How to Bring Your Team Online Without The Overwhelm – Part 4

Setting your team up with a blogging success plan

In part 1 of this series, we looked at why setting your team up with a blog might be counterproductive if you want fast duplication. In part 2 we covered 7 strategies for getting your team started on Facebook and in part 3 we covered the secret to Facebook’s News Feed optimization. So now that we have your team online without the overwhelm of starting a blog right of the bat, it’s time move to the next level. This post is not meant to be a tutorial for setting up and installing your blog, but rather an overall game plan for launching and beyond.

Many current bloggers (myself included) will tell you that after fumbling through the frustrating learning curve of setting a blog up, they suddenly realized they didn’t have a plan. They don’t have a clear idea on exactly why they’re blogging, other than it seemed like something they should be doing. Ahh the beauty of hindsight! If I only knew back then…. well you know the rest of the saying.

So the first step, is getting clear on why you’re blogging and what it’s main purpose will be

  • Generating leads for your primary opportunity?
  • Raising your credibility through personal branding?
  • Build a relationship with your niche?
  • Creating an extra stream of income through affiliate products?
  • Or all of the above?

Once you’re clear on why, the next step is how. You need to choose a theme that will serve the strategies above. Now I know this is a getting started post but it’s worthwhile thinking about search engine optimization and squeeze pages etc even if you don’t quite understand what they are right now. If one of your aims is to generate leads for your primary opportunity, you might want to consider a theme that already has squeeze pages built in. One of the newest and most stylish looking themes on the market that has this option is Optimizepress. If you’re on a budget, you can still use a great free theme and buy a squeeze page plugin down the track. One of the best free themes I’ve seen is the current WordPress default theme, twenty ten.

Now it’s time to cover your branding

If one of your aims is to raise your credibilty through personal branding, you absolutely must have your photo in your banner. In the online social marketing age, people are looking to connect with real humans more than ever before. A block of colour and a slab of text just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore and the competition for attention is fierce. If you’re just starting out and on a budget, you can get a personalized banner done over at Logonerds.com for $27.

Next is your tagline

As internet connections increase, attention spans decrease. You have a couple of seconds to make a good first impression or it’s sayonara baby! Your tagline needs to be one or two catchy sentances that let your visitors know how your topic will serve them. The process of crafting a tagline will also help with defining the main theme or your blog.

What topics will I specialize in and who to I want to attract

A lot of people get really stuck when it comes to deciding what to specialize in because they think they don’t have any value to share. This is so far from the truth it’s not funny. Each and every one of us has had totally unique experiences in life that have formed who we are today. Not another person on the planet can explain the pearls of wisdom you’ve gained from a book or course in the same way that you can! Just as my unique blogging experience has allowed me to write this post. You don’t need to know everything about your topic right now, you just need to choose something you’re passionate enough to keep learning about. Once you have this in place, decide who you want to attract and what problems your blog can solve for them.

While having your own blog is great for increasing your online visibility, it doesn’t become a marketing strategy until you have a way of capturing leads

So the next step is to create an offer for your opt in box. Ultimately the end goal is to create your own product or tutorial, but since this series is about coming online without the overwhelm, lets start with a solution you can have up and running overnight! If you haven’t heard of PLR products before, they are basically content packages that you are given the right to put your own name on for a fee. If you google PLR products you’ll find lots of different sites but make sure their quality is exceptional before you make a purchase. You also want to email them first to find out what the cap is on how many copies they sell. Decent sites won’t sell more than about 100- 200 hundred. It’s worth paying the extra for sites that have a cap so that you don’t end up with a product 5000 others are using as their opt in. The best way to use a PLR product is to treat the content as a template and change it around enough so that it’s unique to your personality.

Now that we have our opt in offer, it’s important to have a content strategy before you start posting

This is probably the most important step that I missed when I was starting out.

  • Based on the marketing strategies you are already using, how much time can you dedicate to blogging?
  • Once you’ve worked out the time you’ll commit, how many times a month will you post?
  • Which day of the week will you set time aside to reply to your commenters, and leave comments on other blogs?

If you can write out a clear content plan before you start, it will save you a lot of headaches down the track.

Blogging will be a complete waste of time if you don’t have enough traffic to generate leads and build community

The two best sources of traffic are social buzz and organic search engine traffic. In part 2 of this series we talked about hooking up with an online tribe to create buzz on your Facebook profile. If your Facebook tribe are already bloggers, then you will already have an awesome strategy for creating social buzz. If not, you can read this post on creating your own tribe or check out some of the places I hang out to create awesome blogging alliances.

I’ve found that almost 50% of my traffic comes from social buzz. That said, we don’t want to leave out the other 50% that are coming from the search engines. Over time, you’ll find visitors naturally coming in from the search engines but you’ll have far higher traffic numbers if you create posts that get their attention. The easiest way to do this is to decide on a keyword you’d like your content to be found for and then optimize your post. If you have no idea what search engine optimization or optimizing posts means don’t worry, I’ll let you in on my secret weapon. It’s a paid plugin called SEOPressor. This little gem will literally hold you by the hand and tell you what you need to do every time you post which will make a huge difference to your organic traffic.

