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Episode 38: How To Grow A 7-Figure Podcast With John Lee Dumas

May 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

If you get into a conversation about starting your own podcast, it won’t take long before JLD gets mentioned. John Lee Dumas, otherwise known by his cool nickname, is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet.

He regularly brings in six figures from his podcast…every month!

And he took some time to share his secrets. We talked about growing your podcast to a seven figure revenue generator. He talks about pitching to sponsors and sprinkling call-to-actions throughout his episodes.

We also talk about productivity, which is one of John’s strong suits. To publish 1 episode every day and grow your business at the same time requires a legendary amount of productivity, and JLD unloaded with tidbits that anyone can use.

For instance, on the day I interviewed him, I was podcast #16 of 20 who would interview him that day. This is based on his batching concept where he chooses 1 day to cluster up all 20 podcast interviews he does each month. He also uses this approach to record 30 episodes (1 month’s worth of content) by choosing two days to conduct all of the interviews. Basically, John has a bias towards action.

“You need to have a bias towards action…..do things that scare you.” —John Lee Dumas

Learn:

—How to grow your podcast to a seven figure empire

—How to be more productive than you’ve ever been before

—How to pitch your podcast to sponsors

—How to incorporate CTAs in your episodes

Key Links from the Show:

EOFire.com – John’s Podcast

Recommended Books:

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters

5 Ways To Land More Guests On Your Podcast

April 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Hello everyone, I’m teenager entrepreneur Marc Guberti. In this post I’m going to share with you five different methods you can use to get more guests on your podcast.

But before I get into that, I want to talk to those of you who haven’t yet started a podcast, but are thinking about it, and tell you why podcasts are so valuable.

One of my favorite things about podcasting is that I get free mentors.

Rather than pay for an expensive consultation session, you can interview someone, ask questions that are also your audience’s questions, and get the answers as well as more insight about your niche. So I find that really valuable.

You also get to build relationships with, as you scale your podcast, some of the most influential and successful people on the planet.

That is no understatement at all. Basically with a podcast, and you being able to interview all of these people, you are going to reach more people with your podcast. If you really scale this up, you could even have a chat with one of your role models.

Some people are able to land that interview on their very first episode. I would not recommend doing that because you’re going to feel a lot of pressure interviewing your role model. While that’s also just the nature of the game, I recommend conducting some interviews before you ask your role model if he or she is available for a podcast interview.

Finally, exponential authority.

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen other people with podcasts do this, but they’ll say stuff like, “I’ve had guests like so-and-so and this person and that person.” That gives you more authority by association. So if you associate yourself with authority figures in your podcast, you’ll increase your own authority as well.

So now that you know why podcasts are awesome, I’m going to talk to you about methods, beginning with the ‘contact me’ page.

This page works both ways: your ‘contact me’ page and your guest’s ‘contact me’ page. In the beginning, your contact me page is going to do little to nothing unless you already have a big audience.

So what you want to do on your guest’s ‘contact me’ page is tell them about your podcast and your past guests, if you have any; if you don’t, focus more on what your podcast is about. You should be doing this either way, but you should have a stronger focus on what your podcast is about if you still haven’t had any guests.

You want to make this a really short email, less than five sentences, because some of these people are very busy and they only have a few seconds to decide if this is the right opportunity for them. The ‘contact me’ page seems to be a universal page on most blogs. You can usually find it easily at the top of the blog. If you cannot find it, go into the search engine on that person’s blog and search for the words ‘contact me’ or ‘contact us’. You can also go to the very bottom of a blog to look for the contact me option.

As you continue to get more guests and you continue to build your authority, some people are going to contact you directly and ask if they can be on your show. Some of your fans may also suggest people who could be on your show. So in the beginning, you’re doing a lot of work by contacting people, but eventually people are going to be contacting you asking to be on your show, or giving you ideas of who could appear on your next episode.

The second way to get more guests from your podcast is to use Twitter.

