There are 3 important steps in blogging:

Without traffic, blogging can be frustrating. So today, I want to expose one of the surefire ways you can generate steady traffic to your blog.

And its called your Email List!

According to Jeff Goins, the international bestseller author of The Work of Art, when he approached his publisher about marketing strategies for his next book, they asked him one simple question:

how big is your email list?

When a publicly traded company approached Derek Halpern to buy out one of his popular blogs, he could have asked for 7x to 10x their original offer: If he had an email list!

But I have got news for you. Building an email list is no longer as easy as it was in the golden era of 2001. Terrific content is no longer good enough because everyone is creating wonderful content and readers are spoiled for choice. Pop-ups are so common that many readers now ignore them.

So how do you cut through the competition and build an impressive list in 30 days?

Eric of BeardBrand used a giveaway to spike his email list and increase his plateauing sales. Prior to running a contest using Gleam.io, they had 135 subscribers and little sales. After running a week-long contest, BeardBrand had 1001 subscribers. The day they launched the contest, they did about 4x their daily normal sales.

Noah Kagan  grew the email list of AppSumo with the first month from 0 to over 30,000 subs with just giveaways! In 10 months he grew his list to 147,973 subscribers; with just giveaways.

Rohan of Wet Shave Club saw how giveaways shot BeardBrands email list and revenue. He decided to use it for Wet Shave Club which was a new company he just bought and rebranded.

The results? 2000+ new email subscribers and $100k revenue in 6 months. I dont know about you but that is pretty impressive. How did they get $100k with their email list?

Simple. By contacting them directly with an discount offer.

Pro Tip: Running a giveaway is an easy way to build your list and increase your blogs revenue generation. But there is a wrong way to do this and a right way to do this. A wrong way is to offer an iPhone as the prize. Everyone will enter but chances are that most of them are not your target audience. The right way to do this is to give a prize that will appeal only to your target audience. Also promotion of the giveaway is as important as the prize you are giving. Get influencers in your niche/marsupial niches to promote your giveaway and your email list building will  skyrocket!

I highly recommend Gleam. I have used them and a few other giveaway software and I completely love their service. You can even start with the free plan.

So if you are too busy to do other methods listed below, a giveaway might be your magic lamp. If you need ideas for a giveaway, drop a comment and I will gladly help out. 

Dan Faggella of  CLVboost was able to use guestposting to grow his email list to 10,000 subs in a matter of months. He used guestposting as a watering hose to drive traffic to his site. You can read all about his expert marketing strategy.

Pro Tip: Want your guest posting to result in an avalanche of email subscribers? Then you absolutely must read Hennekes post on CopyBlogger: Unleash a Surge of Email Subscribers from Your Guest Posts With This Simple Landing Page Strategy

When I did my book launch, I made over $3,000 in one day. Launching a product or a service is an effective way of capturing peoples attention.

So why not launch your website and capture emails?

This is exactly what Harleena Singh is doing with her personal website. And her results are spectacular! The traffic to her site must be enough to have spiked her Alexa ranking, even without a single post published.

Ramsey recommends this method and shows how you can do this in this blog post. If you have a tight budget, then you should follow Jon Morrows method. While contributing to copyblogger, he was building an email list for his blog. He used a coming-soon software to capture leads. The day he opened his blog for the first time and wrote the first post on his blog, the avalanche traffic was incredible. However, Jons method is a slower process of building trust through continuous guestposting/contribution to an influncers blog. It might take longer to get 1000 email subs this way but it will be totally worth it in the end.

Tools you can use:

To make this method so much more effective, you can use these tools that will lead to a viral sharing of your launch date and a spike in your email subscription rate.

Launch Rock: A simple tool for launching your website.

SeedProd: I have personally used SeedProd and I absolutely love/recommend them.

A article upgrade is an extra material complimentary to the article you just published. If a web visitor loves the article and knows article upgrade will benefit him, he wont mind parting with his email address, just to get the upgrade. Probloggers like Neil Patel, Bryan Harris have used this technique to increase their email list.

Content locking is more prevalent in subscription sites. A glimpse of the full article is shown (like the first three paragraphs of the article). Then the rest is hidden and only trading an email address will unlock it. This works extremely well in industries where information is not readily available online.

Pro tip: For content locking I highly recommend using OptinLock

For article upgrades consider Optin Monster

This is a smart method and I encourage people to use it too. This is how I found Bryan Harris of videofruit.com and ended up on his email list.

