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How To Become A Successful Part-Time Blogger

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It’s easier to become a successful blogger if you take the full-time route. However, it is also possible to become a successful part-time blogger.

While I see myself as a full-time entrepreneur, I must acknowledge that I am technically part-time since I’m a college student.

When you’re part-time, you don’t has as much time as a full-time blogger to commit towards your blog. That doesn’t necessarily put you at a disadvantage. This lack of time can actually be your greatest asset.

When you don’t have as much time, you get smarter with the time that you have. Mastering efficiency and effectiveness now will result in massive gains when you go from part-time to full-time.

Here are some tactics that will help you become a successful part-time blogger.

Knowledge Acquisition On The Road

The best way to speed your growth is to learn more about blogging and your niche as a whole. However, if you spend too much time acquiring knowledge, you won’t have enough time to write blog posts.

While I find time to read every day, you’ll also find it very effective to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on your daily commutes. Music will provide you with short-lived motivation (if your lucky enough to hear your favorite some on the radio), but listening to a podcast or audiobook will provide you with knowledge that will speed up your success.

To see the impact of this tactic, let’s say your daily commute is 20 minutes one-way. That means you’re on the road for at least 40 minutes every day. That comes to a total of 14,600 minutes (243 hours and 20 minutes) every year.

Finally, let’s say you listen to your audio content at 1.5 speed instead of the regular speed. I wouldn’t recommend making it too fast because you have to absorb the info as you drive, but 1.5 is doable.

That one decision cuts a 30 minute podcast episode down to 20 minutes. A 6 hour audiobook is now just 4 hours, but you’ll learn the same information.

In 14,600 minutes, you can listen to 730 podcast episodes or listen to 60 audiobooks assuming they all average 6 hours per audiobook. If you can listen to audio content at twice the speed without getting distracted, you’ll reap even more gains.

That’s much better than listening to music that only serves a short-term purpose.

Delegation

As a part-time blogger, there are only so many hats you can wear. Marketing, web design, creation, and writing email copy are some of the many hats we can wear as bloggers. It’s easier for full-time bloggers to put on these hats.

Part-time bloggers thrive in a different setting.

Instead of wearing so many hats, they distribute the hats to others. In other words, part-time bloggers delegate many of their tasks. I delegate a wide variety of tasks, and if I didn’t, my blog wouldn’t be where it is today.

All of my freelancers combined work at least 40 hours per week. That number is going to multiply as 2018 continues to take its course. Guess who would have to do all of that work if the freelancers weren’t here to help.

That’s right, me.

And while it’s doable for the summer and breaks, this just isn’t possible during school. Especially since I’m still doing a lot for my content brand already.

Start delegating the time consuming tasks that you don’t want to do. With your newfound time, do something that generates more revenue for your blog. If you can hire a freelancer whose skill and workload helps you generate more revenue than you’re paying that freelancer, that’s a plus.

I have someone else handling my Amazon Book Ads, and I am making a nice profit even after accounting for my monthly fee and ad spend.

But for now, delegate one task whether the primary focus is saving more time or making more money.

Prioritization & Focus

When you delegate various tasks such as social media growth and scheduling your content, you’ll have more time. This is where priority and focus come in.

The way you use your extra time determines that outputs you get within your lifetime.

You need to focus on the priorities that will result in the most traffic, conversions, and sales. Those are your three greatest allies in the blogging world. Getting more traffic means you can convert more people. If you convert more people, you have more people to sell to.

And more sales means more revenue that you can reinvest, use to delegate more tasks, or put it into your nest egg.

80/20 Marketing VS Creation

People are great at creating valuable content. If successful content brands were solely based on creating valuable content, a lot more of us would be very successful.

But content brands don’t just rely on great content. They also rely on even better marketing. Marketing your content makes the difference between your work getting seen and your work not getting seen.

If your blog post doesn’t get seen, it’s not valuable. Even if you wrote thousands of words and did some epic research, your blog post is not valuable unless people see it.

How can a blog post be of value if no one has read it? The definition of value as a whole is dependent on other people reading the content and getting value from it.

With content marketing being so important, we now return to the 80/20 rule. I’ve mentioned this rule a lot through my writing, and chances are you’ve come across it often. Here’s how the 80/20 rule works in this case.

