How I Built a 4 Figure Monthly Blog in 3 Months – Part 1

I started a new blog last year, and the blog was resulting in four figures monthly for me within 3 months of starting it.

I will be sharing how I did this in a series of blog posts on Zac’s blog (also check out Zac’s blogging successes), with examples and resources to make this series really practical.

Here are some interesting things about the blog I started:

• It started as challenge to myself on my blog to show my readers what is possible through blogging
• I started the blog in a different niche from my blog’s niche
• I maintained the blog under a pseudonym
• It was a “success” within 3 months of my starting it, according to my plans when I started it; my definition of success was for it to generate 4 figures monthly,
• I documented my progress publicly on my blog in a series of posts

What will be covered in this series?

• Part 1: How I Planned My Blog and Chose a Niche
• Part 2: How I Chose My Domain Name, Set Up My Blog, and Created Key Pages
• Part 3: My Process for Writing Key Posts that Drive Income
• Part 4: How I Market My Blog

Since today’s post will be kick-starting the series, I’ll start by going into how I planned my blog.

Why Plan Your Blog?

Most of us are used to viewing blogging as something really simple, and we feel there are really no life-changing decisions when blogging so there’s no need to plan. Why not avoid “procrastination” and just get started?!

How I realized the importance of planning a blog

I used to share the opinion that planning isn’t necessary when blogging but the blog I’m featuring in this series isn’t my first blog; I started my first blog carelessly, without any real plan on what to write about, and not only did I struggle to figure out the purpose of my blog for a very long time, it also took me a whole year to generate any real income from it.

Once I started to generate income from my first blog, I realized I could have shortcut the process if I was initially well-informed about what I am doing, and if I had planned everything before I started. My knowledge and experience with my first blog helped me plan my new blog. In retrospect, I’m glad I did.

When it comes to planning a blog, there are 3 things I believe are key, and that this article will be covering. They are:

• Choosing a niche
• Determining your blog’s purpose
• Deciding on a content and marketing plan for your blog
• Planning how to make money from my blog

The ultimate aim is to get results and the above 3 things must be taken seriously; they might evolve once you start your blog but it is important to start with them in mind.

How I Chose My Niche

When it comes to blogging, you can’t afford to be a jack of all trades.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs all over the world and thousands in almost any niche you can imagine; with so many blogs that specialize on topics they care about, and the increasingly limited time we have as human beings, readers can’t afford to read your blog if you’re a generalist.

I learned this the hard way with my first blog; I struggled for a long time and couldn’t build an audience when I was writing about everything. However, the moment I shifted gears to start talking about writing, especially the kind of writing that helps you get paid online, readers started paying attention and I started to build a real audience.

I wasn’t ready to make this mistake with my new blog so I decided to choose a niche and stick to it. This time, the niche I chose was the “guest blogging” niche, which can be classified under thecontent/inbound marketingniche, which can also be classified under themarketingniche.

If you carefully analyze how I chose my niche, you will notice how specific I was. Here are some tips when choosing your niche:

1. Make Sure it’s Something You Have Experience in: In my case, I have years of experience with guest blogging. I have written guest posts promoting my blog, and guest posts promoting my clients; I’ve written around a thousand guest posts over a span of 3 years, and I’ve written guest posts to get traffic, subscribers, backlinks, etc., so I know how guest blogging works inside out.

Your blog topic could be about your experience, what you studied in school, your hobby, or a subject you are passionate about. Just make sure you know enough about your subject to be able to blog about it.

2. Make it Specific: I needed to get results quickly, and this is a one man operation. I’m not a mega corporation with millions to invest, so I can’t afford to choose a niche too broad.

I could have gone with “marketing” or with “inbound/content marketing” but I went with “guest blogging” because it was more specific and I feel I could achieve success much sooner in that niche.

3. Make Sure it Has Potential: If there are a lot of businesses offering services relevant to your niche, it is a good sign it has potential. There are a lot of people offering guest blogging services, people doing case studies about it, and I’ve made money in the past doing it, so I know it has potential.

With these 3 things in place, you are well-equipped to succeed in a niche.

How I Determined My Blog’s Purpose

Since your blog can’t be about everything, it is important to also work on its niche; what will you discuss, and what will be the main aim of your blog? The more specific your blog is, the clearer its purpose.