I was simply looking for an ebook on entrepreneurship strategies. In the search results, I saw an ebook with more than 10 contributors who gave great tips on how to upscale your online business. Bryan Harris was one of the contributors. I was sucked in by the practical advice he gave that I immediately clicked the link to his website.

I was not disappointed. His website had more practical advice on how to get customers and build an email list. Long story short, I subscribed to Bryans list 3 hours after downloading a free ebook on Smashwords.

Pro Tip: Publishing an ebook on Smashwords or Amazon is great. Making it free is even better. Want to attract 1000s of downloads? Co-author the book with 5 to 20 more experts in your niche.

Mary Jaksh optin The (Nearly) Ultimate Guide to Writing is how I discovered the Freddy Krugger of blogging, Danny Iny and ended up on his email list.

Gone are the days when you see other bloggers as your rivals. If you can collaborate with another blogger, (especially one who has more traffic than you) to contribute to his/her optin, you will be increasing the chances of being found on the blogoshere.

There you have it: 6 simple ways to grow your email list.

Over to you. In the comments, tell me what ways you use to grow your email list. If you are stuck and want to know ways you can grow your own email list, peculiar to your niche, ask me in the comments. I reply to every comment and will gladly help you out. 

There are two types of people in this world.

People who wait for opportunities to drop from the skies into their laps and those who go out there, to create their own opportunities.

In the same vein: there are two types of bloggers

Now, I will be frank with you: Blogging is no walk in the park. In the past decade, blogging got so complex, technical and competitive that starting a blog these days is like enrolling into an university; there is just so much to learn.

So how do you start a blog you are absolutely sure will help you fire your 9-5 boss? How do you ensure you dont fall into the unfortunate pool of bloggers who have never been able to make a cent from their blogs?

I compiled a list of articles that will help you build a profitable blog. Afterall, making some extra money from something you love is never a bad thing. Nor is it a bad thing if your blog can bring in 6-figures each month, so you can spend time with those that really matter in your life.

Before you jump into building a blog, you must first know what your blog will be all about. You must also know how you can turn a profit with your blog. Fail at this step and your blogging will be a horrific experience to put it mildly.

Greg Narayan explains all you need to know in about planning your blog in his recent article: Guide Part 1: How to plan your new blog perfectly

I love how Don Purdum showed how planning can triple your sales in weeks in this post: Why my Business trippled in 6 weeks. 

Don reveals that clarity + focus =execution. And I agree completely with him because lucrative blogging requires intentional efforts. Profits dont just automatically spring from blogging.

We all know Content is king. But many bloggers do not know how to package their really useful blog posts in a way that will attract, entice and seduce their target audience. If you want to be a popular blogger, then I do urge you to learn how to speak to your readers in a personal manner, like you are having a conversation with them. No matter how knowledgeable you are, your content must never sound like you are speaking down to your reader.

When Neil Patel started his food blog, he first started by building a Facebook page for the blog even before he had written a single post. Its very frustrating when you watch your wonderful content gather dust because nobody is reading it. I recently started work on a blog project (will write about my experiences one day) and the first thing I did was to build a Facebook following for this blog. Micheal Hyatt shows just how important a platform is in this video

For the blog project, I knew that building a platform is extremely important. I first created a facebook page, acquired followers and shared other peoples content with them. I shared other bloggers content so that I can tell what my facebook followers loved. I then built a blog and only created content similiar to those that had many likes and shares. The result? Constant traffic and a daily growth of the email list. And the blog is just three weeks old. I do intend to intensify on my platform building efforts on that blog and will share how I did it all when I have attained my targets.
You should focus on building your platform even before you start creating constant quality content. These articles below will help you know how to go about that:

Why you need a platform to succeed

The best first steps to develop your online platform

Ever been to Adriennes blog? Have you noticed how many comments and social shares every single one of her posts have? This is because she is a master at building relationships. If you want a blog that wont die out, then you need an engaged audience who hang on your every word.

Adrienne shows how you can do this in this post: How to build relationships through blogging

Building relationships and a platform is only part of the equation. If you really want a successul blog, you must be ready to promote your blog content 80% of the time. Thats Derek Halperns theory and this strategy is adopted by most successful bloggers. Nobody will know you have great content sitting on your blog if you dont share that content with your email list, social media followers and other connections. There is an on-going debate about whether you should blog daily, weekly or monthly. My take is: it all comes done to the revenue. If you run Google ads on your blog, then it makes sense to blog regularly. If you dont have google ads on your blog, but want to sell your services and products, I say spend less time writing articles (20%) and spend more time promoting it (80%) so that people who will pay for these services and products can hear about you and visit your blog.