I absolutely love using Twitter for the purpose of getting more guests on my podcast episodes. I find people in my niche who I want to engage with and then ask them via Twitter if they would like to appear on my podcast. The great thing about Twitter is that it’s just 140 characters; sometimes I’ll find myself sending two tweets to the same person to get my point across, but that’s still less than 280 characters, and people usually engage with their followers on Twitter.

Responsive users are looking to see who has mentioned them, so they will see your tweet request. And a lot of them will engage with that tweet. I mean, some people might say, “Unfortunately I can’t do it.” But other people will say, “Great. Where do we start?” Another thing I do is include my email address within these tweets.

Why? Because you can’t easily continue a conversation like this on Twitter. Once you have the person’s attention, you’ll now want it to go beyond 140 characters. You’ll want to send them your scheduling link, which you definitely want to keep private or else you’re going to get a lot of people that you don’t want to interview filling up your calendar.

Even if you don’t have a scheduling calendar, you don’t want to be talking about, “Oh, let’s do it at this time, this date,” on Twitter. That’s why I provide my email address within the tweets that I send to these people. As a bonus, if you are a verified user, you can filter and see all of the verified users who are following you. If you have a lot of verified users following you, you can go through them and see which ones you really want to have on your podcast, and then contact them.

The reason I like this method is because in order to be verified you’ve likely done something really cool. Maybe you have an incredible story, or expertise. These are the types of people you want as guests on your podcast. So that’s how you use Twitter in order to get more people on your podcast. It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of thousands of followers or just a few hundred followers, you can use this method to get more people on your podcast.

The third way to get more guests on your podcast is through referral.

After you interview someone, ask that person if he or she can recommend anyone who would be a great guest for your podcast. This allows you to leverage your guests to build relationships that you couldn’t have built on your own. Some people are inaccessible to you but not the person you interviewed; that person can make the introduction.

This is an underrated method. It may not be the method that will get you the majority of your guests, but you can get a few really cool guests by asking every one of your guests, “Who would you like to see on my podcast? Who can you introduce me to?” The main rule I follow is to build as many relationships as possible. I like to follow the approach in which you build one meaningful relationship every single day.

So I build a lot of relationships without expecting anything in return. But sure enough, I get many things in return. I mean, I don’t go into the relationship with expectations. But I often engage with a new contact only to find that same person lending a hand a few months down the line, perhaps by saying, “I know this person who would be great for your podcast,” or, “I know someone who is looking for people to interview for his podcast.” So you never know what opportunities will open up when you start to build relationships; try to build one meaningful relationship a day and expect nothing in return.

The fourth way to get more guests for your podcast is to read books about your niche.

When you read books about your niche, it helps you build knowledge about your niche. That’s one of the most common reasons people say, “Read books.” But there are more benefits to reading books, especially when it comes to having your own podcast. What I’ve noticed is a lot of authors like to mention other authors and other people’s works within their own books. It’s a pattern I see a lot.

So with this pattern in mind, you can come across more people who would make for great guests on your episodes. Even if you can’t get the main author, you can go through that author’s book, see which books and authors he or she recommends, and then contact those individuals to see if they would like to be on your podcast. Plus, reading a book written by a guest on your podcast will greatly strengthen the interview.

What I like to do when I’m interviewing someone (and have read their book in advance) is underline key points found within their book. By doing that, I am able to bring up key points when I first contact them about being a guest, as well as formulate better questions once they agree to be a guest on my podcast. I don’t have to reread the book, I just focus on the important points I’ve already underlined.

If you get really good at reading books you could get through 10 books a month, and read as many books as possible from authors who have books on pre-order. You can say, “I have this podcast, I’d love to interview you about your upcoming book.” Some of them will send you a copy or a few chapters to help you formulate questions to make the interview better.

Authors with books on pre-order are the easiest people to get on your podcast because they are looking for more exposure at this specific moment of time. What these authors try to do is get a bunch of podcast interviews, or a bunch of guest posting opportunities all within less than four weeks from the time the book actually launches.