You need to spend 80% of your time marketing your content and only 20% of your time creating the content.

If you spend more time marketing than creating, you’ll eventually get a big boost in traffic. If you prefer to create content, you can develop systems for marketing your content and delegate the marketing to your freelancers. It’s more than possible, but you still need to follow the 80/20 rule.

If you create content for 10 hours each week, you need to assign at least 40 hours per week to your freelancers responsible for marketing your content.

Find Your Full-Time Sprints

Every part-time blogger needs to find certain gaps of time where they have the full-time blogger status. For me, those moments are during holiday breaks and the summer.

During these gaps in time, I’m sprinting hard.

I’ll plan out the sprint a few days in advance. When you have more time to play with, one of two things will happen:

Since you are a part-time blogger who performed under time restrictions, removing the time restriction will result in a decrease in productivity. Now you have more time to use, but you’re taking your time.

With the fire in your belly to permanently reach full-time blogger status, you use your current full-time sprint to accomplish far more than you would have accomplished as a part-time blogger.

Planning out the sprint ahead and utilizing those extra hours each day will make a big difference in the future. The more you care about the planning process, the more successful your full-time sprint will be.

Focus the majority of your time on revenue generating activities because those are the activities that will elevate you to permanent full-time status.

In Conclusion

Regardless of whether you’re just getting started or have been a blogger for a while, you can become a full-time blogger.

If you are not a full-time blogger yet, you’re not correctly investing your time towards blogging.

The moment you change your approach, you will change your results. Part-time bloggers may have less time, but you can create systems and utilize your time more effectively.

It’s not about how many hours we each have in a given day, but rather, how we’re using each hour.

What are your thoughts about becoming a successful part-time blogger? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Promote Your Brand During Industry Events

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To succeed in business, you need to constantly perform at your best. The better you promote yourself, and the more people you connect with, the more your brand will grow. We’re good at promoting ourselves online. Use social media, grow an email list, and interact with people. Promoting your brand during an industry event is completely different.

Industry events are different because of their structure. You have a limited time window to learn from speakers and connect with attendees. Within your limited time, you need to build relationships that will continue after the event.

Promoting your business is much easier if you are the speaker at a industry event. As an attendee, it’s more difficult.

Regardless of whether you are a speaker or an attendee, the insights in this article will give you a leg up at the next industry event you attend.

 

Determine Your Objectives

Determining your objectives revolves around this question:

What do I want to get out of this event (other than learning from speakers)?

Do you want to recruit more affiliates for your upcoming launch? Do you want more clients? Are you looking for a coach? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself as you ponder the primary question.

Without determining your objectives, none of the other tactics in this article will carry any weight. Determining your objectives is the first step to achieving them.

 

Meet Up With The Right People

When you walk into an industry event, you’ll be walking within a sea of people. Not all of these people are equally important for your objectives. Some people are more enthusiastic than others to hire a coach. Some people are downright negative, and you need to get out of those conversations as quickly as possible.

The event’s structure will make it easier or more difficult to meet up with the right people. If an industry event has many presentations, you can attend the presentations where more of your potential clients will be.

Let’s say you coach people on launching and scaling a successful podcast. You can either go to the presentation about podcasting or the presentation about Twitter.

Go to the presentation about podcasting, connect with people before it starts, and then connect with more people after the presentation.

If presentations are not segmented in this fashion, arrive earlier than usual and talk with the other early birds. The early birds are usually some of the most determined attendees at the event.

Even if these people aren’t the right people for your coaching, affiliate program, or anything else, chances are they know a good fit.

 

Talk With The Speakers

If you go to an industry event, you owe it to yourself to talk with the speakers. Getting on these individual’s radars will open the door to more opportunities in the future.

This is how some of my best friendships with top players in my industry get formed. I watched people like Seth Godin, Mike Michalowicz, and Ramon Ray deliver awesome presentations multiple times. I interacted with all three of these marketing legends multiple times.

You only get that level of interaction and friendship by continuing to show up and interacting with the speakers. If you want to take this specific tactic to the next level, you can follow a speaker around to multiple locations.

Just make sure you can go up to the speaker and say what you were able to implement from the previous speech.