Now we can talk about one of the reasons you started blogging in the first place. Now making money with a blog is pretty easy when you have an engaged platform who trust and hang on your every word. There are various ways of making money from a blog and they can be broadly categorised as follows:

Notice I did not talk about SEO, traffic generation, email list building. Why? Because these are tactics in a strategy. Some bloggers chase after the latest SEO fad or traffic generation trick without knowing the underlying strategy. Build a platform first, create really helpful content for this platform and work on developing a strong relationships with this platform and things like SEO, traffic generation and email list growth will happen as a result of this. People will become repeat visitors of your blog and happy customers of your services/products not because Google told them to but because you gave them what they wanted and built their trust in you.

Notice how I put revenue last. Trying to sell to people who dont know and trust you is trying to put the cart before the horse. There is no way you will be able to sell a consulting service of $1000/hr or an online course of $10,000/yr if no one knows if you will be able to deliver what you promised.

So over to you? How have you been able to build a lucrative blog? What plans do you intend to use and build a successful blog?

Everyone wants to be successful. Its the reason stories like how J.K Rowling went from counting food stamps to becoming a billionaire become viral. Its the reason Oprah Winfrey attained goddess-status because many struggling women wanted to be just like her (a broke lady from a broken home one instant and in Americas top ten richest the next instant).

Success is doing what you love and attaining heights you dream of. Success, for me, is being an entrepreneur with a difference. Success for Micheal Jordan was being the best basketball player of all time. Success for Walt Disney is being the best entertainment company in the world.

Success does not have to be all about money. It is about you and what you want in life. If your ambition is to eradicate illiteracy, then your success is defined by the number of countries you helped build robust education systems that work. If your daily motivation is the reduction of mortality rate, then your success would be the day it is observed that 99.9% of your patients survived. If your life goal is to be on Forbes list, then of course, success for you would mean how much wealth you have acquired.

Many times, we want to be successful right now!

There is nothing wrong with a little ambition. Wanting to be successful is not a bad thing. Its expecting to be successful without sweating for it that is wrong. None of the successful people I know had a magic lamp.

Before I go any further, I want to tell you the true stories of three people, whom life knocked so hard, and yet they shocked everyone with their brilliant success.

image credits: DailyMail.co.uk

She is best known for her Harry Potter series, that sold over 450 million copies with the last four books setting records as the fastest selling books of all time on both sides of the Atlantic and generating billions of dollars from book sales and the film merchandise.

But J.K Rowling had a rough start. 

In 1990, her mother died from multiple sclerosis. Grief led to her first marriage, that lasted less than 3 years. This was the start of a dark period in her life and in her words, she felt like a failure. Christmas of 1993 saw her back in Edinburgh, with her young daughter and living on welfare.

She started writing the Harry Potter first book in  1990 and submitted it to publishing houses in 1997. It was rejected by 12 publishers and nearly thrown out by Bloomsbury (the publisher that eventually paid her a paltry $4000 as royalty for the first book). Her saving grace was the daughter of the editor of Bloomsbury who insisted on reading the rest of the book.

An American publishing house, saw the book and immediately bought rights to publish it in America. The rest, as they say, is history.

30 year-old Neil has achieved a whole lot for his age. He was recognised as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepeneurs under age 35 by the United Nation. He has made it to Forbes top 10 online marketers list and Entrepreneur Magazine believes he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world.

What company did he create that got him all this recognition?

Neil is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics and Hello Bar; with these companies he has increased the revenue-generation capacity of blue-chip companies like Amazon, NBC, Viacom and HP to mention but a few. To view an infographic that shows all the details of Neils life, click here

But he was not always the top-shot internet marketer.

Neil reveals that he started out with crappy jobs: like being a janitor, a salesman for an expensive vacuum-cleaner that nobody wanted, and starting a job board that sucked a lot of money and never made a cent. Even the early days of Crazy Egg was punctuated with crazy losses. After Crazy Egg, he started a number of software companies that failed.

But he did not give up.

