blogging

How To Freelance Without Losing Control Of Your Blog

July 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Freelancing presents a golden opportunity to make money to finance your blogging efforts. After all, blogging itself is a big investment of both time and money — you have to invest in various tools, platforms, and even freelancers.

Still, many people who try to juggle freelancing and blogging end up losing control over one or the other. Balance is the key to keeping both moving forward in tandem, and this post offer tips to help you get there.

Hire Freelancers

When you start earning money as a freelancer, it’s perfectly acceptable to use some of those earnings to hire a freelancer.

Do the math:

Let’s assume it takes you an hour to schedule your daily social media posts. And as a freelancer, you’re hired to write content at $20/hr.

If you hire a freelancer to schedule your social media posts at $10/hr, and both of you work the same amount of hours each week, you’ll have a net gain of $10/hr.

Sure, $10/hr may not sound life altering, but this example gives you an idea of how you can freelance to lighten your workload and make a profit. And the principle can be applied to higher amounts of money.

If you’re paid $50/hr as a freelancer, for example, you’ll have a bit more wiggle room and more money to spend on outsourcing content creation, outreach efforts, or any other business activity that’s important to you.

For content creation specifically, you can hire writers that can imitate your style and complete your projects. For instance, if you’re paid $100 to write an article, you can pay a ghostwriter $50 to write it for you in your voice.

If you work with a good writer, you’ll only need to proofread the article and/or make minor adjustments before submitting it.

Using these simple calculations, it’s easy to see how you can make extra income without making additional time commitments. You are simply shifting attention from one task to another (i.e. from scheduling social media posts to writing content for someone else).

Stick to a Schedule

Part of making the freelancer-blogger journey work for you is sticking to a schedule. You need to delegate certain times of day in which you focus on your freelance work or blog.

That means time stamping when you’ll begin a task, and when you’ll finish it. My own schedule includes running, content creation, summit preparation, showering, eating, and a wide range of other activities – all of which are written into my daily schedule.

Schedule your day down to the minute, but be sure to give yourself some free time because you’ll need short recovery periods to remain energized and motivated.

Connect the Dots

The best freelancing opportunities are high paying jobs that perfectly align with the work you’re already doing for your blog. If you like to write about social media, for example, look for freelancing opportunities that require knowledge of social media.

When your blogging and freelancing efforts work in synergy, you’ll naturally be more efficient since there isn’t as much of a learning curve.

Simply managing a social media account connects with blogging about social media. You can write content based on what you’ve learned (just make sure not to mention a client by name unless you have permission).

Efficiency is Everything

And everything you do should be done as efficiently as possible.

We are either efficient or inefficient at any given moment. Inefficient time represents failure, while efficient time represents success. Strive to become as efficient as possible in carrying out your freelancing and blogging tasks.

And don’t forget to carry it over into every other thing you do. Rather than write emails of several paragraphs, for example, write a few sentences that get your point across. And when appropriate, copy and paste responses that you’ve written ahead of time.

Every second you save adds up. Get into the habit of saving a few seconds here and there, and soon those seconds will turn into minutes and hours.

Identify the tasks that take up the majority of your time. If you’re not sure, simply begin tracking your daily activity over the next month. Once you have these tasks in mind, ask yourself how you can cut 20% of the time needed to complete them and still get the same results.

Here are two critical ways to boost your efficiency:

Have a strong desire to boost your efficiency.
Create systems that allow you to become more efficient.

Your desire will increase as you work towards becoming more efficient each day.

The winning system is dependent on the task and how you work. We all have different philosophies; the key to building better systems is understanding the methods that work best for you, not others.

Some people prefer to spend 2-3 days a month on their content creation efforts; others work on their content a little each day. Some people spend time outlining their blog posts; others let the writing itself guide direction.

I happen to think that if you aren’t using outlines, you’re making an efficiency blunder. But again, the trick is understanding what works for you.

Concentrate on Long-Term Clients

Freelancers spend a lot of their time looking for work and writing proposals.

