MBA1167 Is It Too Late To Start a Blogging Business? + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey there. Today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This Friday we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. It's $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but it's going to go to somebody for free today. We do this every Friday and it's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review to enter our weekly random draw and then listen in on Friday to see if you won. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey yo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that get your brain juices flowing 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 Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn. Is it too late to start a blogging business? About 10 years ago it was the height of businesses built around blogs. People writing and posting about a subject matter and earning a living from it. Whether through sponsorships or AdWords or affiliate commission or their own content products, blogging was an actual business model. In the last 10 years, many have left the blogging world thinking, hey, this is a lot of work, this is tough and there's not enough money in it. Well, I'm here to tell you that blogging is having a resurgence and a lot of online businesses that I know of are built around a strong blog and a people that make a very healthy six figure living running a small niche blog or several blogs. But what do you have to do different these days to be successful with blogging and make some money in it. That's what we talk about in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I'm here to tell you that blogging is still alive and kicking. But what worked back in the day, 10 years ago, doesn't necessarily work today. You need to have a different strategy. The Internet has evolved, it has matured and so has the people that visit these blogs. So there's a few things I want to talk about when it comes to having a successful blogging business. What are the essential things you need to have? For many people that want to start an online business, a blog is a great choice. You get to write and talk about your passion, be totally location independent, travel the world and make money in the process. Sounds amazing, right? But there's things you have to do to make it work. So let's get into those. Number one, you have to have a business model around your blog. Can't just blog and then say, okay, how do I make money? You have to think about that beforehand. There are several ways to earn an income when running a blog. One of the most popular ways is through affiliate commission. Let's say you love video games and you have a blog that talks about the different video game consoles and the latest releases. Now every time you write a write up a blog post about a new game, whether it's good or bad, you can include your affiliate commission to Amazon. It's called Amazon Associates. So when people click on that link, you will get commission for every sale that's made through your link. If you get enough clicks and sales, you're obviously going to make enough commission. There's also Google AdSense. This used to be huge back in the day. People used to make a lot of money on putting, you know, ads on their blog. But this is less profitable than it used to be. It's been abused over time. And Google has cleaned up the algorithm. And Google AdSense really only makes sense in terms of making you enough money or some money that's worth your trouble and worth, you know, putting ads on your blog. If you have tons of traffic to your website, we're talking about 200 to 300,000 visitors a month at least. If you're not there yet or your blog is not that popular, you still can make money. And option number one, the affiliate links is definitely an option. Number three, sponsors. You know that we have sponsors here on the podcast, but you can do the same on your blog. You can negotiate a deal with sponsors where they can be on certain blog posts or on certain pages on your website for a certain amount of time, for a certain amount of money. You can also, of course, build your own informational product. For example, one of the most popular blogs out there is a blog by Steve Camp called Nerd Fitness. Nerd Fitness is a blog for ordinary, you guessed it, nerds that want to get fit. And he has his own products, his own type of programs, like how to get on a Paleo diet, or be part of a community where you can have encouragement from other Nerd Fitness fans. Or be part of a community where you can get encouragement from other Nerd Fitness fans. Having some sort of reoccurring membership to your product or products is a real viable option because you don't really need to charge so much. If you have a $30 membership fee a month and you have a hundred people, that's $3,000, very low overhead, and that's just one revenue stream. So you have to have a business model. You have to have a way to make money. The second thing is you have to niche down. The best blogs are ones that are very specific. I talked about Nerd Fitness, where it's very, very niche. Not just a fitness blog. It's a fitness blog for people that love, like, Star wars and Legos and like to nerd out. They're not necessarily a bodybuilder. They're just somebody that has, you know, a professional job that wants to get into shape without having to feel like a slob, right? They want to feel like a decent person and not feel so demotivated. Going to the gym, looking at all these other people that are in so much better shape. They want to be around people that they can relate to, and they want to read blog posts that give them that feeling. So whatever your genre is, trying to niche down as much as possible. A lot of people tend to not do this at the start or as a beginner because they think, hey, I'm going to be limiting the number of people that read my blog or my traffic or my buyers. But the problem is when you try to appeal to everybody, you appeal to nobody. And the world is big enough and the Internet is huge enough for you to actually niche down and still have, you know, enough people. This reminds me of Kevin Kelly's blog post, A Thousand True Fans. All you really need is a thousand true fans to run a