Neil knew what he wanted and continued to strive for it. As at 2012, Quicksprout  earned $1,000,000 in revenue. Big-shot companies like Amazon, HP have hired his services in millions of dollars and currently Neil is working on transforming an already successful Kissmetrics into a $100 million a year revenue business. Read more of his story here and here

He dubbed himself the crash dummy of the internet. He has tried almost every single legitimate tactic or strategy there is to make money online. Just last month, his blog brought home a hefty $123,853.51

He might not be a millionaire but he makes a pretty decent income from his internet marketing ventures.

But it was not always this rosy.

Before he started making money online, Pat received a sack notice! During the economic crisis in 2008, he was fired from his 9-5 job but notified on-time by his boss. He had to move out of his house into his parents house and start commuting by train to save money spent on gas for his car. Out of desperation, he walked into internet marketing and has never looked back since.

When you read through these stories you will notice certain things (what I call the ingredients of success)

When you read Neil Patels life story you will discover he had one driving force: he wanted to be rich. He wanted to break free of the shackles of middle-class.

J.K Rowling wanted her books to find a home in every young childs library. She always dreamed of being a writer.

To be successful, you must first want it bad enough.

Ask yourself this question: What do I really want in life? What do I want so bad in life?

Do not freak out: it mustnt just be money. Some people want to visit every nation of this world so bad. Some people want to leave a legacy for their kids. Some want to create freedom and equality for all.

Whatever it is, you must want it bad enough.

J.K Rowling worked on her novel for more than five years. At a point, she was making notes on scraps of paper or tissue or anything close-by whenever inspiration struck. What many people dont know is that J.K Rowling started writing at a tender age. When next you watch a Harry Potter movie, know this: It took years of preparation, training and a lot of sweat and blood (her mothers death) to make that story the stellar piece it is.

When Pat Flynn started trying to figure out how to monetize his blog, he was driven by one compelling force: he had to find a source of income so he could take care of his wife (then fiancee) and their children. Pat had no experience in marketing but he learned it. Pat knew nothing about Affiliate marketing but he learned it.

He was willing to work to make his dreams of fending for his family and spending quality time with them come true.

After answering the first question, ask yourself this second question: What do I need to do to achieve this? Be brutally honest with yourself. Get a pen and paper and put down everything required to achieve your dream. From skill-set, connections to finances, list every single thing.

We all have doubts but our doubts must never overshadow our belief in ourselves.

When Pat Flynn found out that a large number of people visited his site, he was scared.

According to him, he had these thoughts:

What if my notes weren’t good enough? What if I’m forgetting something?

I knew the content was good though, and exactly what I needed to pass, so I internally began to become confident in what I had created and was determined to monetize this site somehow.

Do you ever feel this way. I know I do sometimes. Everyone does. The trick is to put in your best and when the nagging voice of self-doubt pops into your head, silence it with the results of your genuine efforts.

After answering the second question, ask yourself: what are my fears? Your fear could be that you are not educated enough. It could be that you do not have the right skill-set. It could be even a physical deformity like you do not have good legs so you are not mobile. Whenever I have doubts about myself, I tell myself, If Nick Vujicic can become a world-renowned motivational speaker, write 4 inspirational books and accomplish a whole lot more, then I have no excuse to keep doubting myself

Nick Vujicic is one of the men I admire and you can find out more about him and other people who never allowed their weaknesses stop them in this inspiring article by Ikechi Awazie 

When Pat Flynn was warned of his imminent sack by his boss, He knew immediately that he had to figure out how to make money online.

According to him:

My body was still going into the office a few times a week, but my mind was all about online business and learning all about how it worked and what I could possibly do to begin to earn an income online.

In my mind, I was already laid off.

I had a few months left on payroll, plus a small severance package and some emergency savings if I needed to use it – so I figured I had maybe 6-8 months to make this online business thing work – whether it would be something I did with my LEED blog or something else. If not, then I would send out resumes like mad or go back to school to get a Masters and go from there.

As far as I was concerned, I had no other options but to make it work.

When J.K Rowling was receiving food stamps to take care of herself and her daughter, she poured herself into her book. She just knew that she had to make it as a writer or the future really looked bleak.

Pat Flynn created a new dimension of affiliate marketing with his website smartpassiveincome.com.

This is how he did it.

First he would create a blog post for a product he was an affiliate of. Then he would create a video showing exactly how to use this product, revealing  free-of charge what some people taught at a price. He did this for BlueHost, Samuri products and many others.

The result?

His affiliate links recorded crazy conversions, and shot his earnings through the roof. Dont believe me? Click on this link to see for yourself. Before Pat Flynn started this form of affiliate marketing, it was little-known. Pat Flynn was one of the internet marketers that made it a well-known strategy.