While there’s nothing wrong with a one-time job, once it’s finished the freelancer must seek out another job, and write another proposal.

If you’re serious about pursuing freelancing, always be on the look out for long-term work and spend time writing winning proposals for those clients.

Not only will you work more efficiently, you’ll have a steady income and won’t always be stressed out about finding the next job.

In Conclusion

Freelancing provides a certain sense of security (you can’t fire yourself) and independence (like working in pajamas?).

Not only that, many jobs have a payout ceiling; more effort and results don’t necessarily translate to more pay. But other jobs pay by performance, and the idea of being paid for what you’re truly worth makes the entrepreneurial journey very appealing.

As a freelancer, you set your own rates. Start small, and as you work your way up, raise them! Use the money to pay for some of your business expenses now with the goal of being completely free to run your business in the long-term.

While it’s harder to get out of the gate initially as a teen (you have to do a lot more to demonstrate your credibility), a huge benefit of starting early is experience.

Freelancing will help you with expenses as you charge forward on your blogging journey. I was able to completely offset my living expenses!

What are your thoughts on freelancing and blogging? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

Update

I joined together with some other experts on a project with the Tommy John team. venThere’s e more tactics in this infographic for freelancing without losing control of your blog or any of your other big projects.

Marc_Freelancers

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

5 Blogging Habits That Will Turn You Into A Full-Time Blogger

April 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

blogging

The blogging habits we use to guide us play a significant role in our content marketing efforts.

The most successful bloggers live by a series of habits that guide them through the world of blogging. Blog traffic comes easy to these individuals who enjoy hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors.

As part of my New Year’s resolution to surpass 100,000 monthly visitors, I decided to analyze these successful bloggers to see what makes them tick. How do they surpass 100,000 monthly visitors, and how can I achieve the same results?

With this in mind, I’ve written a blog post that details the habits successful bloggers use to attain their goals. There are five blogging habits you should develop if you want to become a full-time blogger.

#1: Write At Least 1,000 Words Per Day

No one said blogging would be easy. This first habit is perhaps the most important because you can’t promote content until you’ve created it.

Not only does writing content matter, but writing lengthy content matters, too. Most blog posts featured on the first page of Google search results exceed 2,000 words.

Writing at least 1,000 words a day will give you a total of 7,000 words each week that you can dedicate to your blog. If you write 2,000-word blog posts, you’ll have at least three blog posts every week.

However, some bloggers write even lengthier content more frequently and consistently. That’s why 1,000 words per day is the absolute minimum. But if you manage to write over 1,000 words, even better.

Writing 1,000 words per day requires time, and time is more scarce than ever. So how is it possible to accomplish this goal every single day?

The best way to free up your time is by outsourcing work to freelancers. If it weren’t for outsourcing, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish many other important tasks for my business.

I simply wouldn’t be able to write lengthy blog posts, produce one YouTube video every day, create training courses, or write books. Many of my ventures would be sidelined if I tried to do all of the work by myself. And I’m always looking for more ways to outsource my business.

The more you outsource, the more time you create for yourself.

With that said, you also need to use your own time productively. Many distractions will try to keep you from writing 1,000 words each day, but with practice, you can overcome them.

Most distractions are a result of bad habits. The best way to eliminate these bad habits is to replace them with better habits such as writing more content for your blog and reading books during your breaks.

Plus, writing 1,000 words a day will make you a better writer. Value will begin to come naturally. The challenge is to write valuable content even when you’re pressed for time.

#2: Conduct Research For Every Piece You Write

For every blog post you publish, you should conduct a massive amount of research. In the past, I would write lengthy blog posts without doing research, and then wonder why I wasn’t getting any long-term traffic.

But ever since I’ve added research to my content marketing efforts, my traffic has gone up. Many of the top bloggers I analyzed conduct hours of content research just to write one great blog post. And it makes sense because linking to great content benefits both you and your readers.