Influencers appreciate it when you consume their content and pay attention to their brands. They love it when they hear people say, “This is what you taught me…and this is how I applied it to my business.”

 

Make A Profit From The Event

Have you ever wondered why people are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single ticket at an industry event? Most people view these events as opportunities to learn from the leaders and interact with them.

Savvy marketers view these industry events as a way to make more money. The moment I graduate college, I’m going to more events like Social Media Marketing World regardless of whether I am a speaker or an attendee.

Tickets cost anywhere from a several hundred to over $1,000 depending on when you get them. At an event like this, I would build relationships with people and hope at least one attendee becomes a client.

The lowest I charge for any of my services is $497/mo with a 6-month commitment. That’s $2,982 in six months—way more than the price of a Social Media Marketing World ticket.

And that’s if I just get one client for my lowest-priced service.

But an event like Social Media Marketing World attracts thousands of social media marketers, so if I only got one client from SMMW, I definitely did something wrong.

 

Practice Your Pitches Beforehand

The second worst time to start practicing is on the day of the event. The worst scenario is to not practice at all.

If you can’t effectively communicate with attendees, you won’t achieve your objectives. No matter how great your product is, you won’t get affiliates if you don’t effectively communicate.

I advise practicing every day for moments like this. Getting in front of the mirror helps some people, but I don’t see the need. As long as you continue practicing your pitch, you’ll give a better pitch when you need to.

Start with practicing your various elevator pitches. Various elevator pitches?

One person would be a great guest on your podcast. Another person would be a great client. Each person gets a different pitch.

You don’t tell the potential guest about your coaching services. You don’t focus your conversation with the potential client about your podcast.

As an added bonus, you can practice the pitch with someone. Make your pitch, and have your partner control the rest of the conversation.

How will you react when your partner says, “This works”, “This isn’t for me right now”, or something similar?

How will you handle questions like “What’s the price?” and “What’s your podcast all about?”

Don’t just get a partner who listens to your elevator pitch. Ask that partner to get actively involved and ask questions as if this wasn’t a rehearsal.

 

The Post-Event

This is where the magic happens. You’ve gone back-and-forth between sessions, attendees, and speakers. Understand that everyone else at the industry event followed that same schedule.

A day after the event, everyone begins to play catch up mode. People respond to emails, address backlogged tasks, and do everything else that they missed.

But during this time, many people are catching up with their inboxes. You need to get into the attendees’ and speakers’ inboxes during this time.

Continue the conversation you were having before. This email will be different depending on who you were talking to. You may decide to send a potential client a link to schedule a free 30 minute call. You may provide a speaker with a link to schedule a time to appear on your podcast.

For people you want to know better but don’t have a call-to-action for, you can simply email them and mention the following:

How great the event was (great practice for any post-event email)

How much you enjoyed meeting the person and/or learning from them

To help you with this process, write some notes on the back of every business card you receive. Write what you and the other person just discussed and some points you can bring up during the post-event conversation.

What were the topics you discussed? Did anything personal come up from either side? Did this person have a kid, upcoming birthday, or anything else? Who’s their role model? You won’t know the answers to all of the questions like these. Knowing the answer to a single one will allow you to write a more personalized email.

 

In Conclusion

Why would I write a blog post about industry events when I rarely attend them? The answer is that I set a goal to attend a few industry events in 2018. I’m going after the more high-ticket industry events where I know I can positively impact attendees.

I’m going where more of my targeted audience goes. But these aren’t just people in my targeted audience. These are people who care… a lot.

If you’re willing to spend hundreds or even a little over $1,000 on a single ticket, and that doesn’t include traveling expenses for people who live in different countries, you know this is a serious crowd.

They’re super successful already or willing to put in as much effort as possible to become super successful.

You don’t just spend that much money for a single ticket and plan out your travel just to be wishy washy during the event.

Seriously committed people attend these types of events, and you should too. My school schedule makes it more difficult to attend a variety of these events, but I’ll tell you this…

I’ll be at Podcast Movement 2018.

What are your thoughts on attending industry events? Do you have any tips for making the most of these events? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Automate Your Content Brand

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The more you can automate, the more you can focus on your priorities. Automation can make any area in life easier ranging from money distribution to making sure every task in your business gets done.