J.K Rowlings Harry Potter book was rejected by 12 publishers in a row. Why? Because of literary rules like Hook the reader on the first page, The story must start with the main character, If its for kids, then words like wizard, magic, dragons etc will land it in the slush pile, The fantasy genre is overflogged for kids. Kids want another type of hero

J.K Rowling did not allow all those rules determine what she will write. And she was still optimistic even after receiving all those rejection letters. And today, she has over 450 million books sold to show that certain rules are meant to be broken.

Due to their creativity, they were ahead of their times and created trends that everyone else scrambled to follow.

Neil Patel started marketing before he was out of college. Pat Flynn started blogging while he had his 9-5 job and J.K Rowling started writing stories before she was a teenager.

They had skills.

And these skills paved the way for their success. Nobody becomes successful without having a skill.

Look at your dreams again. What is the one skill you have that you can start using right now to achieve them.The skill does not have to be a direct skill.

For instance, you might be a really good writer but you want to develop an app that helps women get their finances right. To develop this app, you need to know technical stuff like a programming language.

But you do not.

Dont let this dissuade you. You can hire a programmer to do your app for you, while you make money for to pay the programmer by freelancing your writing skills on job sites like Elance or even on your own website. 21 year-old Brandon did something similar and you can read all about it in the article: Crazy Dog Apps Used Fiverr to Build App Store Empire

The important thing here is you have to have a skill that will make it easy to achieve your goal. So ask yourself again: What is the one skill I have that I can start using right now to achieve my goals?

J.K Rowling went to stay near her sister who believed in her. Neil Patel co-founded most of his companies with his sisters husband. Pat Flynn says: When I told my wife [of the imminent sack], she took it well. She has always believed in me and I owe her everything for that.

Another connection that shot Pat Flynns internet marketing career to the top was his affiliation with the Mastermind Meeting with the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

According to him: This mastermind group started to meet regularly, and for a while included Dan Andrews, which many of you may know from the Lifestyle Business Podcast – but it was that first meeting that changed everything.

Because it was in this meeting that Sterling told him to write and sell an ebook on his first website, since it was getting thousands of visitors. It was through this group that Pat Flynn got this idea that generated $7,126.91 alone.

J.K Rowling knew she wanted to be a writer and stuck to it. Pat Flynn decided he wanted to be an internet marketer and stuck to it. Neil Patel decided to take the internet marketing scene by storm and has never looked back.

Regularly you see people chasing the latest fad and abandoning it when it does not give them the results they desire immediately. You see entrepreneurs abandoning their young businesses out of frustration because they are not yet earning money from it. It took Pat Flynn more then 15 months to earn a substantial amount of money from his first website GreenExamAcademy.com

It took J.K Rowling 7 years of dedication to her novel before she got her first payoff.

It took Neil Patel years of dedication to learning internet marketing, even failing at his job board and losing money initially with Crazy Egg before he started racking in millions.

Every good thing takes time to grow. A plant will take its time to poke it head out of the soil, even if you water it endlessly for 24 hours. It will never break through the soil in that 24 hours.

The fear of failure has crippled many people making them prefer a mediocre life than to achieve their dreams.

Dont let this be you.

Neil Patel states clearly that many of his software companies were failures. But this did not stop him from founding Kissmetrics. Instead of succumbing to his failure, he learnt from them.

According to him:

Eventually, we learned that Crazy Egg succeeded while our other software companies didn’t because of two reasons: not only does it solve a unique problem that enough businesses are experiencing, but it does so in a very simple way.

With our new found knowledge, we decided to create another analytics company that would solve a much larger problem than what Crazy Egg solved.

Do not see failure as an indication of your weakness. No. If a project failed, you are not the problem. The failure of the project is not a reflection of your capabilities as a person. Instead understand that failure is a way to learn something new you did not know before. Neil used the knowledge gained from the failure of his software companies to build Kissmetrics. When something fails ask yourself, What next? How can I fix this?

Despite the fact that J.K Rowling felt like a failure when she found herself as a single mother with no achievement whatsoever, she continued writing. Pat Flynns eminent sack pushed him to work harder on his website. Neil Patels failure did not stop his craving for success. Instead he used his failures as a tool to create a powerful company.

Everyone is scared of failure. But I want you to know this: Should any of your plans fail, simply get right back up. Do not give up.

