Podcast Archives
7 Tips For Growing Your Blog While Having A Full-Time Job
Episode #33 | Episode Date: November 12, 2014
Hello, there! David Risley here! Welcome to another episode of Coffee Break Blogging! đ
With episode 33 of Coffee Break Blogging, we’re still working on setting up the framework for moving forward on the 7 Stages of Building an Online Business.
In this one, I talk about how to do all that we’re going to talk about… but while holding down a full-time job. Specifically, I’m going to cover 7 specific strategies in order to build leverage. If you have a full-time job, but want to build up your blog-based business on the side, then give this episode a listen.
So in this episode let’s talk about my 7 Tips For Growing Your Blog While Having A Full-time Job.
The reason I want to do this is because in the last episode I talked about the realities of blogging for a living. And in part of that I basically talked about how it is a lot of work. And that is definitely true. And so I kind of realized that a lot of people who may be listening to that would think, “Well, crap! I don’t have a heck of a lot of time here!” because you have a full-time job.
I want to set forth a few tips. A few mindset things that you can be thinking with, going in and basically make this entire thing more easy to think your way through despite the fact that you have a full-time job. There is no getting around the fact that if you are doing this while you have a full-time job, you are going to have to bring the hustle.
You are going to have to be willing to work on this in the evenings or work on this on the weekends. You’re going to have to turn the TV off and learn to make smarter choices with where you spend your time.
We all have 168 hours, I think, every single week. So you are working 40 of them. You’ve got some driving time potentially, and you’ve got “sleep”. So if you are doing 7 hours a night, you’ve got about 49 hours of sleeping; that brings us to 89. I’m just going to round off and say you probably got about 60 hours of time during the week that you could do something with. And it really just comes down to “power of choice”. Are you going spend that available time on something that actually is going to grow your business? Or are you going to spend it on not doing anything like that? We have families; I mean, I’ve got 2 kids… I totally get it. But we can all carve out a little bit of time to do this.
So anyway, with that… let’s jump right in to these 7 Tips. Some of these are going to be a little “forward looking” because we are going to be talking about a few things that would come later when it comes to the business building. But I just want to set this forward now so you can actually think about them.
1. – Write in batches.
To do your content production and your actual blogging in batches. And what I mean by that is you set some time aside where that is the time that you write. And you try to pump out a few things at once while you are in that “mode” of creating content.
So let’s say you have Mondays to Fridays in the evenings. So let’s say Monday and Tuesday are your “content evenings” where you do nothing but trying to create content. And then that would give you the other three evenings of the week to work on other things that are going to build your business because just pumping out blog content is not necessarily going to do it. There are a lot of other things involved. So, you will have to work out what that schedule is.
But if you centralize everything and do it in batches, where you just not write one blog post and move on but you sit down and you try to write a few. Then you can get more done and you can put a lot of things into your schedule. Maybe even create a month’s worth of content in one week and then you got that three weeks that will grow the business.
2. – Think about starting your email list immediately.
Now, we are all going to be talking a lot about email marketing in coming episodes… but when it comes to building leverage and really utilizing everything that you release and getting as much “bang” for your bucks, so to speak… your email list is a very important thing.
So if you want to be able to grow your blog as quickly as possible with a limited amount of time, it is extremely important that you start building that list from day one with your site.
3. Realize when “good is good enough” and not push it further than that.
There’s this idea of Minimum Viable Product which is the idea of… You know what the result is that you need and once you get to that point, you stop and you move on to the next thing.
You don’t try to get into this loop of this quest for perfection. There is really no such thing as “perfect” in this universe. So why pursue it? Just get the thing to a point that it needs to be and then move on.
And a good example of that would be your blog theme. A lot of people really love tweaking their site. It’s like they are constantly seeking perfection but they can’t quite put their finger on exactly what that means to them and so they end up wasting a lot of time on that.
Just go for good is good enough. You can always tweak that thing later, when the time is right.
