Hey there! Matt Majernik here and welcome to another episode of the 10-minute marketing show where we help entrepreneurs build a life and business they love in just 10-minutes per day. Every episode will be rapid fire 10-minutes of actionable strategies that you can use to grow your business. Without further ado, let’s dive in to today’s 10-minutes of marketing.
Your Daily Habits Determine Your Success or Failure.
We’re actually picking up exactly where we left off on our last episode. In our last episode we talked about the compounding effect and how our small, daily habits are actually what determines our success or failure. But today, I want to get into a real life example to show you exactly how this works. I’m going to talk about the actual daily habits that you need to develop to grow a blog from 0 to 100,000 visitors per month.Let’s say that you’re setting up your blog completely from scratch today. You’ve got your WordPress blog set up. You’ve got a topic that you’re passionate about. But you need a road map. How are you going to grow this blog into one of the most popular blogs on that particular topic?
There are only 2 Keys TO Becoming a ROCK STAR Blogger.
How do you become an expert? How do you become an authority within your particular marketplace? What are the daily habits you need to develop to grow your blog from 0 to 100,000 visitors per month? The reality is, it’s a really simple answer. It’s ridiculously simple, in fact. And that’s actually why most people fail. It’s too simple. They think that it must be harder than this. It’s got to be more complex. There’s got to be more pieces to the puzzle and more steps involved. As entrepreneurs, we often have the habit of actually making things more complex than they should be. But when you look at any specific goal that you want to achieve, you’ve got to break it down into daily habits. And the key to building a super successful blog is just two things.1. Content creation
2. Promoting that content
It’s as simple as that. However, just because it’s simple does not mean that it’s easy. There are a many different pieces to each of these steps. But at the end of the day, the two things that you must do to create a popular blog is to create great content and promote that content.
You would think that would be pretty much common sense, but it is amazing how much people over complicate it. One of the biggest keys to growing a popular blog is simply to get focused. The main reason that people actually fail at blogging is they jump from one strategy to the next and they never focus on a single path of excellence. They fail to focus on those small, daily habits that create compounding effects.
So, what do you need to do on a daily basis (I’m talking Monday through Sunday) to grow your blog from 0 to 100,000 visitors?
First, of course, is creating content. This could be articles, podcasts, infographics, emails, etc. But whichever type of media you choose, you must create epic content that entertains, provides massive value, and solves a specific problem for your readers.
If you do just a little bit of research on sites like Topsy and Buzzsumo.com to find the most popular articles on any website or topic, you’re going to find that the most popular blog posts are generally between 2,000 – 3,000 words. There’s a lot of people out there cranking out these 500-word posts and then wondering why they’re not getting anywhere. The reason their traffic is not growing is because they’re competing against thousands upon thousands of other blog posts that are published each and every single day. A 500-word post simply isn’t going to cut it!
Create EPIC Content!
For you to stand out among the blogosphere, you’ve got to create epic content. Long, informative posts between 2,000 – 3,000 words. Include multiple forms of media in each blog post. Images, videos, slideshare presentations, and animated gifs. Not just one long sheet of text but broken up into paragraphs with plenty of white space and rich media interwoven to add additional value and really make the article pop.You don’t have to necessarily create your own videos or your own slideshare presentations. Thousands of people have already done that for you. You can just focus on creating great content and find related videos and slideshare presentations to weave into your article.
So step 1 is to create epic content. But again, how do we turn this into a daily habit? What can you do every single day to make sure that you’re continuously creating epic content? That your blog is continuously growing?
Here’s the Boring Secret that Makes All the Difference…
I recommend that you write 1,000 words per day. Get a big wall calendar and a red marker. Every day that you write your 1,000 words, I want you to make a big X on that particular day, and that means that you have just completed your most important task of the day. If you want to succeed at blogging, you must be creating content every single day. This is how you build momentum. It’s how you build authority, traffic, and a tribe of raving fans.The next step, of course, is promoting that content. Because it really doesn’t matter if you’ve created the best content online. You could literally have the best article ever written in the history of the internet, but if you don’t promote it, no one sees it.
So your second most important task is to promote that content. In the early days of your blog, you want to focus on an 80:20 ratio. That means, 20% of your time should be spent creating your content. 80% of your time should be spent promoting that content. If you spend an hour creating content, you should spend 4 hours promoting that content. This is especially true when you’re just getting started. The promotion side is MUCH more important when you’re just getting started. Because when you’re just getting started, you have no audience. No list.
In just 3-6 Months, You’ll Have a Snowball Rolling…
Once you start pumping out content though, you’re going to start growing your fan base, your Twitter followers, your Facebook Fans, and Google+ followers. Most importantly, you’re going to start growing your email subscriber list.Once you’ve been blogging for 3-6 months, you’ll have new leverage points that will allow you to start generating traffic on demand. So that every time you publish a new blog post, you can quickly and easily push it out to your existing subscribers, followers, and fans.
But in the beginning, there is no fan base. So it’s a lot more work to get traction. To get the snowball rolling. But once you gain that momentum, it gets easier and easier. Each piece of content grows your fan base.
