Way back in the olden days of blogging, around 2004, it wasn’t very complicated.

You wrote an article, around 500 words or so. You published the article. And, that was it.  You definitely didn’t need a checklist of 27 ways to promote your blog posts!

If you wanted people to subscribe to get automatic updates when you published new blog posts, you set up an RSS feed for an email subscription with Feedburner or Feedblitz (both are still alive and well, I’m happy to say) and asked your blog readers to subscribe. That’s it. The automation was simple and worked.

If your content was great, you got hundreds or thousands of subscribers and could monetize your content with affiliate offers, ebooks, ads, teleseminars, and other products and services. You could build an audience of fans and build a sustainable business.

In fact, that’s how I started my company, The Blog Squad, in 2005. There was a ton of demand to help people set up blogs and train them on how to use it. I started my first business blog in 2004 and never looked back.

Things are more complex now. There are millions of blog posts written every day.  [Read more…]