Every single successful person I know has tasted failure, rejection, losses and pain. And thats what made them stronger and moulded them into who they are.

1. You must want success so bad that you are willing to do everything legally possible and ethically right to get it. By this I mean, that you should not allow your ambition steal the precious moments you spend with your family or make other tasks like a trip to the gym impossible. Instead I mean that you should cut your time spent catching up on social media, TV bingeing and instead spend this time working on your success. I mean you should be ready to sacrifice an hour or two of sleep to build yourself up for success.

2. You need to start being with like-minded people: You are a product of the people you spend your time with. If you really want to be successful, you need to start building connections, relationships and friendships with successful people.

Over to you. In the comments below, tell me the one thing you do everyday to achieve your dreams of success. Are you having challenges being successful? Tell me about and I will get back to you with tips that could help. A problem shared is half-solved. 

One of the things I have noticed business owners struggle with is making money from their startups in as short a time as possible. Because if the business is not making money, it is likely to sink in debt and when bills cant be paid, the business is likely to die.

But how do you make money from your business?

The answer to that is simple. By attracting a good number of buyers/customers/clients. A good number of customers can be anything from 100 to 10,000 depending on the product you are selling.

However, one thing I have noticed is that a lot of business owners set 1000 sales of their products/services as a milestone. For the purposes of this article I will presume a 1000 sales means purchases from a 1000 customers.

The answer to this is not so simple, nor is it straight-forward. Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Research has shown that a satisfied customer is 60-70% more likely to buy from you again, while a new prospect is 5-20% likely to buy a thing from you.

For instance lets say you run an eCommerce website that specializes in custom-made shoes. You have a new batch of shoes and announced it on your Facebook page. Lets assume that two sets of shoe-addicts saw it: Abigail and Dagrin. Now Abigail has bought one of your shoes in the past and she loved it while Dagrin stumbled on your announcement.

Who do you think will immediately click the link with the intention to check it out and purchase it?

If you guessed Abigail, you are right. Because of the pleasant experience of her last purchase, Abigail will buy anything from you, once she likes it.

Dagrin, on the other hand, would be skeptical. First he has to be sure your website is legit, then he has to be sure the shoe really looks good, then he has to be sure you will deliver his shoes, then he has to be cajoled into parting with his money.

But if your business is new, then you will have to know how to convert Dagrins into Abigails. To help you with this, I will explain how to build your customer base then show you a practical case study after that. Ready? lets delve in.

In this article, I will assume that you already know who your ideal customer is. I will also assume that you already have a website or blog. Next you have to determine what you will sell on your blog. There are many ways to make money from blogging but the most popular ones are:

The model you use will greatly depend on the type of business you ventured into. For instance if you are a catering company, your revenue will most likely come from selling your own meals or outdoor catering services or training courses on how to cook spectacular meals. CrockPot Restaurant is an example of this as shown below:

But if you are a food enthusiast who just loves to write and talk about food, then majority of your revenue will come from affiliate sales and Ad placement. For instance Jenn Segal of OnceUponAChef uses adverts in multiple sections of her site to monetize her sites traffic

Dont worry if you are a bit hazy about this at the beginning. You can figure this out as you get website visitors and begin to discover what they like, dont like and what they need solutions to.

Often times I see newbie entrepreneurs hoping to break even and start making a healthy profit within a month or two. Not only is this hard to achieve, such expectations can quickly dampen your spirits when you fail to meet them.

For instance, if you started a photography blog, do not expect to get 10,000 unique visitors within a month of starting that blog. Many 3-year-old blogs can not boast of half of that traffic.

According to Shanelle Mullin, Director of Marketing at Onboardly, “The key to setting achievable marketing goals is to spend time evaluating your current position. Many startups set lofty, unattainable goals and end up discouraged, which can be detrimental in the early days. On the other hand, some startups set easy, insignificant goals and end up missing out on growth potential.

So it is important to balance it out. Dont set goals that are too difficult to reach and dont set goals that are not challenging.

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.
– David Packard, co-founder, Hewlett-Packard  

And David is right. No matter how good your website looks or how terrific your content is, you must actively promote it. Do not expect your customers to find you. Go out and hunt them down! When Noah Kagan, founder of Appsumo and the OkDork blog, launched a new product,  How To Make A $1,000 A Month Business course, he knew he had to develop a spectacular marketing plan. His target was to sell 3,333 memberships to the course within 12 months. He reached his target in 10 months!