profitable business. So no matter how niche you are, you can find a thousand people. Whether you're into building your own beehives in your backyard or. Or a travel blog for Snowboarders, where best to snowboard around the world. You're gonna find people that are interested in that and are happy to, you know, take you up on whatever your business model offerings are. The third thing is probably the most critical thing is probably gonna make or break your blog as a business, and that is consistency. You have to be consistent with the blog. Yes, you have that kind of freedom to travel the world and be location independent, but it doesn't mean you don't work. It means that you have to actually publish your blog posts on a regular basis, whatever that consistency is, whether it's twice a week, three times a week, once a week. The point is, is that you have to be consistent. I always bring up this example. Brian Dean, backlinko.com, an incredible blog. Brian only publishes maybe once every six weeks, which is very rare for a blog. But when he does publish, his blog posts are basically books. They're like amazing. They're filled with all these multimedia. It's about like 8 to 10,000 words. The average blog posts these days are like a thousand words. But he takes it seriously. He understands that his blog generates so much traffic and allows him to build his business and make money and live his life. So if you want to look at an example of somebody who really is consistent and also is really high quality when it comes to writing great blog posts, then check out Brian Dean over@backlinko.com so consistency is key. You got to be consistent and you're going to get rewarded for your consistency through your search engine optimization. Google is going to rank you higher because it sees that, hey, you're providing great information to people on a consistent basis. And it's not enough only to publish, but you have to remember this is a business. You have to market your blog, you have to get out there, you have to guest blog, you have to do interviews, you have to make sure that people find your blog. And that's a whole episode in itself. But the point is, is that you have to incorporate marketing to your blog. If you build it, they will come. Does not apply on the Internet. Just does not. You have to get people to come to your blog and you have to. That means you have to be on other platforms, you have to market yourself. One thing I do want to mention about blogging today is that back in the day it was totally fine to write a 300 to 500 word blog post. This day and age is just not going to cut it. If you want really good traffic, if you want people to really take you seriously, if you want to be ranked high, you want to make sure that people share your links. You really gotta focus on quality as well as quantity. You want to go deep as much as possible on your blog posts. Today I don't publish blog posts that are less than 1500 words. 1500 is short for us. We try to, you know, hover around 2,500 and we feel like that's enough information to really cover a topic thoroughly. And when you do that, you will be rewarded again with your ranking. Because hey, Google recognizes this is not some sort of short blog post. Just so you can push a blog post out there and you know stuff with keywords or you know, stuff the headline with a bunch of keywords so you can attract people and then it is not really helpful. Google really is geared or it's programmed to rank sites that are helpful to the search term. If you do go deep and you do take the time to write a great piece, it's really gonna help. And there's a major differentiation between, you know, the actual length of your blog post, between a 500 word blog post and maybe a 1500-2000. So take the time to write something quality and a bit deep as well as enough meat on the bone for people to actually learn something.

Okay? Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy cute PC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.

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You can still build a business around a blog. But there's one last piece of advice I have to tell you. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to build interest and traffic to your blog. But that's where the consistency and quality comes in. The more you focus on quality and consistency, the faster you're gonna grow. That's the formula. Publish consistently with great quality content. Get the traffic first. Make sure you have an audience. Make sure you got people commenting, you got people engaging with you. After you have that, everything else will fall into place. You have to have an audience so they can click on your links, so they can buy your products, so you can have a business. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that was helpful. Today's episode is not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to one of our listeners who left us an itunes rating and review. See who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Hooten Law 2018. Hulaw's from Canada and says great resource. Five stars. I found the $100 BA show to be a great resource to start my own law practice. The episodes about building a website, blogging and standing out in my marketplace was especially helpful. Well, thank you hu in law and you are our winner. All you got to do is email me at omar100-mba net so I can hook you up with that Free Ride to easy course, a $500 value. If you want to win, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw no matter where you are in the world. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this building an audience. Whether you're blogging, podcasting, you know, growing your YouTube channel, you're on Twitch. It doesn't matter. If you're trying to grow an audience, it takes time. It takes consistent effort. I can see this firsthand. Being somebody who's built many blogs as well as, you know, the host of the show. You know, we've been doing the show for over four and a half years and we started with one listener, right? And my advice is, when you're starting out, do not worry about the numbers so much. Just worry about the quality and the consistency and the audience will follow. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Sam.