Your readers are getting higher quality content (and are more likely to share it), and you get more search engine traffic. Talk about a win-win. And there are more benefits to linking out than just that: Here’s the complete list from SEO Moz.

Each time you write a blog post, expand upon it by linking to other relevant blog posts found that help strengthen your content. Adding these links helps your blog grow, regardless of whether the links lead to your own content (internal links) or to someone else’s content (external links).

The benefit of internal linking is that people will spend more time on your blog, lowering your bounce rate (likelihood of someone leaving after viewing one page/post on your blog). And a lower bounce rate will help your SEO efforts.

External links to high-authority sites let search engines know that your blog also has authority. Since you’re promoting quality content, search engines think your content must also contain value, pushing it higher up the search engine rankings.

Content research takes a significant amount of time, but you’ll end up with a more valuable blog post. Readers will engage with it for longer periods of time and you’ll get more traffic.

I like to Google my way to the articles that I link to in my blog posts. And sometimes I use other tools for my content research.

Conducting content research becomes much easier as you spend more time writing content and engaging with people in your niche.

#3: Ask Questions To Expand Your Content

Have you ever finished a blog post only to realize that it’s too short for search engines? I have, several times, but not anymore. Before I reveal what I did differently, I’ll tell you what I was doing wrong.

For a blog post like this, I would have come up with the title and jotted down the five tactics I intended to mention within the post. While this approach made it easy to crank out content, I’d often get stuck at a little over 1,000 words. Sometimes I’d fall short at 800-900 words.

Now that never happens. Why? Because I ask myself questions that naturally make my content longer. Socratic questioning (asking yourself questions) is a form of conversation that has been used for thousands of years, and it still works today.

For all of the tactics I discuss in this blog post, I asked myself three questions. When asking these questions, I saw myself as a reader who wanted to learn as much as possible from this blog post.

What are three things people want to know about this particular tip? What would they ask?

By anticipating these questions in advance, I no longer have to worry about word count. Since I focus less on increasing word count, I have more time to focus on providing a better experience.

Here’s an example of an outline I did for the 4th habit I mention in this blog post:

#4: Follow The 80/20 Rule

•What is it?

•How do I market myself most effectively?

•How do I make it easy?

Keep this outline in mind when we get to the 80/20 rule.

Asking three questions definitely adds time to my outline process, but only by about 3-5 minutes, and it’s worth it when you consider my final draft.

So I may spend 5-10 minutes expanding upon my outline with thoughtful questions, depending on how long the outline is to begin with. But, in every case, it never takes an entire day.

I just write down the first three questions that come to mind. If I struggle to think of a third question, I leave it alone and address the next portion of my outline. I don’t want to sit around and ponder because I know I’ve got a behemoth of a blog post ahead of me.

The cool thing about using Socratic questioning is that you turn each of your tactics (or in this case, habits) into a mini blog post. You’ll want to write a blog post that contains a series of mini blog posts all wrapped up into one because that’s how you provide massive value that ranks well with search engines.

Creating an outline like this is easy. Writing the content is simple, albeit time consuming. But the more time you open for yourself, the more you serious you are about blogging.

#4: Follow The 80/20 Rule — 80% marketing, 20% content creation

The 80/20 rule is also known as Pareto’s Principle. With this principle, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

This 80/20 rule for blogging slightly different. It asks that you spend 80% of your time marketing your content and only 20% of your time actually creating content.

Thus, if it takes you an hour to write a blog post, you should spend four more hours marketing it. And since the Socratic questioning technique mentioned above increases your writing time, your marketing time will also increase.

Of course, you can skip the marketing all together, but you won’t get very far with your blog. There’s simply too much content, and competition, on the web. You’re not just creating content. You’re creating a content brand.

And just like any other business, your brand needs effective marketing to become a surefire winner. Successful bloggers write a bunch of epic blog posts, but their marketing efforts are why we end up reading them.

Most of the efforts you’ll make as a successful content marketer involve connecting with other bloggers. In an interview, Neil Patel explained that, when he was getting started, he would contact anywhere from 400-500 people about his new blog post.