My Favorite Part… Promoting Your Content
So what are the best ways to promote your content? One of my personal favorites is social media. Spreading your content through sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.But my all-time favorite is blogger outreach. That means that once you’ve hit that publish button and you have an epic piece of content on your blog, you then email 20, 30, 40, 50 related bloggers. Send each person a fun, short and personalized email letting them know about your latest blog post.
This is by far one of the best ways to promote your content. In fact, with just our last piece of content, we emailed just 20 people and that generated over 1,000 visitors. You don’t even have to send out that many emails. If you’ve truly created epic content and you send out some fun, personalized emails, other bloggers will be happy to reshare that content with their own community on Twitter, Facebook, and Googl Plus. It is by far, one of the fastest ways to get momentum and to build your audience.
Unfortunately, for most people, it strikes fear in the very heart of them. Just the thought of emailing someone and the possibility of rejection strikes terror in most people. The fear holds them back.
But for you, it offers a huge opportunity, because no one else is doing it. No one else is truly creating epic content and promoting it by sending short and personalized emails to 50+ related bloggers.
The other great thing about this is that over time, you’re going to form some great long-term relationships. Let’s face it, sitting in front of this computer, all day long, can get kind of lonely. But when you have a group of blogging friends that you can just chat with and bounce off ideas, it makes this whole game a lot more fun. Don’t be afraid to reach out. It is by far, one of the best things that you can do to grow your business and have a lot more fun.
Now if you’re doing podcast or creating audio content (just like what we’re doing now) you can promote that content on sites like iTunes, Soundcloud and Stitcher Radio.
Or you can use my new favorite traffic strategy – Facebook Ads!
Yes, I am talking about spending some money to promote your content and grow your business. It really amazes me how many people are so resistant to spending money on ads. They will buy products all day long to get information to “learn” how to grow their business, but they won’t spend a dime to actually GROW their business.That’s exactly what Facebook ads will do for you. They’ll do it affordably and very quickly. The great thing is, it doesn’t take that much investment. You can spend $10 or $20 to promote your latest blog post. That will get you your first couple hundred visitors. And as long as you’ve created epic content, like we’ve been talking about, that Facebook ad will create additional momentum. People are going to click the Like and Share buttons, which will send you hundreds of additional (FREE) visitors that you don’t even have to pay for. It’s completely free because you’ve ignited that momentum. All you have to do is make sure that you’ve created great content. Go to Facebook ads and spend $10, $20 or $30 to get that momentum rolling. It’s one of the fastest ways to grow your blog traffic.
Now… bring this back to daily habits. Anything that’s important in your business should be done consistently… day after day… week after week. We talked about the habit of writing 1,000 words per day and getting your big wall calendar and putting an X to each day that you do your writing task.
This is critically important to becoming a top blogger. But what about content promotion? I could say that I’m going to form a daily habit of spending 1 hour each and every day promoting my content. That’s pretty good. But honestly, it’s not specific enough.
It must be a habit that you can measure.
Something specific that you can do and then measure the exact results. 1,000 words per day. You can measure that. It’s very specific. We also want to get very specific with our content promotion. What can you do on a daily basis to make sure that your audience, your blog, and your email subscriber list grows every single day?Let’s put this into specific daily habits. How about one post per day on Facebook? You can measure it and it’s very specific. It’s very easy to check that off the to-do list. It’s also measurable. You can go on to Facebook each day and make that post. At the end of the day, you can see exactly what the results were. How many likes did it get? How many people saw that post? How many shares did it get? How many people clicked the link in that post and went to your blog? Everything in Facebook can be measured and tracked. That is one of the biggest keys to creating daily habits. They MUST be measurable.
Our next content promotion habit is going to be one post per day on Google Plus. Again, it’s very easy to measure the results of that activity. That’s key. 10 posts per day on Twitter. Again, you can measure exactly how many clicks those 10 posts generate. You can also batch process this task so that you can automatically load up 70 tweets for the entire wee. I recommend using something like BufferApp so that you can schedule all of your posts on Monday and have them drip-fed throughout the week. That way you can use the rest of the week to focus on other high-leverage activities.
Another one of my favorites that we talked about is blogger outreach. How do we turn that into a habit that can be measure?
Let’s send 10 short, fun and personalized emails per day to related bloggers. When I get to the end of the day, I know that I’ve got to send out my 10 emails. And again, it is a habit. It is something that you’re going to do daily because that is the only way to improve, the only way to create mastery.
But also make sure that you’re enjoying the journey. Make sure that you always make it fun. Keep it personalized. Again, we’re building our business around something that we are passionate about. Building a life and business you love. Don’t get so caught up in the tasks that you forget to enjoy the journey.
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the 10-minute marketing show. If you’re enjoying this content, I would love it if you are able to leave a rating and review inside of iTunes. Let me know any sort of topics that you would like to hear in upcoming episodes. Go ahead! Leave us your comments, questions, and feedback and let me know what we can do to make this podcast even better!