Getting high authority authors when they are in this pre-order stage will allow you to get more people later on because, as mentioned before, authority by association means you will be associated with some of these really successful authors (who you had contacted back when their books were on pre-order).

The final way to get more guests on your podcast, is to contact more people.

I mean, it sounds really simple. Contact more people, get more of them to say yes. But you need to contact more people in order to multiply your results. If you want to get more people on your podcast as guests, then instead of contacting five people, contact 10 people. By contacting twice as many people, in theory, you get twice as many guests for your podcast.

I like to make this a daily habit. I’ll contact at least three people a day for either a podcast appearance or a summit experience. This daily habit keeps me in check and makes it easier for me to contact different people and get interviews with them. So, with this habit, I contact over 1000 people in any given year. And if I get 33% of those people to say yes, I’ll have enough podcast material for an entire year. And if I do a weekly, rather than daily, podcast, I’ll have nearly 300 extra interviews that can be organized into summits.

I personally recommend not having too long of a queue. Let’s say you get 20 interviews for your podcast and you do an episode every week; that is unfair to guest number 20. So at that point you would increase the frequency in which you publish new episodes. It will challenge you to reach out to more people. It will challenge you to learn more about your niche. And it is such a fun experience!

In my experience, though, scheduling can get really annoying – things like suggesting different times and dates. I stopped doing that and started using Acuity. Acuity lets you set up a calendar and people can simply choose which times and dates work for them, which also work for you.

This makes it easier for you to contact more people because you don’t have to go back and forth with scheduling technicalities. Instead of going through all that hassle, you can just send them a link to your Acuity calendar, and that makes it easier for you and easier for the guest to schedule an interview.

Do you have any tips for landing podcast interviews? Will you try any of the tips mentioned in this post? Reach out in the comment section below.

If you’re new to this blog, please subscribe with the form below to receive more content like this. And don’t forget to pass on this post if you know someone who may benefit from it.

Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay

Episode 37: Embracing The Go-Giver Mindset With Bob Burg

April 19, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The Go-Giver reveals the unconventional secrets to success that are all based on five special laws. Interested in learning more? That’s what this episode is all about!

For Episode 37, Bob Burg was nice enough to stop by and talk about his book The Go-Giver. Bob has sold over 500,000 copies of his book Go-Giver which provides valuable insights on how to become successful by following the unconventional method of giving. He’s spoken in front of audiences ranging from 50 to 16,000 attendees and has shared the stage with today’s thought leaders, Olympic athletes, and a former U.S. President.

We discuss which types of goals you should be setting so you increase your impact which in turn increases your revenue. If you live by a dog eat dog mindset, this episode will give you the mental shift you need to dramatically improve your results. The reality is that mindset will only get you so far. The Go-Giver mindset combined with knowing the five special laws will allow you to go beyond your greatest expectations.

“Selling is discovering what the other person needs, wants, or desires, and helping them to get it.” —Bob Burg

“Don’t make money your target. Your target is serving others. Money is simply the reward for hitting the target.” —Bob Burg

Learn:

—The Go-Giver mindset that is critical to your success

—How to make more money by focusing more on serving your audience

—How to produce more value faster

—How to impact as many lives as possible

Key Links:

thegogiver.com—Bob’s site. Listen to his podcast!

Books:

The Science Of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles

How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The Secret Of Selling Anything by Harry Browne

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

The Go-Giver by Bob Burg & John David Mann

How To Write Your Blog Posts 10X Faster

April 18, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Hello everyone, I’m teenage entrepreneur Marc Guberti. Today I’m going to talk to you about how to write your blog posts 10 times faster.

Let’s start with the dilemma: the length of time it takes you to write your blog posts.

Even if you’re producing great content for your blog, you can’t help but think about the time you spend writing — time that’s taking you away from other opportunities.

If you spend all of your time writing blog posts, for instance, you may be missing out on opportunities to actually promote your posts. Publishing, but not promoting, great content will only keep your blog a well kept secret. This is the dilemma many bloggers find themselves in.