He asked each person to share his latest blog post. Neil found these people using BuzzSumo, his go-to content marketing tool (he refers to it as God’s Gift To Marketers).

BuzzSumo lets you see everyone who has shared popular blog posts in your niche. You can then contact these people and let them know about your own blog post.

Of course, you can try to hunt down these people on social media, but it’s much more time consuming. The best way to do it for free is to use a social network’s search engine and search a blog post’s title.

Here’s what it would look like on Twitter if, for example, you wanted to search for my guest post 5 Ways To Flood Your Blog With Traffic Using Pinterest (currently my most successful guest post).

However, this strategy takes FOREVER and BuzzSumo does the same thing much faster. If you can fit $99/mo into your budget, BuzzSumo is a worthwhile investment for your content marketing efforts.

Regardless of which option you use, contacting hundreds of people involves a lot of work on your part. The best thing you can do to cut down your work time is to create a rubric message.

Rather than re-write the same email over and over, you can simply copy and paste the body of the email and change a few things to personalize it (addressing each person by his or her first name, for example).

#5: Voraciously Read Other Blogs

Successful bloggers constantly read other people’s blogs. If you look at any of their blog posts, you can tell they’ve read several other blog posts on the subject before finishing their own.

You wouldn’t be shocked to hear that authors read several books before writing their own. So it should come as no surprise that bloggers read several blog posts before writing their posts.

Sometimes a blogger will write two blog posts back to back, but even then, intense research goes into each one. The research is based on blog posts that were read in advance.

However, successful bloggers don’t just read any blog on the web. They read blogs related to their niche. They want to gather as much insight as possible. But they also want to see what’s working for audiences in their niche.

Which pull-words result in more engagement? How is this blogger getting more shares? How is the blogger making revenue? Successful bloggers ask themselves all of these questions, and they find the answers by conducting research.

During this exploration, more content ideas emerge. And it’s easier to learn something when you actively write about what you are learning. By repeatedly writing content about subjects they want to master, bloggers eventually become experts in their field.

Try to read other people’s content for at least 30 minutes every day. The great thing about blogs is that they’re available online as compared to books (unless you read eBooks, but I prefer paperbacks).

If you have your smartphone with you, you can easily search for blog posts anytime you’re waiting for something to happen. Read a blog post while you’re waiting for a performance to begin. If you are waiting for an Uber driver, read a blog post until he shows up.

As you read, take notes on what you learn and write down content ideas as you go. That way, you’ll be armed with more knowledge that you can refer to within your next blog post.

In Conclusion

The most successful bloggers spend hours upon hours in a given day on their blogs. They treat their blogs like a full-time brand because that’s exactly what they are.

You may only be able to commit to your blog part-time, but you can still live by these blogging habits. A blog post like this is a lot to soak up in one sitting. However, you can always start small and build upon these success habits.

Habits by nature are obtained through gradual development. Out of every success tactic I came across during my analysis, contacting 400-500 people for each of my blog posts seemed the most daunting.

Why does it have to be 400-500? Why not start with 10? You can then inch your way towards 20 people, 30, 40, and gradually make your way to the 400-500 threshold.

Neil no longer contacts 400-500 people every time he writes a new blog post. Why? Because he doesn’t have to. But when he was just getting started, he made those contacts in order to build momentum.

All of these habits will become easier over time and yield greater results as you exert more effort towards each.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

Which of these habits do you think is most important? Do you have a 6th habit for us?

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

And if you know anyone else who needs this burst of insight, please be sure to pass it on.

[Tweet “5 #Blogging Habits That Will Turn You Into A Full-Time Blogger.”]

If you’re new here, join my mailing list using the form below. You’ll get a ton of free content just like this.

Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

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

How To Write 10,000 Words In Less Than 12 Hours

March 11, 2017 by Marc Guberti 10 Comments

What would you do if you could write 10,000 words a day to kick you content into high gear?

