you’re posting your new video to YouTube, there are a number of tweaks that you can make to enhance its visibility both on YouTube itself, and within search engines. Here is a detailed overview of basic video SEO for YouTube.

Once the video is up on YouTube, you can then grab the embed code and put it onto your blog simply by pasting the code into the HTML of a blog post. Don’t forget to write a short textual piece around the video to explain the content of the video and encourage visitors to actually watch it. This little blurb will also enable search engines to understand the context of the video file, since they can’t read video files themselves.

3. Marketing your video

This is where your experience in marketing textual blog posts really comes into play. Great content is essentially great content, and the people you want to reach, whether you’re creating video or textual content, will not change.

There are however, a couple of new tools that will help you market your video effectively.

Oneload

Oneload (a.k.a. Tubemogul) is an online video distribution tool. The tool allows you to upload a video once and publish it to over 20 video platforms in one go.

Prior to your first use of Oneload, you’ll need to identify all of the video platforms that you want to submit your video to, and go and create accounts with each of them. You can then link them all to your Oneload account for easy distribution.

Realistically, you’re looking at around a day’s work to set up 20 accounts on video platforms and to enter your profile information, but once it’s done, it’s done.

Other distribution tools

Finally I will just go over some tools that you’re probably more familiar with, and highlight how they can be used to market your video content.

• Hootsuite: This social media management tool allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn communications all in one place. You can therefore submit your video to your Facebook page, plus your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts through this tool.
• Shareaholic and Addthis: These two tools allow you to bookmark content to multiple social networks and social bookmarking sites with ease. They are also perhaps two of the most popular social sharing button plug-ins for WordPress. Install either one as a browser plugin (they work on all major browsers), then select the social bookmarking sites that you are interested in, and you have a one-click way to share your video posts on these platforms.

A word of caution here: don’t expect instant results. You need to build up a presence and some relationships with others in your niche who are active on these sites so that you content gets a kick-start once you submit it.

A wide variety of techniques are available to market your videos solely within YouTube, both to build up a following there and to push these people back to your site. That will have to be saved for another day though, as it’s a huge topic. If you’re interested, though, look into the topic of video annotations with links to other videos.

It would be fantastic to hear some tips from others who have experience with video blogging, as the starting points I’ve covered here really are just the tip of the iceberg. Let us hear your advice in the comments.

Neil Davidson is the Founder of My Web Presenters, who are a leading Online Video Production specialist. They create and market compelling and emotive video that helps businesses to grow. You can keep up with their video marketing blog here.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Video Starting Points: Make and Share Your First Video

Some people, it would seem, are unable to accurately determine cause and effect.

Apple was awarded a patent on Thursday for a multi-point focusing system that integrates with devices capable of multitouch input, possibly pointing to future use of the technology in a next-generation iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Following a recently won appeal from the federal court, Apple on Friday filed a motion for injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 which could see the tablet pulled from U.S. shelves as soon as early June.

It was announced on Friday that the made for TV movie "jOBS," which will chronicle the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is set to begin principal photography in the original garage that was the humble home to what would one day become the world's most valuable tech company.

In an effort to drum up subscribership and advertise its unlimited data plan for the iPhone 4S, Sprint revealed on Friday that it will begin offering a $100 credit to any customer who trades in an iPhone from another carrier.

One report says Steve Jobs was intimately involved with the four-inch iPhone, while another says he was working on creating the best car ever. Only one person can set the record straight for a major motion picture event.

With Apple set to flip the switch on its Mac App Store sandboxing system, the company sent out an email to registered developers on Friday reminding them that enforcement of the new rules will being on June 1, 2012.

Apple and a handful of other tech companies are said to be in talks with Russia's Skolkovo Innovation Centre about building research facilities in the organization's "Technopark," which is at the heart of a larger initiative looking to bring high-tech innovators into the country.

Investors will pressure Facebook, the public company, to find new ways of making money from users' personal data. If times get hard, can Facebook do that without endangering user privacy?

Market research firm Gartner says adoption of Android tablets and smartphones in large businesses has been "severely limited" because of the complexities of managing the various Android models and versions.

