The Beauty Of Strategic Blogging

email leads Aug 03, 2020

Introduction

Yes, okay so we are making progress.

In the last five lectures you learned about:

And in prior lessons you learned about:

You have made a ton of progress!

At this point, we are actually one third of the way through your training so if you’ve made it this far (and have actually read the content from beginning to end) I just want to congratulate you for your hard work.

>> Click here to get a FREE instant download of the PDF version of this post... I'll throw in my audio narration as a free bonus.

You’ve come a long way and are better equipped than when you first began. Let’s look at what we’re diving into today:

We’re going to talk about blogging in a way that doesn’t suck the life out of you. And I'm going to show you how to blog in a way that actually helps you to earn revenue. You’re going to learn methods of earning a reliable side-income from the original content you produce from your blog.

And the good news is a blog doesn’t need to be a long term grind for you or even feel like another job in itself. With the right mindset and tools anyone can monetize their blog and begin generating a regular revenue stream from it.

AC Units in a Van?

The other day, I was driving my son oldest son home from martial arts practice and I noticed one of the strangest things I've ever seen on the road.

It was a van, like a contractor van; you know what I mean? It was one of those sketchy looking white vans that we usually associate with kidnapping unsuspecting children.

There were two things that caught my attention: First, the van was lifted, the chassis was raised as if it were designed to go off-roading. It had large, knobby off-road tires and a brush bar in the front and back.

Now this was odd but not worth sharing. It's the second observation that compelled me to tell this story today.

The driver installed two full-sized air conditioning units in the rear door! The rear windows were replaced with two ponderous air-conditioning units jutting straight out the back of the van!

I took a picture and had a good laugh.

So what's the point of this story?

We'll, I'm guessing that guy installed those AC units because his air conditioner wasn't working. Maybe it was just there for decoration (I mean how would he power it right?) but the point of the story is if something doesn't work the first time you try, don't be afraid to try something else even if it might make you look weird.

As you're attempting to build out your blogging workflow you'll hit hurdles and I'm here to tell you "Don't let that make you throw in the towel!"

Just take a step back, reassess the situation and try something else (even if it feels strange or makes you uncomfortable).

"Building an online business is an iterative process and it will be filled with trial-and-error and experimentation."

So do you want to know how exactly we are going to build your online business?

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The Blog Baseline

There are really only three major steps to building your online business:

Your List
Your Blog
Your Product

We explored your list last week so today we are jumping into your blog.

Your blog should be the nexus of your business. You will use your blog to attract your market so you will want to produce content that gives results so you can gradually build trust with your audience.

Then the next step is to build a direct line of communication with your audience. That’s where your email list comes in.

The way you build an email list is by offering a freebie, also known as a lead magnet, so you can deliver results BEFORE ever asking for money. Many people miss this but the goal of the lead magnet is to give your best material away for FREE so you can build trust and deliver results before asking for money.

And then the last step is the delivery of your product. You can have a flagship product, an online course, an e-Book or whatever you want. The key is it needs to be a digital product so it can be automatically delivered to your subscribers thus freeing up your time and separating you from the trading-dollars-for-hours grind.

The Mark Of A Successful Blog

If you really want your blog to work you'll need to obsess over keeping it focused.

"You can’t just ramble about that annoying girl with the long nails at work or the fact that your kids keep junking up the house. It is true that these little anecdotes have their place, but in your blog you need to zero in, with laser sharp accuracy, on the specific needs and desires of your target market."

And the true power of blogging is underscored when you realize that people desperately want you to be yourself.

They want you to be genuine and to just talk to them like you would to a friend over a cup of coffee. When this happens your blog opens the door to authentic relationships.

The good news is that it’s now very easy to get started blogging with very little technical expertise. I started with Wordpress, transitioned to a few other content management platforms and eventually landed on New Kajabi because of their awesome customer support team and ease of use.

If you want more details about why I chose New Kajabi go back and read through the “Choosing Your Technical Platform” lesson.

New Kajabi makes it really easy to publish your blog. The advantage means there is very little technical friction standing between you and publishing regular updates. In fact, most blogging systems allow you to schedule your posts for certain release dates. So you can batch blog 3 or 4 posts over the weekend and then drip them out one per week over the next 3 to 4 weeks. Talk about saving time and keeping your content fresh!