Now I’m going to tell you how to get out of that dilemma by sharing my own story. I started my blogging career writing long blog posts. I had heard about a method in which one writes at least 2,000 blog posts in order to get ranked number one on Google. So I wrote a lot of long blog posts, which took me hours at a time.

I would write and publish a long post. People would engage with it. And I would often enjoy a lot of social media shares. But inevitably, I would not have much time for the rest of my business. I would not have time to work on an important project like a virtual summit. I would not have time to schedule podcast episodes, or to interview people for them.

So yeah, I wrote long blog posts, and they received more engagement, but they literally prevented me from moving forward in any other area of my business.

It was actually my interest in hosting a virtual summit that made me realize something had to change. I’m still in the planning and preparation phase of this summit, which will be a content marketing success summit.

In order to make this summit a success, I needed more time for planning, contacting potential speakers, and many other related tasks. But my self-imposed blogging requirement got in the way and created a conflict.

I was worried about becoming so focused on the summit project that I would neglect my audience by not providing consistent value. And I knew that by neglecting my audience, I risked losing it by the time I was ready to launch my summit. So I changed my approach.

Let’s say 30% of my time was spent writing blog posts (which is a conservative estimate), with another 40% of my time going toward the summit, and 10% going toward miscellaneous tasks.

I adopted a strategy that would allow me to cut that 30% down to 5%. That’s right, rather than spending 30% of my time, or three hours a day, writing blog posts, I wanted to spend 5%, or 30 minutes a day, to achieve the same result. Doing this meant writing faster, but it also meant opening the door to new opportunities.

You could even take this a step further by outsourcing that 5%, which would give you even more time to pursue other opportunities. At this point you’re probably wondering, “Okay, that’s great. I just need to write my blog posts faster, but how?How do I do it?”

One way to increase your blog writing time is to rely on transcriptions

In fact, this very blog post was first a video, which was transcribed with Rev. The company charges $1 per minute for transcriptions. So not only do I have this video, which I’ve put on YouTube, I also have a blog post on the same material that people can read through and engage with. I get to feed two birds with one stone here.

The reason I switched from writing all of my blog posts to using Rev transcriptions is because I’d heard about the service from people who had found themselves in a similar situation.

Several people I’d interviewed for my podcast episodes like Kim Garst and Ray Edwards told me, “You’ve got to try Rev and you’ve got to try this approach.” They’d recommended this approach because no matter how fast you are at writing content, you will always speak faster than you can possibly write.

This is basically the analogy of writing versus speaking. Even the world’s fastest writer cannot compete with his or her ability to speak (unless they’re writing 200 words per minute). The average for most people is 38 to 40 words per minute. The average speaking rate is 150 words per minute. That is a huge difference, and you also circumvent writer’s block.

The other thing about writing is that you’ll sometimes stop to think about what you’re going to say; when you’re speaking you have less time to pause and think. Most of that is pretty rapid fire. There are a few pauses, sure, but nothing compared to the pauses that take place while writing content.

These pauses can last five minutes or more, especially if you’re experiencing writer’s block, but most people don’t have to worry about speaker’s block. I may pause for five seconds, but that’s really about it. And I consider it a pause, not speaker’s block.

You can also use this strategy to “write” and publish your own book very quickly while providing value.

Not only do you speak much faster than you type, you’re also not going to be second guessing as much about the content; it just comes out naturally.

Writing, on the other hand, gives you lots of opportunities to second guess, rework sentences, etc., all things that take up more of your time.

Once you have the transcription, all you need to do is a little polishing — editing, breaking up paragraphs and some revising to make the post more readable. With a video like this one, you can also incorporate pictures. That’s more important for the blog post than the video because in the video you have a lot of dialog that keeps the action moving. People often skim blog posts so images are a nice way to break things up. It’s easier to skim a blog post than a video, and images help support important points within your blog post.

Another important thing is to add links to your post when necessary. For example, you can edit the transcription to mention an influencer and to link to that influencer so you can do influencer marketing and say, “Hey, I mentioned you on my latest blog post. It would be treat if you could read it and share it.” Obviously a little better wording than that, but you get the idea.