Part of my blog’s purpose is to inform people about guest blogging and teach them how to get results doing it; this was automatically established when I chose my niche.

However, to take things to the next level and establish my blog’s purpose, I decided I wanted it to be different from other blogs that talk about guest blogging. I want the tips to be practical, informative and easy to use; as a result, it will be rare to see my blog focus on “10 tips to do this guest blogging, etc.” Of course, I could write about topics like these once in a while but the focus of my blog is on offering practical information like the ones below:

• The Ultimate List of Blogs that Accept Guest Posts
• Case Study: How I Used Guest Blogging to Increase My Search Traffic by 342.35% in One Year
• The Ultimate Guide to Building Backlinks with Guest Blogging

As you can see from the above 3 posts, which are the kind my blog focused on, the main aim of my blog is to provide useful information that readers can act on, not just another filler “tips” post.

How I Created a Content and Marketing Plan for My Blog

I knew my blog won’t succeed just because I have the perfect niche, and that I had to create a real plan for marketing it. This plan had to include how I approach content on the site as well as how I market it.

Here was my plan for my blog:

Blog content: 3 blog posts a week on average

Marketing: 20 guest posts monthly and regular activity on community sites like Quora

I was being unrealistic with these goals because I had another well-established blog that required my attention, I freelance for a living, and I had other plans, so I couldn’t commit to meeting the above goals without focusing on my new blog full-time; and I can’t afford to work on it full-time yet. However, having the above goals as my plan helped a lot.

I didn’t meet up with these goals but using it as a guide, my blog started to generate income soon. It has been making me an average of four figures monthly for at least 9 months now, and it now gets an average of 4,000 visitors monthly.

I also evolved some of my plan, like being active on Quora, when I didn’t see any results from doing them after sometime. So, instead, I changed my focus to only publishing posts on my blog and guest blogging on other blogs. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to do a lot of these to get results; with just 6 quality posts on my blog and around 5 guest posts published on other blogs, I had my first month where I made over $500 income as a result of the blog.

How I Planned to Make Money from My Blog

It is important to discuss this to put things in perspective. How I planned to make money from my blog is an important piece of the puzzle and it is something I needed to decide on before I started my blog.

Based on my experience, of 2 years, building my first blog, I had realized that one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money from my blog is by offering my services. I was a freelance writer; this time around, I decided to offer my services as a professional guest blogger, and occasionally a content marketer.

With this kind of plan to make money from my blog, I only needed to get a few clients every month and income will be consistent.

I did. I got my first client exactly 1 month and 10 days after I started my blog; when my blog hasn’t gotten up to 500 visitors; I still work with the client today, and I’ve made five figures working with him.

What I realized in the process is that, by offering my services, I don’t need thousands of monthly visitors to make money from my blog; with just hundreds of visitors monthly, I was getting clients consistently and soon started having four figure income months.

Watch Out for Part 2

This post is already very long so I have to stop here. In part two of this post, I will be talking about how I created my blog, chose my domain name, and how I went about creating key pages that influenced the success of my blog.

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If you love this post, you will also love my free ecourse on how to blog for clients. Make sure you check it out!

Social Media and Work Experience - How can you stand out?

When it comes to looking for a job in social media marketing, work experience is invaluable. As a current undergraduate marketing student I know how important it is to have relevant work experience, especially when it comes down to looking for that first move onto the career ladder - however, I also realise just how hard is can be to get this experiences.

I have been fortunate enough to carry out work experience that has included social media marketing as part of the role. Whilst at university I have had the opportunity to do a year out in industry - which gave me an invaluable insight into how social media marketing works in the Engineering industry. This allowed me to adapt a social media strategy, work on Twitter, Facebook and a blog from a B2B perspective, and attempt to get internal staff on board with getting social!

If you have the passion and drive on social media, and social media marketing is something that you have the ambition to get into, then why not use it to get work experience? My philosophy in life is "If you don't ask you won't get" - so put it out there on your personal social media channels that you want to get work experience! Work for free, offer to work for a few days, who knows who might be interested! I used this tactic and managed to get some additional work experience with a communications and PR company - absolutely perfect! Reaching out to social media companies via social media surely makes sense?! Research the type of companies you would like to get experience with and make sure you know exactly what you want to get out of those few days working - be honest and let the company know exactly where you want to get experience. If you want to find out how to tweet for a company then let them know! Social media marketing is all about being just that - social!