When you get into the habit of publishing your content on a consistent basis not only will you notice an increase in returning visitors (because they want to see what you’ll publish next) but also Google and Bing will reward your discipline by favorably ranking your website in the search engine results pages.

The last advantage of blogging is that you can provide a place for your fans to leave comments on any given post. This turns a lecture into a conversation. It means you can “talk” to your audience and they can talk back. You can interact with your people and engage them in ways that increases their value perception.

The result is that you'll create an environment where people can interact with each other. And as they help each other and answer questions they'll become fans who freely advertise your brand and champion your cause to their friends, co-workers and family.

The Advertisement Model vs The Authority Model

So when your blog, list and product are working together, you'll start to build a community who really trusts you.

And when people trust you they will buy from you.

When I first got started, I earned money from fixedByVonnie.com by attracting attention to my blog and then selling that attention off my site to advertisers.

When visitors clicked, Google would pay me a percentage of that click. This approach can be very profitable but its biggest shortcoming is it relies on having a popular website with heavy streams of traffic. When you stop blogging or traffic wanes your visitors wane, your clicks wane and therefore your profits wane as well. This is the advertisement model and it is no longer a viable option today.

This is why fixedByVonnie.com felt like a long-term grind for me because I had to keep churning out long blog posts to keep the traffic coming so the clicks wouldn’t die out. I learned the hard way from that mistake and it’s not the approach we’re going to learn in this course.

“This isn’t the way to build a modern online business today. What works today is to funnel visitor attention into digital products you own and create so you can maximize your impact and profits.”

And this is exactly what you’re learning in this training course.

"What I want to suggest is the Authority model where you leverage your blog as a platform to showcase your expertise on a specific topic your audience cares about."

The nice thing about this approach is you don’t have to take on another full-time job blogging all the time. Quality is more important than quantity and you can publish just a few high-quality posts because your revenue model isn't based on ad clicks, it’s based on earning trust and then funneling that traffic up your value ladder through your backend higher priced products.

And as you may have already guessed, email plays a huge role in that process.

Imagine This

We’re going to discuss tiered pricing models in future lessons so I don't want to get into that now. Right now I just want you to realize that by using this simple, blog-list-product system you can very easily scale your business from a hobby to a side-gig that generates significant income.

Note: "easy" does not mean "no effort", it simply means you have a proven path to accomplish your goals.

So let’s say you earn $100,000 per year at your current full-time job. And let's say over the previous year, out of all the people you attract to your website via your blog, that a small percentage of that traffic joins your email list. And let's imagine an even smaller percentage of the people who join your list, buy your digital products (i.e., an $14.97 e-book, a $49.97 mini-course or a $497.97 flagship course...)

Let say, over the course of that year, you gained 100 customers, who over the span of the year purchased multiple times from you earning you an average of $1,000 of revenue per customer.

That would mean you earned $100,000 last year.

Now I’m not saying you’re going to make that off the bat because you won't. That's not how this works.

In fact, the goal of this training course is to simply help you launch your first product and earn your first $1,000 online. That’s it. We’re going to keep our numbers small and reasonable and scale up as you build confidence in what you can do.

So here's what I want you to do: don’t focus on or get distracted by large websites in your niche. Our goal isn’t to channel thousands of people to your blog every month. We’re just trying to get a hundred or two hundred high quality leads into your blog universe so you can nurture that relationship and walk them up your value ladder of higher priced backend products. In other words, our goal is to actively avoid building the biggest blog and to instead zero in on a precision focused niche blog, with high quality content that you are serving to a small but highly engaged audience. That's our mission.

Blogging Nuts And Bolts

So now that you’re aware of the high level concepts behind blogging let’s get on with some tactics to help you get writing!

The first thing you want to do is to write about what you know about. You don’t need to be an expert in the thing you want to write about, you just need to know a little more than your audience so you can take them on a journey from their pain to your solution.

The other thing that will help you surmount writers block is to research first, write later.

Once you pick your topic and complete your research you can begin outlining your blog posts. Start with the topic and a short introduction.

From there move into the main idea where you include three tactics your audience can implement to get results. Remember the focus is always on results!