Once you do a video like this one, send it to Rev and then polish it.

You have a blog post that you completed much faster than you would have if you went through the traditional route of writing the content yourself.

You can even outsource this stage of polishing your blog posts so you literally just do the video, send it to Rev, send the transcription to someone else, and that’s it. Really it’s just coming up with the video. That’s all you have to do. Then all of a sudden, you have an epic blog post that your visitors will be eager to read through and share.

What do you think about transcription services like Rev? Let us know in the comments. If you are a new visitor to my blog, subscribe using the form below to receive more content just like this. And if you have a question, please leave it in the comments.

Signing off, what I want you to do is dream big, achieve greatness, and unlock your potential today.

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay

Episode 36: Building A Targeted Instagram Audience With Ksenia Avdulova

April 12, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Want to know how to grow a targeted Instagram audience that will expand your brand’s reach. In this episode, Ksenia Avdulova shares the insights you need to take your Instagram account to the next level.

Ksenia is the mastermind behind Breakfast Criminals, a global movement with a goal to inspire people in every part of the globe to start every day with love, one acai bowl at a time. Her life mission lies in connecting people to their hearts through healing food, public speaking engagements, tribal gatherings, and daily Instagram posts infused with soulful messages.

Ksenia used Instagram to promote what started as her “passion project,” and now has over 70,000 followers on the platform. Striking partnerships on Instagram allowed her to see the business model behind her work, and she’s been running with it ever since.

In this episode, we’ll explore Ksenia’s success and how she build a targeted community that actively engages with all of her Instagram pictures.

“I set an example, that’s the best way to get anyone to do anything.” —Ksenia Avduolva

Learn:

—How Ksenia grew a targeted audience

—How to strengthen your Instagram community

—How to come up with Instagram ideas

—How to prepare your image for the Instagram spotlight

Key Links from the Show:

breakfastcriminals.com – The Breakfast Criminals website

Breakfast Criminals’ Instagram—@breakfastcriminals

How To Surge Your Blog Traffic

March 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Every blogger wants more blog traffic. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you currently enjoy. What does matter is that you want more of it.

A surge in my blog traffic has made the difference between being relatively unknown to having a successful content brand. Here’s the surge that I’m talking about:

I achieved this by changing the kind of effort I was putting into my blog. Anyone can get these results, and even better, with the right kind of effort.

If you want to surge your blog traffic, here’s what you need to do:

Publish More Content, More Often

The consistency and frequency of your content publishing schedule plays a big role in your blog’s success. To grow my own blog, I wrote as many as two blog posts per day. While these blog posts were much shorter than the ones I currently write, I still published two every day.

I then changed my strategy to write one long-form blog post per week. Apparently, Google likes long-form content, but ironically, that’s when my traffic started to dip. So I increased my frequency to two blog posts, and one podcast episode, each week.

And I’m beginning to see traffic gains now that I’m posting content more consistently and frequently. Eventually, with the help of guest posts, I plan on publishing one blog post per day on this blog.

Getting into the groove requires the formation of daily habits. Daily habits make it much easier for you to get into the flow. My daily habit is to write at least 1,500 words per day. This daily habit earns me a total of 10,500 words each week. That’s anywhere from 2-3 blog posts per week.

Some days I write more than 1,500 words, but I never write less than 1,500 words in a given day. This habit allows me to stay consistent with my blog while writing additional content for my Kindle books.

Another thing that works for me is to set a time and day each week to publish my blog posts. This way, I end up writing the posts well in advance so there’s no last-second cramming.

The less time you have to write a blog post within your deadline, the less value it will provide to readers.

Writing all of this content will help you rank better on search engines and give your readers a better experience. However, you can 1-up your efforts by optimizing your content for success.

On the SEO side, the Yoast plugin is the most valuable plugin in your arsenal. This plugin makes it easy to optimize your blog posts for search engines.