4. Consumption and production do not go together.
You cannot consume things in terms of content while also simultaneously producing it.
If you want to produce things; produce assets for your business. You cannot be at the same time sitting around on Facebook or reading other people’s blogs. Those are two separate actions.
So one of the very important things you need to learn to do is: when you consume the material of other people that you do that in a very limited batch as well. You set aside time for that and then when you are done, you shut all of it off and you get on to production.
And you can’t do both.
If I were reading 5Â people’s blogs at the same time while I’m trying to write my own blog post, it would be very schizophrenic. It would just really difficult to get any kind of a rhythm going.
5. The 80/20 Rule
You may have heard of this 80/20 rule before. And the idea is that you are going to get 80% of your results from 20% of your effort.
That 80/20 rule is something that you are going to see apply to a lot of things. Well, I also think that you should apply that to your content production and that you spend about 20% of your available time on actually making content and the other 80% should be spent on things that will actually grow your business.
The back end stuff like creating things to build your list with, or working on your next product… those things will actually help you grow business and creating blog content will not.
So, try to keep that 80/20 balance. Now, if you are the type who takes a really, really long time to create a blog post, then you might need to change your standards a little bit. Or maybe shift to a different format.
If it takes you 2-3 hours to write something but you are comfortable with just getting out and speaking it into a podcast or doing a video on it, well then do that because you can make it a lot quicker, okay? But try to aim for that 20% content to 80% building your business.
6. Get busy pretty quickly on building lead magnets and your products.
Now this is, again… all stuff that we are going to be talking about in coming episode when we get to that point in the 7 Stages but I want you to understand that it is not all about blogging. You’ve got to be working on your assets. And the assets are going to be things that build up your email list or what make you money. You cannot be blogging and also be doing those things.
So if you are going to be getting into the information marketing business in some way, then you are going to need to work on creating that product. If you are going to be providing a service then you need to be spending time on finding clients and delivering that service. Okay?
So this is where that 80% thing I was just talking about will come into play. Spend 80% of your time doing those things. Working on building up your assets and creating lead magnets to build up your list or to actually make things that can make you money.
7. Think about CONTINUITY
You need to be thinking about continuity when it comes to your products and some of the things that you might be thinking of offering in the future.
Continuity means that it is a rebuilding, recurring product where somebody pays you let’s say monthly or something like that. The great thing about continuity income is that it will allow you to build up an income base over time. Whereas, instead of going out there and constantly pursuing one-off product like an eBook that somebody might buy one time and then they are kind of done with you, you can instead be thinking about a monthly product where somebody signs up and then if you are doing things well and you are delivering value to them, they will keep on paying you every month.
So when you sell somebody, you are actually creating a new payment stream and these things add up and you can actually create a pretty respectable income stream and you can do it with a compounding effect based off your blog. That is how you start thinking about this a little bit more strategically and you can actually grow your business with limited time because you are going to have limited time especially if you have got that full-time job.
So you need to be thinking about getting the most bang for every available hour that you have. And when it comes to selling products, I think continuity is the best way to go. And then we just need to talk about what kinds of things that you can offer that would justify a monthly program.
But that is, again, all set that we will talk about in coming episodes of Coffee Break Blogging. M’kay? đ
So those are the 7 tips. Some things that you can put into your caps, so to speak; mindset things, things to think about as we move forward that will help you grow your business and find results despite still having a full-time job.
It is certainly possible. Yes, it is going to take work. But if you do thing smart and with some strategy behind it, you can actually get those results quicker than you may think. Okay? And that is, despite having that job. But just be willing to work. Be willing to put in those evenings, turn off the television. I cancelled cable here in my house, not too long ago. And it was a great, great decision. So maybe you want to think about making some moves like that. If you are not willing to make any changes, it’s going to be really hard to pull this off while you got a full-time job. Okay?
With that, thanks again for listening and I’ll see you next time! đ