If you are going to use social media to get work experience there are many different ways to achieve this. Why not do some research and find out what hashtags you can use on Twitter? There might be one to bring lots of small companies from your local area together, or #JobHour to see if there are any companies who are interested. It is all about selling yourself as a passionate individual! My recommendation here would be to target smaller companies - they are more likely to be able to give you time and really value what you can offer them.

Social media marketing is continuously changing - new aspects are developing all the time - so do your reading, read blogs, articles, journals, and keep up to date! Why not start your own blog? This is a great way to keep your social media going and will give you an insight into social media marketing. Think of it as marketing yourself via social media! You can use this to reach out to potential companies that might offer work experience, and direct them back to your blog as a portfolio.

We are in an age now where social media marketing is huge. Personally I use social media to communicate with companies, and with my experience I know that most companies now have a social media strategy to communicate with their customers. Social media marketing is a powerful tool, and companies are going to want to employ someone who has experience in this. If you are able to get some experience in this area, you really are setting yourself apart in the job market.

Best of luck to anyone who is looking for work experience - it's tough but worth it!

Helen Chick

I am a final year Business and Marketing student, who loves all things social media. Blog about "My Life as a Student" and love to tweet! Currently looking for a graduate role.

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How to Grow your Brand on Twitter

With Twitter now eclipsing 200 million active users and on the verge of an IPO, there can no longer be any doubt that Twitter will become a regular feature on the docket of marketing executives. The company Twitter will be on a prolonged offensive to develop its business and monetize its base.  The question then becomes, from a brand’s perspective, how to grow your brand on Twitter?

Objectives first

The first point of call is to figure out what are the overall business objectives and to understand how social media — and in this case Twitter — will be a contributing factor in the overall strategy.  With these objectives clearly in mind, the next consideration is to figure out what you will be measuring against.  For example, where is it that you want the Twitter users to go (i.e. create a funnel)?  What actions do you want to stimulate (e.g. subscribe to a newsletter)?   Once the objectives and measuring sticks have been identified, then a strategy and implementation plan comes into focus.

Twitter Options

Having established the objectives, the question remains as to how to grow your brand using Twitter.  Below are several typical usages for Twitter.  These are arguably transfers of traditional business functions onto another channel.  Only the first is demonstrably about hitting the top line.

• Sales Channel (e.g. DellOutlet, SteamyDeals [Steam video games]).  Other brands use their Twitter to announce deals or offer coupons within their stream.  Whole Foods is one of the more recent ones to join this bandwagon.  With pure players and/or those with eCommerce sites, this avenue is easy to control and measure.  However, it is a more complex affair in a cross-channel environment.
• PR or Corporate Communications - To broadcast corporate messages, for example press releases and/or shareholder information (e.g. LOrealUSACorp)
• HR Recruitment / Careers - To speak to and hire new recruits (e.g. Nestle USA Careers)
• Customer Service (e.g. JetBlue, NikeSupport,ComcastCares…).  According to an infographic produced by Sentiment Metrics, 30% of top brands now have a dedicated customer service on Twitter.

Unlike on a Facebook page or in LinkedIn Groups or Forums, a brand’s Twitter followers are not a tight knit community.  {Click to Tweet} Each person or account has chosen to follow the brand, but does not necessarily interact with other followers.  After all, 80% of all Twitter accounts do not actively tweet.  Moreover, the notion of unfollowing on Twitter is done with little friction.

What counts on Twitter?

Twitter has unique differences to the traditional media channels and we have seen some very original and different ways of using Twitter to help drive the business.  A healthy Twitter account should typically have a combination of the four components below:

• Conversation - Procter & Gamble uses their principal handle with a declared intent to “keep the conversation going.”  Conversation is the part that makes Twitter social.  Accounts that are uniquely one-way broadcasts can quickly become stale or viewed as a kind of spam.
• Content creation and distribution - Twitter can be suitable to distribute content that is being created within the organization.  An example is IBM.  The key is creating valuable content for one’s follower base.
• Curation - Rather than focusing on one’s own content, brands can use Twitter to uncover and dispatch the most relevant news out there.  According to a recent Livefyre study, 93% of respondents said that they used Twitter for social curation.  As Livefyre’s CEO, Jordan Kretchmer, said, “[p]eople are talking about your brand every day. Social curation enables marketers to tap into what people are already saying about your brand on social networks and then use it to promote their products in an effective, authentic way.”
• News - Especially when it’s hot.  The bakery, Albion’s Oven, in London has been using Twitter since 2009 to great effect, announcing when the latest baked items were hot out of the oven.
• Customer Service (e.g. JetBlue, NikeSupport, ComcastCares…).  According to an infographic produced by SentimentMetrics, 30% of top brands now have a dedicated customer service on Twitter.

