MBA1051 Starting a Blog From Scratch P1

Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that delivers lessons you can use every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And today's lesson is part one of our two part lesson on starting a blog from scratch. You know how powerful blogging can be. It's great for SEO, it's great for building your brand and communicating your ideas. But where do you start? This is what this two part lesson is all about. How to get started, everything you need to know. So you have a blog, a successful blog on your hands that produces great content consistently. In part one, we're going to be talking about what the topic is of your blog, the content and your production plan. How are you going to make sure that your blog actually continues to produce great content? Blogging is not a once and done thing. It's a consistent procedure we have to follow. I'll lay it out for you in today's lesson and in tomorrow's lesson we'll go into the tech of blogging. What are your choices when it comes to the platforms, how to make sure things are published on time and how to set it all up so you launch with a bang. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 show is supported by Podia. Podia helps thousands of creators earn money from their passion. It's an all in one digital storefront that you can sell courses, memberships and digital downloads in one place. It's the most creator friendly platform on the market with zero transaction fees and a super friendly 24, 7 life support team. No matter what plane you're on, so they're gonna take care of you even if you're just getting started. What's great about Podia is that it eliminates all the technical headaches. It takes care of every aspect of selling your course or membership or digital download. If you got video courses, they do the video hosting for you. If you want an easy way to charge your members on a reoccurring basis for a membership, Podia takes care of it. You want a secure way for people to download your products. When they pay for them, they take care of that too. They also offer free migrations on their Shaker plan. Best of all, Podia puts their money where their mouth is. They have a 30 day free trial with no credit card required. So if you don't love it, you don't pay a penny. If you're looking to start a online course, sell any kind of digital product, or start a membership site, check them out and support the show by going to podia.commba that's P O D I a.commba the first step in starting a blog is answering one question, why are you starting a blog? And it has to be a clear and precise answer. Some answers might be something like, I want to start a blog for my business, to get more traffic to my website. Another answer might be, I want this blog to be a test pilot for a book I may want to write in the future. I want to test out some ideas you have to find and define your own answer. This is critical before you write one blog post, before you set up any kind of software, because you need to know what your motivation is so you can work towards that goal. What's the goal of this whole thing? Why are you doing this? And I'll give you an example from my own business. So we are launching a new product. Can't talk about it yet, but it's a whole new website, A whole new product. And yes, we are launching a blog with this website. My whole reason for launching this blog is to produce great content on the topic of my product to help people out and be found with great articles via SEO. It's all about the audience for me in this blog. I'm trying to write the best articles on the topics they really want to know about. And I want to rank high for each of these topics. This is why I'll be writing blog posts every, every single week for this blog. That's the whole goal. You gotta define your goal. So that's step number one. Step number two, you gotta decide what you're gonna be writing about. What's the topic of your blog? It's better for your blog to be very specific or have some specific topic for yourself than to be super general. It doesn't mean you can't write or blog about things outside that topic. It just means that you wanna stay focused. A good example is the site Real Men, Real Style by Antonio Centeno. Great, great site, huge success. And he has an incredible YouTube channel by the way too. But when he started out, he really just focused on fashion. Suits, ties, shoes, things like that. But as he grew the blog, he started to introduce other topics. But at the start, or starting right now, he got very specific. Nowadays, years after he's launched the site, he might have articles on dating, he might have articles on how to perform on an interview. It's outside the scope, but he started out very specific, so get as specific as possible at the start, at least. Next, let's talk about the content of your blog posts. What's going to be actually on the screen? How long are your blog posts going to be? Do you want to do short blog posts? Like, Seth Godin has very, very short blog posts. It's a daily blog, but his posts are very short, less than 100 words sometimes. Are you going to go long form? Like Brian Dean of Backlinko.com his post can be up to 8,000 words. What about video? Are you going to incorporate video into your blog or infographics? Think about what your actual blog post will look like. Short, long. What kind of content is just going to be pure text? You need to decide this. And my advice in deciding this is choose what you feel you can produce consistently. If you can't produce an infographic every week, then maybe that's not the best choice at the start. We want to start, we want to launch, we want to make this happen. But if you're the kind of person that is super comfortable on camera and you like to just shoot from your iPhone, and it's super simple for you to just, you know, hit record, and that's your video and you can include it in your blog post, then go with that. But if you're a text person, keep it simple. Keep it just all text. The next thing you need to consider is your production schedule. How often are you going to be publishing your blog posts? Some people publish every day. Some people publish a few times a week. Some people publish once a week, some even once a month. But boy, are they epic posts when they're once a month. So decide the frequency. I've been blogging and doing this online business thing for some time, and let me tell you right now, quantity is not always the best thing for blogging. A lot of people think the more content I churn out, the better. No, in fact, SEO doesn't work that way. Search engine optimization does not work that way. The quality is the most important thing. It's better for you to have 12 blog posts a year