Would you write five lengthy blog posts? How about an e-book? Or maybe high-converting sales copy for multiple landing pages?

Writing 10,000 words a day seems more than challenging. Writing 10,000 words a day seems nearly impossible. However, it is entirely possible. I can write 10,000 words during most weeks.

When I’m feeling really good, I can write 10,000 words in one day. At that rate, I could write 70,000 words per week, or 3,650,000 words every year.

I don’t consistently write at this pace, but when I do write 10,000 words in a day, it’s an awesome feeling. If I manage to write 10,000 words in one day, I can dedicate several more days to content marketing.

With the right work ethic, you can write 10,000 words in less than 12 hours.

Not Your Everyday Writing Goal

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t write 10,000 words every single day of the year. I do it on occasion. The problem with a goal like this is that some people will get tempted to put off their writing and go all-out on one day of the week (or, even worse, once per month).

Writing 10,000 words in one day, but forgetting about the other days of the week, will set you up for ruin. You won’t develop a habit for writing, and you’ll grind through the process instead of enjoying the journey.

If you constantly pressure yourself with this goal, you risk getting overwhelmed and despising writing all together. Before you consider writing 10,000 words a day, you need an established habit.

Writing 500 words per day is a great starting point. As you establish the habit, you can look deeper at some of the other techniques writers use. Once you merge your own habits with the analysis of other writer’s habits, you’ll discover a magic formula.

My absolute minimum goal is to write 1,500 words per day, although I usually finish most days at 2,000-3,000 words. The reason I don’t write 10,000 words a day every time is because I have other responsibilities for my brand. Once I write the content, I have to spend even more time on marketing.

This is why I rarely type 10,000 words in a given day. If you have the writing habit built-in, then you’re ready for your first 10K word day. I advise making a goal for 10K words in a day only twice per month. If you do anymore than that, you risk burnout, but if it works for you, then more power to you!

How To Get The Writing Habit Down

If you don’t have a writing habit, you need to start developing it. Five-hundred words per day is a great starting point. But how do you reach it? For some people, writing 500 words seems just as impossible.

Up to now, I’ve written exactly 500 words and didn’t even notice. It took me just a few minutes. Writing 500 words isn’t that easy, but once you’ve been writing millions of words for your blog posts and books, writing 500 words in one sitting is light work.

Let’s get back to habit development. According to science, it takes 66 days for any activity to become a habit. If you write 500 words every day for two months, you can easily write 500 words anytime.

But instead of writing 500 words per day until it becomes a habit, you need to gradually increase your word count. After a week of writing 500 words, challenge yourself to go a little higher. Don’t make a big jump in the beginning. Choose a more manageable jump such as 550 words per day.

You could even increase your word count to 510 words per day. Small increases add up, and soon enough, you will effortlessly write thousands of words on any given day. It all starts with your daily habits.

Right now, you might be creating a mental roadblock in front of your writing habit. It’s something you know you want or need to do, but for some reason, you keep putting it off.

In The Productivity Project, Chris Bailey lays out six triggers for procrastination. When you look at this list, ask yourself if any of these triggers impact you when you write:

Boredom
Frustration
Difficulty
Unstructured
Lacks personal meaning
No intrinsic reward (it’s not fun)

You can change your results by making these unattractive triggers more attractive. For instance, if your writing lacks personal meaning, change what you write about so it aligns with your interests, which will make it easier for you to write 500 words each day (or more).

I write about topics that I care about, and enjoy writing blog posts like this because they help the people that I’m trying to reach. I don’t enjoy writing history papers, for example, because 99% of them are forced assignments necessary for the grade.

** Want to develop your writing habit and make money from your books and free content you put out? Schedule a free strategy call with me to see if we are a good fit. **

Calculate Your WPM

Let’s shift gears back to your first 10K word day. The next bit of information you’ll need is your WPM. This popular acronym stands for Words Per Minute in the writing community.

WPM is an assessment of how many words you can type in a given minute. Using your WPM, it’s easy to calculate your WPH. Just multiply your WPM by 60. For example, if you type at 40 WPM, then your WPH is 2,400 words.