How did he achieve this?

By breaking down his big goal of 3,333 memberships into monthly goals. Each monthly goal is further broken into daily goals. So each day, he had a benchmark to reach.

According to Noah, Overall there’s no right goal; you want something that isn’t easily achievable but also something that’s realistic so you don’t feel overwhelmed.We break our goal into a daily target so––even if our goal is a billion––we know on a specific day if we are on track; for example, in January when we had to be at 10,000 uniques a day.

A key thing with goals that I learned from Facebook is to only have one goal for a specific period of time. It helps with saying no to other distractions you will face during the year.

Noah reveals a lot of the marketing strategies he used to achieve most of the stellar successes Appsumo has experienced in this article: Create Your First Marketing Plan

Customers determine how fast or slow your business grows, so they should be treated like royalty. This treatment might involve tweaking your marketing plans to accommodate the needs of a vast majority of your customer base. Do not be rigid. Happy customers lead to a thriving business.

Carry out frequent surveys of your customers to find out what they want and develop strategies or modify your products/services to suit them.

For instance if you planned to sell a course on Starting a Photography Business  to your customer base but found that 80% of your email list need to know How to take a spectacular photo then you now know you must change your original course to the one your customers need.

If you wanted to create an ebook on How to prepare delicious African Delicacies but your survey revealed that your email list needs video tutorials, not an ebook, then you have to adapt your original plan to what your email list wants.

If you run a fashion eCommerce store and from your stats, found that most of your eCommerce visitors navigate to the dresses section or ask for fashionable, formal outfits then you know what to stock up on to increase your sales.

Also do not make your prospective customers uncomfortable in any way. According to Neil Patel in this article on Kissmetrics, ways you can make your prospective customers uncomfortable include:

Now its all good and well to state what people should do to grow their businesses. But many atimes, practical examples are the best ways to demonstrate this. For my case study I will tackle an interesting field: Fashion Blogging

As a fashion blogger, you can make money from any of these avenues:

Your blog will only make money if you have a good amount of traffic. To get 1000 customers, you need traffic of at least 10,000 email subscribers. To get 10,000 email subscribers you need a minimum traffic of 100,000 annually. Now if you are a newbie fashion blogger, there is no way you can hit 100,000 website visitors in a month, unless you are well-connected in the fashion blogsphere. First break down 100,000 into achievable monthly amounts.

100,000/12 = 8333

Now we have a more manageable number. Do not fret if you dont hit this number in your first two or three months. Simply subtract, then stack up the remaining months with the leftover.

Example: January you got 100 visitors

thats 100,000  100 = 99,900 visitors

Divide by the number of remaining months

How many months left: 11 months

therefore your new monthly target is: 99,900/11

= 9081 visitors

So how do you meet your monthly target? You need a marketing plan

As a fashion blogger (or any type of blogger) your marketing plan must first tackle how you will attract targeted traffic to your site. Then when you do that you have to convert this traffic to subscribers. When you achieve that milestone, you will then be able to reach out to these subscribers as many times as you want and hence have many more opportunities to convert them to customer.

So first how will you hunt down your prospective customers and entice them to your site?

Follow these guidelines:

When you have reached your milestone of the number of monthly visitors, you should take a critical look at your email sign-up rate. Typical industry averages are: 3% to 11%. Anything higher than 11% is stellar. That means for every 100 people that visit your blog, 3 to 11 are likely to signup for your newsletter.

Then next take a critical look at the problems most of your email signups complained about. Is there a common problem complained about by most of your email subscribers? Write articles packed with solutions for these problems. Are these articles widely successful? Or more popular than any other articles on your blog? Then you have identified a pain point. You can cash in on this pain point in the following ways:

And when you start hitting your monthly goal, you can start displaying google ads on your site. I normally advice new bloggers to forget about using google ads on their site until the site is 3 months or older. Because without a great quality of traffic, google ads is useless on your site. In the article, How to build a profitable blog Kay Rockley shows us that Huffington post makes $2,330,000 from just ads. When adopting the ads model, your customer is anybody who visits your blog regularly.

Click here to see the full infographic

When adopting the affiliate sales model, your customer is anybody who buys through your affiliate links. Pat Flynn made up to $123,853 from mostly affiliate marketing.

When writing sponsored posts or reviews, your customer is any company that pays you to write the sponsored post or review. Enstine Muki makes a killing from this model of revenue generation as seen in this post. He also makes a killing by selling advert space to specific solution-providers.