For successful content creators who find themselves overwhelmed with all of the work, automation is often the next step. Many people wish to automate some or all of their work, but regardless of how much you want to automate right now, it will create the potential for dramatic improvement.

I say dramatic improvement because your improvement is based on how you use your newfound time.

Here are some ways that you can automate your content brand.

 

#1: Post In A Cycle 

One of the most tedious tasks for most content brands is coming up with the social media content. Instead of curating new ideas every day, search for the evergreen ideas that you can continue posting in a continuous cycle.

I have hundreds of tweets that I put in a queue. These tweets automatically get sent out, and the cycle infinitely continues. I can add more tweets to this cycle when I come out with new content, but I don’t have to search for additional content for a long time.

I originally kept a CSV file containing all of these tweets with their links. After modifying the dates using Command F, I could then upload the CSV file into HootSuite’s bulk uploader and schedule over 100 tweets in just six clicks.

Since then, I started to use ViralTag which puts all of my tweets into a queue. You can set yourself up on ViralTag, never log in again, and your social media posts will continue to get posted in a continuous cycle.

I only log into ViralTag when I want to add new content or temporarily pause the cycle (i.e. I don’t tweet on Christmas Day).

 

#2: Delegate Your Tasks

The key to automating any business is to delegate your tasks to others. You can’t automate everything. You can’t send an auto response to every email and expect to build healthy relationships.

To determine which tasks you need to delegate, write down a list of the tasks you do. After you write that list, write a second list of all of the tasks you enjoy doing.

Any task on the first list that doesn’t appear on the second list needs to get delegated.

I tend to make at least one new hire per month. That allows me to assess my needs and grow at a gradual pace. Some day, I plan on hiring 5-10 people every month, and that number will expand in proportion to my business’ growth and needs.

 

#3: Provide Your Freelancers With Rubrics

When you hire a new freelancer, that freelancer will not fully know what to do. This isn’t a knock on freelancers. Imagine you getting hired but receiving vague instructions. I wouldn’t know what to do either.

And just because a freelancer has been working for you for several months doesn’t mean they fully know your expectations.

To make your expectations and instructions perfectly clear, you need to provide your freelancers with a rubric.

Leave no stones unturned. Make it as clear as possible. For my podcast editor and show notes writer, I provided this rubric for writing the show notes:

In the past, this freelancer would provide me with the show notes, and I would customize them to my standard. My clearly laying out my standard, both of us boosted our productivity.

Feeling inspired, I created a rubric for my Twitter Growth Expert. He was already doing a great job for me, but I felt like we were missing something. I’m improving at communicating with my freelancers, but during those times, I was downright terrible with the communication (it took me a few days just to respond to the simplest requests).

The rubric allowed us to get more clear on my expectations and his work ethic. The end result was more productivity for both of us and more rapid Twitter growth.

These rubrics are more productive for both of us because there’s no question about what needs to get done. My freelancers don’t have to guess anymore, and I don’t have to correct their work anymore. I create a rubric for every freelancer I hire. The rubric that takes me an hour to create will save me several hours every week.

 

#4: Automating The Inbox

You shouldn’t automate everything that goes in your inbox, but you can get really close. If you frequently find yourself trying to schedule things through email, you’re better off creating an online scheduler using a tool like Acuity.

That way, instead of the back-and-forth “I can do 3 pm this Wednesday. Does that work for you?” you provide your availability and the other person chooses a time and date from your availability that also works for them.

You can take this a step further by hiring a freelancer to respond to most of your emails. Only advance to this step if…

Your inbox is swamped

You have a continuous stream of incoming emails that you need to respond to

If you choose to hire someone, give that person a rubric showing them how to respond to common types of emails. These types of emails depend on what you get in your inbox.

An inbox detox can also solve the problem. In an inbox detox, you unsubscribe to one newsletter every day (except for mine) and then get fewer emails in your inbox.

 

In Conclusion

Automating your business will open up more time. The way you use that time determine the results you’ll get. While this statement is obvious, it carries more weight since automating your business is an investment.

You invest your money to get your time back. To make the automation worthwhile, you need to make more money from your extra time than you spend to gain that extra time.

What are your thoughts on automating your business? Do you have any automation tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.