Hi there and welcome to episode 254 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, ebooks, and a couple of courses now that help you to start a great blog, and to build a profit around that blog as well.

In today’s episode, episode 254 which you can find the show notes for it at problogger.com/podcast/254, I want to invite you to be a part of an upcoming show on this podcast. We want to do a series of shows actually called My Blog Breakthrough. We are seeking submissions from you, listeners of the podcast and readers of the blog, to appear on the podcast by submitting a short audio clip where you talk about a blogging breakthrough that you have had.

My hope is that this series is going to both inspire our listeners by hearing some different voices from bloggers around the world, sharing their stories, but also giving a few practical ideas of things that other listeners could apply as well. If that interests you, listen on, and I’ll talk to you a little bit more about what we’re looking for and how you can participate in today’s challenge.

Again, the show notes today where you find links to how to submit your story, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/254.

As part of our Start A Blog course which we launched at the start of this year. We did a similar series to what we are planning with this new one–where we invited listeners to submit stories of them starting a blog and it was amazing. People really enjoyed that series. We featured, I think it was probably almost 10 different stories over a week or so of bloggers. It was really great to hear the different accents and the different stories of bloggers in different nations starting their blog and what the start of their blog led to. This really stimulated us with this idea today of doing a series of your blogging breakthroughs.

We know, for a fact, because we hear about these little breakthroughs all the time in our Facebook group, and via emails from listeners and readers as well, that you are constantly, as a listenership, having breakthroughs in your blogging. Everytime we get one of the stories, we think, “Ahh, wish we could share this with a wider audience.” That’s what this series is about. I hope, as I said at the start, is that we want to inspire ProBlogger listeners with your stories—your big stories and your little ones as well because we all have different types of breakthroughs in our blogging.

We also really would like this to be a practical thing as well. What we’re going to ask you to do is to submit your story but also share a tip that will help others make a similar breakthrough as well. Now, you’re probably wondering, “What could I do as a breakthrough?” Well, really it could be anything at all that has helped to grow your blog.

Now, probably some of you are already thinking about how you’ve grown your traffic. We’re certainly open to hearing breakthroughs about traffic but we don’t want everyone to talk about the same thing. In fact, if everyone submits traffic, we’ll only probably be able to feature a few of them. There’s so many other breakthroughs that maybe you could talk about.

Maybe it could be the story of trying a new income stream or even the story of how you made your first dollar blogging–that first income stream for you. Or maybe some are story about how an influencer has helped, or how you got featured in the media, or how a post that you wrote went viral for the first time and how you’ve replicated that. Or an opportunity that arose from blogging. Maybe a book deal came through, maybe an opportunity to be featured on someone else’s podcast–a big blogger’s podcast. Or maybe it was a mindset shift that led to growth in your blog in some way. Or a new tool that you started to use that led to new results. Or a new strategy, or a new social network that you tried. Or maybe it was you’ve refocused your blog, relaunched it. A new niche, or a narrower niche, or a broader niche. Or maybe it’s the way you overcame fear or some other obstacle in your blogging.

Really, the breakthrough can be anything that you would like. Even if it’s something small because what I’ve learned over the years is that sometimes it is the small things that lead to bigger on-going results. I would love to hear some of those types of stories as well. But if you’ve got a big one as well, you’re more than welcome to share that too.

Now, we do want to feature a variety of bloggers. We want to feature bloggers male and female. We want to feature stories from bloggers who sort of are at the beginning of their journey and more experienced bloggers. We want to feature some stories of bloggers that you may have heard of before and some new bloggers, bloggers from different countries, and bloggers focusing on different niches. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m not big enough. I’m not well-known enough.” We would love to hear your stories. Sometimes those unknown bloggers that the rest of us don’t know about, they’re sometimes the best stories of all. We’re looking for breakthroughs of different kinds.

Again, we cannot feature too many on the same kind of wavelength. That’s why we’ve kind of chosen the way that we have for you to submit your stories as well because we don’t want you to start recording your story straight away. We’d like you to submit in a form your idea for the story, just to save you the work of recording something. We want to select and then we’ll commission the ones that we want. That way, we’d know we’re going to get a variety of stories, and we’re not going to waste too much of your time as well.

If you’d like to participate, we are going to ask you to record a story, it’ll have to be within 10 minutes, and we would like it to be of a reasonable quality so that we can use it on the podcast. You need to be able to record a story. You need to be willing to have your voice on the ProBlogger podcast and heard by quite a few bloggers. There’s an opportunity for you here to share your link. Hopefully, it will help you to grow your blog and connect with other bloggers as well but we would love it if you head over to a form that we’ve set-up. We’ve set-up the form at problogger.com/breakthrough. We’ll link to it in today’s show notes as well. You will see there that I’ve written a little bit of information about what we’re looking for and there is a form there that asks you a few questions. It asks you, what is your blog name, what’s your blog URL, what’s the topic of your blog. Then it asks you some questions that again, help us to understand about what you are going to talk about in your recording.