that are epic, that drive crazy traffic than 1200 blog posts a year that are just vanilla and don't really resonate with anybody. And there are businesses that do that. They produce like three or four blog posts a day. And in fact, something I learned from Brian Dean, from Backlinko, the SEO expert, the more pages on your website, the harder it is to rank because you're spreading out your traffic against a lot of pages. So quality super important. So make sure if you're going to choose to once a week, one, the quality is great and two, it's consistent. Choose a consistency you can stick to. If you can't do daily, do not do daily. If you can't do weekly, also don't do weekly, do every two weeks. Stick to what you can stick to once you decided your frequency. Plug it into the calendar. Make sure you use a calendar like Google Calendar. It's free with Gmail. And what you're doing here is you're creating a deadline for yourself with reminders. You need to publish this blog post by this date. And you may want to add some other things in the calendar. Like the draft of this blog post is due on this date, this needs to be edited by this date, and it needs to go live on this date. This breaks up the deadlines into smaller deadlines that you you can manage and be on top of. The next tip I want to pass on is I highly recommend that you actually write your blog post outside of the software you're going to use to publish them outside your website. This allows you to really edit and not mess around with your website too much. You may make a mistake or delete something by mistake, or go live by mistake. There's no reason for you to be writing your blog posts in your site. You can just do this simply with with a doc, with a document. I recommend Google Docs. It's fantastic. Again, it's free with a Gmail account and you just create a new document for every blog post and you can date it and everything in the title. And you create folders in your Google Drive so you can organize your blog posts. And what's great about Google Docs is that you can edit, you can make comments, you can pass it on to an editor and they can make edits or make comments. And when you're happy with it, you can just simply copy and paste it into your website and then adjust the editing according to your site. I like this because it kind of separates the writing and the creative portion of blogging from the tech portion. The tech portion, putting it on your website, it really has nothing to do with the content of the actual article. It's really about making it look good, making sure it publishes right, and all your search engine tags and all that stuff are done properly. So I like to separate the two because you're using a different part of your brain when you're writing versus working on the tech, and it's really tiresome to switch back and forth from one thought to the next. So write everything, edit everything, make sure it's all brilliant on Google Docs, and when you're ready, copy and paste it and do all the proper editing to make it look good on your website. We'll talk more about the tech in part two of this lesson we're going to which is tomorrow, but I got more in part one on starting your blog from scratch. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor how do you stay up to date with the latest business news? If you're still relying on traditional news outlets, keeping up with the news feels like a chore. But it doesn't have to be that way. Business news can be enjoyable, even something that you actually look forward to. How it's called Morning Brew. It's a free daily email newsletter that delivers the latest business news directly in your inbox. Every weekday morning, the writers at Morning Brew curate the top business stories that you should know about and deliver them in a conversational tone. Best of all, it just takes a quick five minutes to read. Seriously. Imagine getting all your information you need to start your day in just five minutes and enjoy every second of it. I'm a subscriber of Morning Brew and absolutely love it. I love because I can start my day reading the newsletter and in five minutes I'm up to date with everything business. I don't have to waste my time scrolling through social media and wasting like an hour. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for free@morningbrew.com MBA that's morning brew.com MBA to start getting your daily dose of business news, I got one final tip when focusing on the content in starting your blog from scratch, your whole goal here is to launch this blog. To actually have a blog in your hands that publishes consistently. That's your goal. You gotta make this happen. So so to better your chances of reaching that goal, I advise you to keep it simple. If it's going to be too much work for you to source great images or shoot video or create infographics, then scrap it. Just keep it down to text. We'll talk about all the different software you can use to publish your blog, but one of them is Medium. And Medium just focuses on the words. If you want to keep it simple, that's a good option. Just focusing on the words. Just writing what you need to say. People love blogs because they love to read. Yes, images are great and they're eye catching and so are video. But if you're just starting out and you haven't blogged consistently, then having video and images may hinder you from actually publishing consistently every week or every whatever consistency you're doing. Again, we want to be successful. We want to publish regularly. We want to be true to our readers. So we got to do what's simple so we actually succeed. Alright, that wraps up part one of our two part lesson on how to start a blog from scratch. Part 2 Tomorrow's episode. We talk about how to set this all up with your website, with the tech, what are the options out there, what's best for you and your business and how do you manage it all. Every time you publish, make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss tomorrow's episode. You'll get it automatically on your device when you you subscribe. That's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Blogging is one of the best things I picked up in my entrepreneurial career. I never thought of myself as a writer before then. It was a struggle to write blog posts. I was very unsure. Am I a good writer? Am I a decent writer? Would anybody read this? All these questions do not matter. The point is you need to get started. You need to actually get your ideas out there. The quality of it, the barometer you need to shoot for is try your best. And your best is going to get better and better as you start writing. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode part two of this lesson. I'll see you then. Take. Sam.