I have two clear goals:
1) To create a second source of income through a blog.
2) To combine my management accounting designation and passion for personal development to generate content that can help businesses become efficient in operations and effective in working as a team.
However, promotion and marketing is not my strong suite so my question is starting out on the venture of starting a blog and monetizing it, what should the focus be for the 3 months?
Can you promote without content? No. However it does not start with content either, it starts with 'strategy'. What exactly do you want to communicate, what you want your audience to expect in your blog, how you want to hook them, engage them, and participate in discussions. What are your strengths - webinars, ebooks, tutorials, reviews?
1. Prepare an inventory of what all you want to offer, and why.
2. Plan a calendar so that you can stick to a schedule. Remember that all blogs start at 'Hello World' and a many end at this post itself.
3. Plan how to reward your audience.
4. Now comes Content and Promotion strategy.
If you want more details, write to me or setup a call anytime! :)
Content. Content, content, content. Work like hell making good content for at least 60 and perhaps 90 days.
No, you won't earn a cent yet. But what you will have is an incredible tool to you win over influencers when you start to promote.
Early promotion is easy. Find other people in your space who already have an audience for doing similar stuff (but not quite the same) and guest post / write for their site. If you're doing financial writing, look to write about a timely topic in Forbes or somewhere big as a stringer. Cross post your content to places like LinkedIn Pulse or Medium. Find people whose writing you admire and ask them for feedback on what they would change.
Once you've written the content, the job's just started, as you can see. Promotion will take up a lot of time, and you want to make sure that you are in a groove and can easily keep producing new content while sinking 2x - 3x the time it took to write an article going around the Net and promoting it or promoting you.
What's the way to Carnegie Hall? "Practice, practice, practice." 😉
Content and Promotion are symbiotic -- you must do both of them at the same time.
If you have no content, you have nothing to promote.
If you have no promotion, your content will never be seen.
Create a plan to promote your content, create your content (the best you've ever created), then carryout your plan.
Repeat every day for 3 months.