Warnings contained in the latest version of iOS suggest that Apple plans to bring support for 3G wireless data connections to its FaceTime video chat feature.

Some people have asked whether it would be sustainable if everyone tried to earn passive income, so let’s get that out of the way before we continue with this passive income series.

I think the supposition here is that certain jobs don’t adapt well to passive income strategies, and therefore certain work is best suited to active income. Let’s suppose that’s true for the sake of argument.

Passive and active income strategies compete in the marketplace. People are free to choose either strategy. Most people choose active income. Why? I think the main reason is that they’ve been socially conditioned to choose this strategy. They probably make this choice without much knowledge of passive income strategies. Schooling, parents, and peers help train most people to chose active income.

Even if a lot more people started earning passive income and fewer people were willing to earn money as active income, I believe the market would adapt without skipping a beat. For critical tasks that could only be performed with ongoing labor, prices would rise, and therefore more people would be willing to perform those tasks.

Presently we have an oversupply of people who are looking for jobs, and we have a shortage of jobs for those people. So is it really wise to keep training more people to look for jobs? No, that would be foolish and will only make the problem worse. It will also cause salaries to drop, lowering people’s standard of living.

I think a better solution is to teach passive income strategies and help some of those people make different choices. Passive income is a great choice in this economy since you won’t need to find a job. In fact, you can actually help to stimulate more job creation.

Passive income has the effect of creating more jobs as well as supporting existing jobs. Whenever I create new passive income streams, I create income for other businesses. These generate revenue that helps cover the salaries of many employees.

Remember that passive income methods involve delivering value to more people than you probably could with an active income strategy. I see no reason to hold back on providing value. You may be providing different forms of value with a passive income strategy, but it’s still a net gain for others if you increase your contribution.

If you license your book to a book publisher and receive passive income in the form of royalties on sales, the publisher may in turn pay people to perform specific jobs to keep their system running, and those employees may receive active income in the form of a salary. Your book deal helps to facilitate this and creates and sustains jobs for others.

Passive and active income strategies are mutually supportive. They are not opposites. I think it’s healthy for both to co-exist.

I don’t personally want a regular job, but I understand that many people do, sometimes desperately so. I may poke fun at the regular job mindset now and then to get people to think about this more consciously and to consider alternatives, but I respect people’s ability to make their own choices.

As for whether it’s fair to earn passive income, I’d say it’s more than fair. It’s downright generous. As I’ve shared in previous posts, passive income tends to be more heavily rewarded (and less taxed) than active income. But passive income strategies can also add a lot of value to the economy, and so it makes sense to reward these strategies more heavily. By helping to create and sustain more jobs for others, you can actually generate significantly more tax revenue than you would if you earned the same amount via active income.

It’s not uncommon for active income earners to think of passive income as a greedy strategy. The irony is that it’s just as easy to regard active income earners as holding back and making a lesser contribution… contributing to just one employer when they could be serving many more people. The truth is that both strategies seek to contribute, just in different ways.

In the next several posts, I’ll cover some specific passive income strategies. I’ll even demonstrate some of these strategies with specific examples from my own business, so you can better understand how they work.

Read related articles:

• You Earn Passive Income by Being More Generous
• What Is Passive Income?
• The End Game of Passive Income
• Passive Income Series
• Earn Passive Income While Web Surfing
• Jobs vs. Passive Income
• Set Your Passive Income Goal

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Amazon has reportedly begun pitching to advertising agencies the opportunity to advertise on the welcome screen of its Kindle Fire tablet for a price of $600,000.

If you're looking for a tasty bite this weekend, these iOS apps can point you in the right direction.

This summer's Mountain Lion update to Mac OS X will continue the trend of bringing iOS features to Apple's Mac operating system. Kirk McElhearn sees the move as Apple's attempt to bring iOS users into the Mac fold.

This week’s roundup of iOS apps offers all kinds of listening options, whether you’re staying at home, partying at the club, or going to see your favorite band in concert. Flipboard, StubHub, and Thefuture.fm all have updated offerings for your listening pleasure.