With the average WPM lurking between 38-40, the 500 word goal is easily attainable. It’s an average WPM. For most people, it will only take 12.5 minutes or less to finish writing a 500 word blog post (assuming the idea and outline are already in place).

Knowing your WPH allows you to determine how much time you need to write 10,000 words. With the average being 40 WPM (and therefore 2,400 WPH), you only need to type for 4 hours and 10 minutes to reach the 10,000 word milestone.

Of course, this is assuming you consistently type at 40 WPM from start to finish. At some points, you’ll be thinking of different ideas and possibly doing research to verify certain facts as you write your content.

In that case, it will take longer than 4 hours and 10 minutes. If you factor in everything else that can possibly happen (including idea development while writing), you’ll find yourself at the 5-5 1/2 hour range for 10,000 words in a day.

Mathematically speaking, none of this seems as scary as before, right? I could literally write 10,000 words every day of the year, but five hours of writing each day without any marketing won’t bring forth a content brand.

This entire example is based on the average WPM. You may be slightly above or below the average WPM. The only way to determine your status is to start a typing test. Typing tests only last a few minutes; what type what shows up on the screen, and you get your WPM in real-time.

The typing test lasts for a minute, and then you get to see your results.

Here’s mine:

Screen Shot 2017-03-11 at 10.42.38 AM

For this speed test, I typed 95 words per minute, which came from countless hours of practice. At this rate, I could write 5,700 words in one hour and finish writing 10,000 words in just two hours.

While this data is skewed since the words are already provided (and you’ll have to think of fresh ideas to write about), knowing your WPM gives you a rough idea of how much time it will take for you to write 10,000 words. Just tack on an extra hour to factor in time for idea generation.

On this WPM test, you’re also likely to make mistakes as I did since the words are listed one after the other instead of provided in clear sentences.

While writing takes time, editing and revising can take even longer. You can hire an editor, ask a friend for help, or edit the content yourself. With all three of these approaches, there will be typos in your work. It’s practically unavoidable unless you meticulously look it over for several months or even a year depending on how long your content is.

At that point, it could have been published in an imperfect form but attracted more people to your brand.

Combining Attention & Energy

The timing of your work is just as important as the amount of time you invest in your work. Let me share an example with you:

Writer A goes through the entire day feeling exhausted. She still feels exhausted but pulls out her computer anyway and starts typing at 10 pm.

Writer B wakes up at 6 am and starts writing almost immediately. After some typing, she takes a break, eats a healthy breakfast, and then continues typing for another hour.

Which writer seems more productive to you? I’d go with Writer B any day of the week. Both writers are committed and willing to write for several hours. The difference is that one feels charged up while the other feels exhausted.

Your body and mind are part of you, and they play a big role in your productivity. If you feel distracted, that will negatively affect your productivity. There’s no question about it.

Most people focus on time as a measurement of productivity. If you worked for six hours today, you were more productive than when you only worked for five hours, right?

That approach is all wrong.

It’s not just a matter of how much time we put into our work, more specifically, it’s about what kind of time we’re putting into our work. Are you putting quality minutes into your work, or do you struggle through the day eager to boast about how much work you did later?

Circling back to The Productivity Project, Chris Bailey also mentions biological primetime. Everyone has a biological primetime, the timeframe in which it’s easiest for us to enter our working flow. For me, my biological primetime is early in the morning. For others, their biological primetime is in the afternoon or evening.

Think about how you work to determine your biological primetime. That is when you need to write your content. During this primetime, it’s much easier to write 10,000 words a day.

To actually find your primetime, you need to track your entire day, from what tasks you completed to how often you procrastinated. If you do this for a week, you will discover your biological primetime.

Once you know your primetime, you can reallocate your tasks so your high-value tasks (i.e. writing 10K words) get distributed within your biological primetime. That way, your attention and energy are properly focused on the work that matters most when you’re at your optimal level of productivity.