How to launch your blog with maximum impact

I remember chatting to someone one day to see how their blog was going after their launch, only to find out they had already quit. When I asked why, they replied “I don’t think Google even knows I exist.” So I zipped over to do a site search on Google and sure enough, they hadn’t even been indexed! Don’t let this happen to you! One of the easiest ways to get indexed is to submit your first post to Digg. And if you head over to fiverr.com Sir Fred (as he likes to called) will submit your post and get you 25 Diggs for 5 bucks. Another one of my secret weapons! To check if you’ve been indexed, head over to the google search bar and type in “site:http://www.yourblogname.com” without any spaces.

Once you’re indexed, make sure you have all the right social buzz and community widgets installed. Once you’re all set, send a shout out to your tribe to come and join/like them to create social proof before you officially launch. When the grand day arrives, it’s time to transform your Facebook profile, into one very cool advertisement for your new blog. To do this we are going to convert your 5 thumbnail pics at the top of your profile page into your blog banner so that it looks similar to this:

And guess what, you don’t need to know how to do this as I’m going to let you in on another one of my secret resources. If you send a file of your blog banner to my friend Jon at Facebook Custom Pictures, he’ll do it for you. But wait for the best part……it’s only 5 bucks! I don’t know about you but these 5 buck services are really growing on me :) The only thing left to do now, is to let your tribe know you’re blog is ready for lift off. Now you can sit back and relax as you watch the power of social buzz unfolding. Just one of the many rewards of starting your online presence on Facebook and launching a blog after you’ve built those connections.

If you think the post or any of the posts in this series can help your team, there’s a Facebook share button below :) And as always if you have any questions or want to share some of your own strategies, your comments are always welcome.

Michaele

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10 thoughts on “How to Bring Your Team Online Without The Overwhelm – Part 4”

  1. Hi Michaele,

    Just read your Alpha Influence post (which I loved by the way) but I noticed you mentioned the blog melt down you went through. I thought it was strange that the comment I left here never showed up so I wondered if it got deleted?
    Anyway it looks like you have things working again so I just wanted to pop by and say I love the blogging blueprint you’ve mapped out!
    It would have made a huge difference when I was starting out that’s for sure. I’ve learned a lot from the last 4 posts in this series. I still need to check out the Fiverr guy you mentioned so thanks for sharing.

    • Hey thanks for taking the time to let me know about the comments. They were all from my last post, which at the time was this one.
      I ended up with a choice of leaving the entire blog without any FB likes or RT or losing my latest comments. I went for the latter!

      I’m glad you enjoyed the series and the fiverr guy’s username is Sir Fred. I plan to do a post shortly on the gems I’ve found in there.

  2. Hey Michaele,

    You’ve done such a great job at outlining exactly what it takes to create a popular blog. I was like you when I started… blogging because it seemed that I should be doing it! LOL

    But getting that focus on what you want from your blog and who you want to reach are hugely critical, as you pointed out. Couldn’t agree more.

    I’m sure those thinking of taking on the task of starting a blog will find your post hugely useful!

    • Hey Bob,

      I think almost everyone I know started their online journey without any solid plans for their blog. Perhaps a lot of that influence came from Dillard’s Traffic Formula course.

      Anyway, now it’s our turn to help other new people avoid some of the painful mistakes we made. Gosh I can still remember the early days of wanting to throw my computer out the window lol!

      I appreciate you stopping by.

      Michaelé

  3. Hi Michaele,

    Wow, what a great post. You really covered all the important points of having a plan in place with your blog. Like you, I wish I had known all of that when I first got online. I wouldn’t have wasted SO much time fumbling through cyberspace trying to figure this all out.

    You shared some great tips here that I still didn’t even know. I love those moments. See, I’m STILL learning as I go but I really think that’s the fun of it too.

    Really informative post and even though it’s an older one, definitely needs more attention. Hope you’ll have things back up and running for you soon. Best of luck to you.

    ~Adrienne

    • Hi Adrienne,

      This post got a little long in the end but I really couldn’t cut it down without missing some important steps. And of course I know you can relate to being a detail person!

      Glad you found some takeaway’s as I always take a lot of gems away from your posts! As always thanks for the great feedback.
      My blog is finally all sorted and just needs my presence back here now :)

      Michaelé

  4. Dear Michaele,

    This was tremendously value-packed and yet SIMPLE! Beautiful article here with the nuts and bolts to tying it together in a way that works. That’s what it’s all about too – making it work!

    I think that learning to assimilate all the massive amounts of info we ‘need to know’ to make a sure-start in blogging is where it sort of falls apart for most people. I think that you have been doing an ACE job of connecting these dots together so that the newbie and/or struggling blogger can get themselves onto the right track.

    I haven’t personally used anyone’s services on fiverr.com yet, but you made some great recommendations for things I think I could certainly benefit from – thanks for that!

    Have a fantastic week!
    Cat Alexandra

    • Hey Cat,

      Now there is a word I haven’t heard in a kazillion years >>> ACE! It gave me a little chuckle as I used to hear it a lot until it some how got replaced with awesome.

      Ahh Fiverr is one of those places I used to get lost in as there are so many services (some of them quite gimmicky) that one becomes convinced they need.
      Having said that, once you get over the ‘shiny toys’ syndrome you can find some really talented people in there who offer really valuable time saving services. It’s especially great for getting small WP coding jobs done.

      Thanks for your contribution to this post and have an awesome/ace week-end :)

      Michaelé

  5. Michaele,

    This is a very informative post. I would like to add one more feature that has helped me on two of my blogs. That is guest author writing. Asking people from your own community of commentators & followers to write guest posts & incentivizing them for the same.

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