But you also need to optimize your blog posts with internal and external links. Internal links are links to your own blog posts. External links are links to blog posts and articles from outside sources.

Internal links help your SEO efforts by doing the following:

Decreasing your bounce rate
Increasing the average time a reader spends on your site

Both of those outcomes are great for SEO.

External links (to high authority sites) let search engines know that, because you’re linking out to authority sites, you must be an authority site, too.

That’s why I add at least three internal links and at least three external links to each of my posts. Setting small goals like these makes them easier to meet, or even surpass.

Assess Your Marketing Strategy

It’s great practice to assess your marketing strategy once every 1-3 months. By looking at your overall strategy, you’ll see what’s working and what missed the mark.

Look at which blog posts earned you the most visibility. These blog posts have high demand, and your audience will want to read more posts like them. The general rule of thumb is to write content of interest to your audience.

Writing more blog posts based on your high-performing posts will result in even more demand for your content. Assessing your marketing strategy allows you to discover what your audience wants and plan more ways to give it to them.

This also applies to writing books and creating training courses. You want to create a product on a proven topic that is in high demand among your audience. That’s why my first training course was about Twitter.

When I created that course, my audience’s demand for Twitter knowledge was higher than their demand for any other knowledge that I was providing.

The best place to analyze your marketing strategy is the WordPress stats dashboard. While Google Analytics offers more, it can become overwhelming. So I prefer to stick with WordPress stats, which clearly communicate everything I need to know.

One important feature I recently utilized is one that let me discover when most people are visiting your blog. I noticed that most people visit my blog on Wednesdays at 10 am.

Based on this information, I began publishing my podcast episodes on Wednesdays at 9 am. The episodes have just enough time to sit on my blog until 10 am when it’s populated with the bulk of my readers.

The week before, the same insights told me that Tuesday at 10 am is the best time to publish new blog posts based on my traffic stats. That’s why I always publish fresh content on Tuesdays at 10 am, in addition to my Saturday blog posts.

Always apply the 80/20 rule to your marketing assessment in order to leverage influencer marketing. These two methodologies can completely transform your brand’s presence.

How to Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has never been as easy as it is now. Not only does the web connect people from all over the world, but the influencers in the digital marketing niche are generally nice people.

I like to mention at least three influencers in my blog posts. The more influencers you mention, the better it is for your influencer marketing efforts. Here’s the idea:

Promote several influencers in your blog posts
Contact each one
Some will share your blog post

In some cases, getting a single influencer to share your content can yield great results. But more often, several influencers join forces to dramatically expand your reach. There are several great case studies about influencer marketing.

You may feel excited about the idea, but not sure how to implement it. What’s the best way to contact an influencer?

Anytime you approach an influencer, NEVER explicitly ask him or her to share your content. The more influential someone is, the more emails they’re receive of this nature. I can see a share request coming a mile away, and they’re annoying.

Share requests can make you feel like your audience is the only thing this blogger cares about, so it doesn’t feel like the blogger is genuine. On the other hand, if you don’t ask for a share, the outreach email feels more genuine.

When you don’t ask for a share and show your appreciation, you usually get the share! At the end of my podcast interviews, I never ask for a share; I simply say that I’ll provide the link.

And I honestly don’t care if guests share it or not. The knowledge I get from each podcast episode is far more valuable than a social share. Show your appreciation, not your desire to get more reach.

Here’s an email I recently received:

Hey Marc,

My Name is Daniel from The Experiment (www.iaexperiment.com).

I know you’re a fan of creating and growing an amazing blog and website. At least that’s the impression I got from this post:How To Build A Successful Blog From Scratch.

When I published this combination case study and guide about generating a consistent stream of traffic from Quora, I thought you’d appreciate it.

You can pop on over to check it out here:

http://www.iaexperiment.com/blog/quora-traffic

Stay Awesome,

Daniel

This is exactly how you should communicate with influencers.