6 keys to grow your brand on Twitter

Notwithstanding all the above usages, there are several key ways how to grow your brand on Twitter.

1. Integrating.  On the very basic level, it is important that your Twitter account have a well thought through bio, replete with a pertinent link.  Moreover, your Twitter presence should be fully integrated into all other marketing materials, including substantively the home page of your main website.  The Twitter handle (aka username) can also be farmed out throughout events, on business cards and more.
2. Listening.  Twitter is a vibrant space and, considering the volume of tweets, it is likely that there are people talking at anytime about you, your competitors and/or your environment.  By listening intently to existing and potential customers, there are inevitably opportunities that open up, whether in the B2B or B2C space.  I highly encourage C-suite executives to use Twitter just to listen to what is going on in the street, thereby side-stepping the internal hierarchies that can often obscure the truth.  A great example of such behavior is the CEO of O2 in England, Ronan Dunne, who as he says uses his account to “walk the aisles.”
3. Demonstrating expertise.  To the extent Twitter is a micro-blogging service (where blogs are a long form way of highlighting one’s expertise), it can be a good vehicle to establish one’s authority in a certain field.  The key point here is to think of one’s brand as a media or publishing company.  Twitter can be a useful part of the arsenal in creating a sense of authority in a chosen sector.
4. Providing offers.  Twitter can be a way to distribute offers, coupons or straight discounts.  Whether the offers are separated into a dedicated “sales” channel or integrated into the stream of the main account, Twitter’s particularity is the rapid decay of Tweets.  Typically, this makes it an ideal channel for flash sale sites.  However, it can also be applied for other offline stores.  The key is figuring out the association between the tweet and the cash register — and making sure the staff are appropriately trained and equipped.
5. Identifying leads.  The search function is an effective way to find interesting contacts.  Sometimes finding leads can be done the soft route, by answering questions of people in need (relative to your area of expertise).  Otherwise, there are many people asking questions and looking for goods/services.  Fixing up some automated searches (using a client such as HootSuite or Tweetdeck to set up columns) can be an effective way to monitor these requests.  Meanwhile, as of end of August 2013, Twitter has rolled out Lead Generation Cards which can only be used with promoted tweets.  As published in a Mashable article,“[i]n a case study quoted on Twitter’s blog, outdoor gear and apparel company Rock/Creek saw a 4.6% engagement rate and generated more than 1,700 new email contacts in one week by using a Card within a Promoted Tweet.”
6. Creating contests / white papers / webinars.  By formulating exclusive contests on Twitter, one can add names to a mailing list and/or establish new leads.  An alternative might be to offer free white papers or webinars.

Conclusions

The key point in using Twitter to grow your brand is to know what you want to achieve, to set out some measurable goals and then test and learn.  It is essential to find an editorial line that respects the followers, because they can very quickly and easily unsubscribe.  Secondly, it’s important to think of this as a longer-term project, without concerning oneself with immediate results.  Buying followers via any of the quick fix services (eg SocialKik, FanBullet) is not prescribed,even at the beginning.  Thirdly, a Twitter feed must be managed.  If you are in start-up mode, training and guidelines are vital.  Members of a team managing the accounts need to play off each other and are ideally identified in the bio (e.g. for ComcastCares) or are recognized in the individual tweets (e.g. via ^initials).    Finally, Twitter cannot be a standalone.  For example, when creating a Customer Service line via Twitter, there usually needs to be other channels to cater to different audiences.

Parting tips: If you are going to be serious about building your brand on Twitter, here are three guiding principles:

• (a) Consider carefully the objective of the account(s) and allocate the right resources (including people, tools and time)
• (b) Listen, test and learn
• (c) Give before expecting in return

Your thoughts and comments are, as ever, welcome.