| Blog Mastermind 2016 [ 5 Days To Go ] A System Works Because The Beginning Knows Where The End Is... When I first started blogging my strategy was 'throw content at the wall and see what sticks'. I didn't really understand back then how my content could lead to money beyond a belief in a simple equation... Eyeballs = Income This philosophy was the guiding principle for any person hoping to make money from content back then. Eyeballs means you have people looking at your content (traffic). The more eyeballs, the greater income you can make from those little square and rectangle ads you plaster over your site. It was easy to understand why this belief took off. We all had our heroes. Heroes were the bloggers showing off these huge advertising paychecks, which fuelled a blogging boom and gave everyone the belief that with enough content riches would come. Unfortunately what wasn't talked about was how few people actually made any significant money from blogging. The very few people who did in many ways got lucky, got in early, and attracted millions of people to their blogs. If you want to make thousands of dollars a month from your blog with advertising, you needed millions of eyeballs. That's just not a realistic outcome for most people. Stop Making Big Traffic Your Only Win Condition It has been five years now since I dropped advertising from my blogging strategy. It was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Advertising requires unrealistic amounts of traffic. It means you're promoting something that's not from you and the worst part, the nature of advertising is to take people AWAY from your site. Think about that for a moment. The great thing about selling your own products is the linear message you deliver to the world. It's your ideas (content) that first attracts people to you (your blog), you then deepen the relationship with more of your content (your email list), and then for those who really love what you do, they buy your products. The flow is NOT: Your Blog >> Ad >> Leave Site The flow is: Your Blog >> Your Email List >> Your Product Forgive me for making it sound narcissistic, but doesn't that make more sense as a business model? You foster a community, a group of people who love your work and benefit from it, and you don't send people away from your world by clicking an ad. Oh, and let's not forget the most important point... Your conversion rate is higher for your own products. MUCH higher. To put it simply, selling your own products to your own audience results in more sales. That should make logical sense. And the final big ah-hah point... Your conversion rate is higher, so you make more sales from fewer people, AND because it is your product, you keep more profit per sale. This means you make more money from fewer people. Gaining this understanding was a HUGE breakthrough for me, and I hope it has been for you too. You don't need millions of visitors. You just need a few hundred who buy your products. With A Direction Comes Purpose Once you commit to a strategy things become so much clearer... Your goal to make money is to sell your own products. In order to sell your products you need to attract a small audience of only the right people, people who NEED your product (they just don't know about it...yet!). In order to attract these people and build a relationship with them so they trust you enough to buy from you, you need content. Thus, all the blog posts and emails you setup in your email list are defined by this direction... this purpose. In my coaching program Blog Mastermind, I call this concept 'Strategic Intent'. This means your blog, email list and products are all linked together with a shared strategic intention, a shared goal. - Your blog has a strategic intent to attract the right people for your email list
- Your email list has strategic intent to deliver a sequence of content preparing people for, and driving people to, your product offer
When you do this right, people land on your product sales page ready to buy. The key point here is that whenever you create any piece of content, whether a blog post, email, lead magnet, video, podcast, or social media post... ...You begin with the end in mind. This is the complete opposite of the 'throw it against the wall' strategy I applied during my early blogging days (and so many people still use today). Why Do You Produce Content? So, let me ask you... Do you know how each piece of content you currently produce fits into the system to sell your products? If you can't answer this, don't start blogging or writing emails, because you're putting the cart before the horse! I'm amazed how many people write blog posts, or start an email list because they were told it's the right thing to do. These things are tools, without knowing how to use them, they're not going to work. The Entire System From Start To Finish When I rebuilt the new Blog Mastermind 2.0 program, my primary goal was to give you a proven system. A system of just a few key emails and blog posts that when used correctly, will sell all your products and services. I call my system The Blog Sales Funnel. Starting next week I'm going to send you a series of training videos breaking down how the system works and how you can apply it to sell your products. You can watch a small sample video right here. Stay tuned for more soon. Yaro Starak
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com | 
Hi! I'm Yaro Starak. I've been living the laptop lifestyle thanks to blogging since 2005.
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