I know this was influencer marketing in action, but emails like these feel so genuine. Here’s why:

He introduced himself in the first line
He’d done some research on me to illustrate that he actually reads my blog
He wrote content and thought I would appreciate it
Then he provides a link to his post

You can tell from the email that he knew a little about me. In influencer marketing, some people just discover someone with a big number of social media followers and act as if they were a big fan all along.

This was respectful and enjoyable to read as compared to some of the other influencer emails.

My best tip for influencers is to talk to them as if they are people, friends, not as if they are influencers. Influencers are people too, but we forget that far too often.

Get More Subscribers With Your Blog Posts

Out of all of your marketing assets, your email list is the most valuable. The email list is the main reason why many bloggers can make a full-time income by writing content.

It’s no wonder that getting more subscribers is critical. Time and time again, people continue talking about why the email list is your most valuable asset and how their biggest mistake was not starting an email list sooner.

Once people realize that their email list is their most valuable asset, they want to grow that email list as much as possible. There are plenty of methods to choose from. In fact, I compiled a list of 50 tactics that you can use to grow your email list.

My favorite approach is to promote my landing pages to my social media audience and optimize my blog to increase my site-wide conversion rate. I promote my landing page on Twitter at least once every hour and have a pinned tweet which also promotes my landing page.

That pinned tweet has stayed there for a while which allowed it to generate some strong social proof over the years.

On my blog, I provide a variety of options for people to sign up:

Welcome mat
Sidebar picture
Pop-up on the side (HelloBar)
Opt-in form at the bottom of every blog post
Occasional promotion within a blog post

To me, this is a great start, but by no means a finishing point. Buffer released an extensive list on different places to promote your free offer, and there’s no reason to halt your expansion efforts.

Increasing the number of opportunities people have to subscribe (without being spammy) will result in a higher site-wide conversion rate.

ThriveLeads and Optimize Press give me a variety of ways to promote my free offers. These are my two preferred tools for lead generation. Both of these tools respectively feel like 100-tools-in-one type of deals.

Follow The 80/20 Rule

With the 80/20 Rule, you focus most of your time on your top priority, such as your branding efforts. The rest of your time goes towards a secondary priority. In a successful blogging strategy, the two main ingredients for success are content creation and content marketing.

Most people spend 80% of their time creating content (or more) and 20% of their time marketing the content (or less). While it takes time to create your content, marketing is how you get your content seen by more people.

You’ll soon discover that it’s better to spend 80% of your time marketing your content. This idea is repeated by people like Neil Patel, who said that in the beginning he’d individually contact 400-500 unique people about every new post he wrote.

Brand marketing is an integral part of blog growth.

You need marketing to achieve the traffic surge you’re looking for. Finding a few hours to commit to your marketing each week seems like a daunting challenge, but there are some ways to make it work.

You can start by boosting your productivity. The smarter you work, the more time you will have to market your business. You can also outsource some of the marketing to someone else. Why do it all yourself when someone else can help you?

I personally prefer a mix of outsourced marketing and doing some of it on my own. That way, I don’t get overwhelmed by the workload but I’m still in the game. I use Upwork to find freelancers, and outsourcing has worked wonders for my business.

I truly believe that without outsourcing, I couldn’t do most of the things that I’m currently doing.

In Conclusion

Any blog can experience a traffic surge. That traffic surge and its impact on your brand are both dependent on how much effort you exert towards content creation and content marketing. Out of the two, more of your attention should go towards content marketing.

Make the connections now that will expand your reach in the future. Don’t be fearful of sending hundreds of emails to people you don’t know. It’s all part of content marketing.

The easiest way to make any type of change is to approach it gradually. For content creation, Jeff Goins recommends writing at least 500 words per day. While I write at least 1,500 words per day, the 500 word per day goal is much easier to attain for a blogger who wants to become more consistent.

The easiest way to get started is by getting your feet wet. You can’t get the traffic surge without even starting. And you must always start what you finish.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What tips do you have for acquiring a surge of blog traffic? What’s working for your blog? What isn’t working?

Have a question for me? Leave a comment now. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone who may appreciate these tips, please be sure to pass this on.

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-marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com