When offering subscription services, your customer is any person that pays for this subscription service.

When selling an ebook, your customer is any person who buys the ebook from you.

As you try out each type of money-making model on your blog, be attentive. What do your customers like? Which model do they prefer? Which model is reaping the most returns for you? Your objective is to ensure you make money, get more customers and not repel your present customers in the process.

To achieve I suggest you carry out surveys on your email list to find out what they really want so that you can provide it. I normally use Google Forms to do this because there is no limit to number of responses I can receive. I recommend you use this. But if you want a more robust survey system, then use Survey Monkey. I also use surveys as a medium to ask, What can I improve to serve you better? and What is the one thing you dont like about my blog?

Watch your ads stats: What is your average Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Observe the number of email subscribers who eventually buy your products and those who abandon the cart. Then find out from those who abandoned the cart why they did and see if a discount will help in closing that sale.

Another thing you must consider is what you can do to turn your current customers into your ambassadors. Your current customer turns into your ambassador when she shares your posts on her social media accounts and when she recommends your service to her friends and family. This is where embedded social media share buttons, running giveaways or customer reward programs become highly effective.

But first you must satisfy that customer before providing means for her to spread the word about you.

Setting a milestone for your business is necessary. Depending on your type of business, a milestone of 1000 customers in 12 months is advisable. To achieve this milestone, you should know who your ideal customer is. Then you should have a website too.

One way of getting 1000 customers is to diversify your revenue-generation models. Do not be fixated on one type. Develop a robust but flexible marketing plan as well. Your marketing plan should focus on how to get targeted traffic to your site, then how to convert this traffic to subscribers so that you can have the opportunity to reach out to them and turn them to customers. Then test and try as many revenue-generation models (advertising, affiliate sales, coaching e.t.c) to see which one works perfectly for you.

Whatever you do, do not sideline your customers. They fuel your business so do as much as you can to keep them happy. Also to ensure you hit your milestone sooner, try converting your customers to your brand ambassadors by making it easy for them to share your content or by offering them mouth-watering rewards for every friend they refer.

Over to you. Tell me your greatest challenge in meeting the 1000 customers milestone in the comments below and I will answer right back with actionable tips you can try.

Life can slap you with the most bizarre experiences.

Like your job application being rejected by Facebook even though you just left Yahoo! as the vice president of engineering.

Thats exactly what happened to Brian Acton. In 2009 (two years after leaving Yahoo!), Brian posted this on his twitter account.

Failing to snag a job at facebook was not the only setback Brian encountered in life.

He faced many others, including bouncing through several jobs after Yahoo! and losing millions of dollars in the dot com bubble.

Not deterred by his life experiences, that same year (2009) Brian and his long-time friend cum old yahoo colleague, Jon Koum, got together and developed an iphone app, which they called Whatsapp.  Based on the success of the iphone app, they expanded to other platforms like Android, BBM. Before 2014, Whatsapp had a whooping 250 million monthly users.

Ask any mobile app developer and they will tell you: those aint easy numbers to attain for a mobile app.

Even though whatsapp did not have any advertising, it made money in two ways. Iphone users were charged on first installation while android users were charged after the first year of free usage. The minimum charge was $0.99 per annum.

Lets do the math: $0.99 x 250 million

thats an approximate $247,500,000 per annum! I dont know about you but that is a lot of change.

Facebook contacted the co-founders of Whatsapp and made an offer they could not refuse. In 2014, Brian Acton and Jon Koum sold Whatsapp to the social media giant for an outstanding $19 billion in stocks and cash.

The same Facebook that rejected Brian Actons job application now gave him 20% stock of Facebook as part of the payment for the phone app.

if that isnt jaw-dropping, I dont know what is.

1. That the road to success is paved with hard work, sacrifice and determination to prevail against the obstacles you will face. Every successful entrepreneur I know or have heard of, had a tale of woe to share. But they never allowed their setbacks kill their ambitions.

2. Its never too late to make it: Brian was pushing 40 when he got rejected by Facebook. Many individuals would have given up at that point and resigned to a mediocre life. But not Brian. He still believed he could make it, regardless of how old he was and what the losses he might have had.

Never give up.

Keep trying.

Keep believing.

Keep working to realize your ambitions. And fortune will smile on you.

Have you had experiences like Brians? Share your story with us to keep us inspired

TAGS:Quintessential Simply Live Grow Aspire 

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