Not only should you track your time to discover your biological primetime, you should also learn a lot about yourself. You’ll learn how you spend your time and how you procrastinate. You can more easily weed out the bad activities so you can focus more of your time, attention, and energy on the tasks that create the biggest impact.

Space Everything Else Out Of Your Biological Primetime

When you keep track of your time, you’ll discover which tasks you do during your biological primetime. Most people discover that they’re making a big blunder within this golden opportunity.

If you check your stats, read the news, or scroll through Facebook during these golden hours, you are restricting your potential. That is the time you should focus on writing content.

Based on how you track your time, you’ll determine different distractions that can get in your way. Email and the internet are two of the many distractions that call us when we are trying to pursue our work. Anticipate distractions like these and eliminate them.

When I write a blog post, I’m almost never on the internet. The only time I use the internet while writing a blog post is when I’m doing research. I find the right time to mention someone else’s article. All I have to do is get the link, and that’s the only time I use the internet while blogging.

Oh, and I never see my Mail icon when I’m writing blog posts. I remove that app from my dashboard and only bring it back when I’m done writing.

Plan Out Your Content In Advance

I keep score of my blog posts’ lengths as I write them. Right now, this blog post is a little over 2,000 words long. In the past, I would struggle to get past 1,000 words with a blog post like this.

I might get past 1,000 words on a post, but not by much.

I always planned out my content in advance, even when it felt like writing massive blog posts was challenging. Back then, my outline was limited. I identified the blog post title and which tactics I would discuss.

Now I use the Socratic Outline for all of my blog posts. The Socratic Outline is like a traditional outline with a twist. You act as the reader and type questions the reader would have. For each tactic I discuss, I type at least three questions that the reader might ask.

For a blog post on getting more Twitter followers, one tip would be “Interact with your audience.” Here are some questions people may have:

How do I interact with my audience?
What do I say?
How do I continue the conversation?

Instead of having five ideas within a blog post containing five tactics, I now multiply that total to 15 ideas within the same blog post containing the same five tactics. The more ideas you have to play with in your writing, the easier it is to write 10,000 quality words each day.

Anyone can type “very, very, very” 10,000 times. Planning out your content in advance allows you to develop the skill of writing quality words in massive quantities.

The Socratic Outline makes long-form content much easier to produce.

Change Your Environment

The tactics mentioned so far will give you the skills and mindset needed to write 10,000 words in under 12 hours. However, your environment is also a critical factor. When I first wrote this blog post, I mentioned that we all have a biological primetime. We are more productive during certain times of the day than others.

I want to take biological primetime one step further. Your biological primetime differs based on the environment you are in. At home, my biological primetime is the morning. Towards the evening, especially after 5 pm eastern, my productivity drops.

The biological primetime for my productivity at home is in the morning.

That’s why I interview most of my podcast guests in the evening. I’m not as productive at writing in the evening, but I can hold great conversations during that time.

Sometimes, when I don’t have an interview, I’ll go to a local bookstore in the evening to become more productive.

My productivity spikes in the new environment because my environment has changed. Your environment affects your biological primetime. I’m more productive at a local bookstore during the evening, and I only create content in that bookstore. I’m not doing anything else at that time.

I do all of the tech related work in the morning (create landing pages, check email sequences, etc.) and create as much content as my heart desires.

If your productivity is lagging at certain times of the day, the best solution is to change your environment. Then, you change your results.

In Conclusion

Writing 10,000 words a day is a daunting task, especially if you do it consistently. However, if you write 10,000 words two days each month, you’ll add an extra 20,000 words to your monthly total.

Those 20,000 words can provide you with several blog posts, books, and other forms of content. As you continue writing every day, you’ll have an easier time writing high quality words in massive quantities.

Share This Post With Your Friends

How many words do you write each day? What are your thoughts on the 10K word day? What’s your plan to write more content? Have a question for me?

Leave me a comment. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone else who needs this burst of insight, make sure you pass it on.