We want to know what was blogging like before your breakthrough, what was the breakthrough, and what was blogging like after the breakthrough. That’s really important for us because we want to see that this breakthrough actually led to some kind of transformation in your blogging or growth in your blogging in some way. You don’t have to write a lot in there. We just want to know the theme of your topic and any relevant information for you there. We don’t want a transcription of what you’re going to say, just the idea, really. We want to know what tip you will give our listeners that might help them with a similar kind of breakthrough. Then there’s also opportunity for you to tell us anything else that you think we need to know about your story.

Now, keep in mind we’re looking for storytelling here that is going to inspire our readers. Again, it doesn’t need to be a massive story in many ways. It could be something small. In fact, sometimes those small things can inspire people the most because they think they can do it too. We’re looking for stories but also looking for something practical here as well. That’s something that I always try with the ProBlogger podcast to do. I want to inspire you but more than that, I want to give you something that you can go and do as well. Please don’t feel the need to write too much. I’m looking forward to seeing what you submit.

Now, if I was doing this, as I thought about this, I really have done this with almost every podcast I’ve written out, I usually try and bring something into the podcast that is a story for myself. If I was doing this, a few things that I would—I’d give you some ideas, it might help to get the wheels turning in your mind—I might do a mindset shift that I made in the early days in my blogging where I decided to stop treating my blog as a hobby and it’s something that might, one day, become a full time thing. I made this mindset shift with Vanessa to treat my blog as a business today. I talk about that story in episode 100 of this podcast.

That might be an example that you might want to listen to that could give you some ideas about a mindset shift that changed for you. Or back in episode 167, I talked about how I overcame eight years of procrastination to write a blog post that I’ve been putting off, that I’ve been too scared to write. Hell, that blog post, when I did write it, actually ended up helping me earn an income–a 5-figure income a month in some months. That was 167.

Episode 67 was when I created my first ebook by repurposing a lot of the content I’d already published before. That was a breakthrough because it, one, it grew us an income stream but it helped open up a new type of income stream for me. That was the first of many ebooks that came or when I created the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog blog post series. The breakthrough there was really understanding that my readers didn’t want just information, that they wanted a challenge, they wanted something to do as well, and that in turn, let to the new course that we’ve just launched as well which you can listen to information about in our last podcast.

These are types of things that I’m looking for. They could be mindset shifts, new tools, new strategies, and new understandings, new learning even. Again, head over to problogger.com/breakthrough. I will love to read your story and then we will be in touch with those that submit that. We want to actually record something as well. I look forward to presenting those stories in our future episodes of this podcast. It might take us a few weeks to go through this process and get them up and running as well.

The other thing that I just wanted to let you know is that there will be a few weeks break on this podcast. It’s the middle of the year. We’ve had a fairly intense year so far and we think, as a team, we just need a little bit of break from producing the podcast for a few weeks. I know a lot of you are on a summer holidays in America or in other parts of the world. Here in Australia, we’ve in the middle of winter and it’s freezing. We’re just going to have a little bit of hibernation of the podcast for a few weeks while we get this new series up and running.

If you’re missing the ProBlogger podcast, there’s 253 other episodes that you can dig around into. I mentioned a few of those today in the show. I do encourage you to dig around in the archives. Have a listen to something that you may have missed in the past. Thanks for listening. I look forward to chatting with you in a few weeks’ time in the upcoming episodes of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening.

If you’re still listening and you are still thinking about your breakthroughs and wondering what breakthrough you could share, I know some of the biggest breakthrough you really need is to start a blog. It’s amazing how many listeners of the ProBlogger podcast who are in the same position as you. People who haven’t yet started a blog. If you are one of those, I do encourage you to check out our completely free Start A Blog course. It is designed to walk you through the process of starting a blog. It is a seven-step course. It’s very comprehensive but it will walk you through even the question of, “Is a blog right for you?” It will help you to define what your blog is about. It will help you work out what to call your blog, how to get a domain name set up, how to get hosting set up, how to get your WordPress theme set up, and a bit of a checklist there for getting your email and social media account set up as well. It is completely free. It can be found over at problogger.com/startablog. It will take you through there where you can signup and register for that free course. If you know someone who hasn’t started a blog, give them the gift of this course by letting them know about it as well. Again, it’s problogger.com/startablog.