Another thing I like to do (although I admit I’m not very good at) is to incorporate a personal story or anecdote into your blog posts. It will set you apart and help you stand out from all the other writers in your niche.

You can then wrap up the blog post with a summary and a call to action where you invite them to subscribe to your email list.

Now one really smart strategy here is to include an opt-in box at the bottom of every post so after your visitor consumes your content they have the opportunity to opt-in for a free content upgrade (i.e., the lead magnet) which would get sent to their inbox.

“The key to writing excellent blog posts is to talk to one person and write they way you talk.”

It’s the same strategy I recommend for your email copy. You want to keep it simple, be transparent and write as if you’re writing to a close friend.

Try it! It really works.

Your biggest barrier to knocking your blog posts out of the park will be:

Not Feeling Creative
Not Feeling Like You Have The Time

But if you only have an hour a day to write this is actually good. Why? Because it can force you to focus and write with energy and intensity.

Create A Blog Schedule

Can you do two hours per week before work?

How much fluff can you cut from your day that you could be spending working on just a tiny piece of your blog?

The truth is everyone is tired after they come home from a long day of work right? I mean everyone is already exhausted when they come home and then they get more exhausted when they need to face the hard reality of life's routines such as taking the kids to Tae Kwon Do, Swimming and After School math. So instead of just saying, “Man, I haven’t put enough time into this” latch on to a very specific, realistic goals that makes sense for you and then stick to it.

It’s all about baby steps. Just take one step at a time.

Here’s my schedule suggestion:

Monday

Just focus on brainstorming and learning something new. Read, watch and listen to something that teaches you how to improve your blogging craft. Click through the internet finding interesting content relevant to your niche.

Tuesday

Outline day. Today is the day where you just want to craft an outline. That’s it. Your goal is just to put down a few bullet points around items you want to write about.

Wednesday

Catch up and continue what you started on Tuesday. Keep crafting your outline. That’s it. Today is just a continuation of Tuesday where you continue to work on polishing our outline.

Thursday

Start modeling your outline into prose. Don’t worry about style, if it flows or even if it’s funny. You just want to focus on writing about what you know, telling stories, giving results in three points and leading into a call to action to join your email list.

Friday

Polish Thursday’s blog post and reread it multiple times to make sure it is free from typos and grammatical mistakes. Also, you should make sure all the links you referenced are valid.

>> Click here to get a FREE instant download of the PDF version of this post... I'll throw in my audio narration as a free bonus.

Saturday

Now that your post is done you can add images and graphics you’ve collected from the web to add that final push to your blog

Now It’s Your Turn

So now that we know where we’re going, lets build your first blog entry in Kajabi.

After signing up for the free Kajabi trial, go ahead and log into your account

At the top of the screen you’ll see a search bar that says “Kajabi Assistant”. Just type “blog” and hit “New Blog Post” to see all you can do with your blog.

If you want to get fancy you do have the freedom to create video headers for each post but for now let’s leave the video section alone.

The biggest thing you need to be concerned with are the "Post Details" Section.

This is where you place your title and your content. I highly suggest writing your blog posts in OneNote or OneDrive because it will automatically save your work as you type and it provides an easy place to copy your content when you’re done.

Create a short description of your page (this is for Google and Bing so when your page pops in the search engine results potential visitors can read a short blub about your blog post)

Next you can post an image, create a tag and publish the post.

I suggest using Canva to start for your blog images. We’ll look at using Canva when we talk about building your lead magnets.

I also suggest leaving your post unpublished until you have about 12 to 14 blog posts stacked in your queue. Then you can schedule all posts to drip once per week and create a content cushion that gives you some breathing room so you always have time to create fresh content

Quick Action Result

Take a moment to think about your blog baseline: the blog, the list and the product. How are each of these pieces connected?
In the “Imagine This” section I walked you through a thought experiment showing you your earning potential. What do you think of these numbers? Too large? Too small? Not realistic? Write down how you feel about this.
What is the difference between the Authority Model and the Advertising Model? Which model is better?
What does your personal blogging schedule look like? Take some time to create your blogging schedule based off the content you learned in this lesson.

In the next two lessons we’ll talk about lead magnet concepts and then will get our hands dirty building yours out. See you soon!