[Tweet “How To Write 10,000 Words In Less Than 12 Hours.”]

** Want to make money from your writing? Schedule a free strategy call with me to see if we are a good fit. **

5 Benefits To Accepting Guest Posts

February 4, 2017 by Marc Guberti 11 Comments

Guest blogging is a well-established approach to getting more visibility for your content. Each guest post is a valuable backlink and more traffic to any of your blog posts, landing pages, or social networks that you get to promote within that guest post.

While the benefits of guest blogging continue to establish a grip-hold on many bloggers’ efforts, fewer bloggers think about accepting guest posts on their blogs.

For a very long time, I was skeptical to allowing guest bloggers to contribute on my blog. Many people asked me, and I simply said that my blog wasn’t open to guest blogging. Recently, my opinion changed and I now accept guest posts.

My opinion didn’t change overnight. In fact, it was influenced by these five benefits to accepting guest posts.

#1: You Save Time

Let’s say you want to update your blog every day. That means you need to write at least seven blog posts every week. While this is an admirable goal that will keep your blog updated consistently and frequently, this effort will take up the majority of your time.

Now let’s say that, on average, you get 3 guest post contributions every week. Now you only have to write at least four blog posts each week to still publish new content on your blog each day.

If each blog post takes 30 minutes of your time, then you save 1 hour and 30 minutes since the content is already provided for you. How can you devote that time? I now use my extra time to create more YouTube videos, training courses, and eBooks.

#2: You Learn From Your Own Blog

The biggest reason I made the change and started accepting guest posts was this one. I like to learn from other people’s blogs, and other people like to learn from my blog. As I saw more people expressing their gratitude for my content, I realized that I wasn’t learning anything from my content.

How can you learn something new from a blog post that you wrote?

Opening the door to guest contributions also opened the door to new knowledge. My blog has a high standard that only opens the doors to high value guest posts that empower my audience…but also me. I like to get empowered by the guest posts too.

The more knowledge you acquire about your niche, the more likely you are to become successful in that niche. Opening the door to guest contributions is a great way to learn and save time at the same time.

You’ll Get More Traffic From Your Contributors

At the beginning of this post, I talked about the benefits of being a guest blogger. More credibility and traffic are two of the key benefits.

With that said, when you open the door to guest contributions, you’ll get more traffic and credibility too. Guest bloggers will feel enticed to share their guest posts with their audiences. The more prominent guest bloggers you attract to your blog, the more traffic YOU will get.

The end result is that both you and the guest blogger get more traffic in a win-win relationship.

#4: Your Blog Gets Updated More Frequently

Let’s go back to the example of writing seven blog posts per week. If you get three guest contributions each week, but you decide that you still want to write and publish seven of your blog posts each week, your blog now gets updated with 10 new blog posts every week.

This increased frequency of content updates will present your audience with more options and give you more Google love. Not only will you get more traffic from your contributor’s social media efforts, but you’ll start getting more search engine traffic.

#5: You Make More Connections

Lewis Howes is crushing it right now. He’s hosting events, has massive product launches, and is a role model for many people. Ever wonder how people like him achieved their level of success.

While different approaches exist, Lewis took on a very interesting approach. He decided to meaningfully connect with one new person every day with LinkedIn. By meaningfully connecting with more people, Lewis was exposed to numerous opportunities that helped him achieve his current level of success.

When you open the door to guest contributions, you will come in contact with more people in your niche. These people will promote their guest posts and lead their audience to your blog. Some of these new visitors will become subscribers. Some of the guest bloggers will repeatedly promote their pieces which would result in recurring traffic from that guest blogger’s efforts.

In Conclusion

Writing guest posts is a great way to gain exposure, but accepting guest posts on your blog is also a great way to get more exposure. Not only will you get more traffic from the guest posts, but that additional traffic will give your existing blog posts an edge on search engines.

You also get to learn new things from your blog which I personally find to be very cool.

What are your thoughts on accepting guest posts on your blog? Do you know someone who does this? Sound off in the comments section below.