A few weeks ago I announced that I plan to make Beginner Blogging a six figure blog (in terms of monthly net earnings) by the end of July 2015. Last week I revealed my plan to make $2,000 in 16 days in order to reach the first milestone of that larger goal.
Today I can say that I am likely to fail in reaching that milestone. It doesn’t really bother me at this stage though; I feel like I’m heading in the right direction and on track for the bigger goal. In fact, over the past week I’ve been working hard on something small that could eventually lead to something huge…
How Last Week’s Plans Panned Out
I split my tasks for last week into three areas:
- Diversifying income streams
- Boosting traffic
- Tweaks
I failed on all fronts, in spite of me probably working harder in the past week than I have done in a long time.
And yet I remain upbeat. You may be curious as to why. Well, although I didn’t do what I intended to do, I have been working very hard laying foundations down, and I’m excited about the work I have done.
1. Diversifying Income Streams
Last week I laid out my intention to diversify my income streams by promoting two products: OptinMonster and WP Curve.
Up to yesterday, I had published nothing on the blog promoting these products. What I had done was completely change my mind about the content I wanted to create.
Instead of simply promoting these products, I wanted to do something meaningful. After some thought, I felt that a comprehensive technical guide to email marketing was the only way to go.
And boy was that a rabbit hole. I ended up writing nine articles and tutorials along with a few other supporting pages. I covered everything from whether to choose a free or premium service, how to create signup forms, how to send broadcasts and setup autoresponder series, and more.
I brought all of these tutorials and articles together under a single post: How to Build Your Blog’s Email List (Everything You Need to Know). Hopefully it proves to be a valuable resource for many beginner bloggers, and also generates some income for me through the AWeber and OptinMonster affiliate links placed within.
But I still wasn’t happy.
The issue was signup forms – more specifically, getting them to look good.
The problem is that adding a template (i.e. a signup form) to another template (i.e. a WordPress theme) rarely results in a seamless integration. The signup form will stick out like a sore thumb, or just look plain ugly:
This was something I had always struggled with in the past. To solve the issue, I would take the form code, strip out the CSS and any redundant HTML, then apply my own manual styling to make it look how I wanted.
But I realized that most beginner bloggers don’t have the technical knowhow to do this, and they end up with an ugly-looking signup form on their site.
So I figured, why not design their forms for them? Why not provide a solution whereby their signup form is designed to melt into the theme’s design seamlessly?
That’s where the idea for my sidebar signup form design and installation service came from. For $19, we’ll take AWeber’s signup form code, add it to your site and make it look beautiful.
Graphically speaking, the goal of the service is to take forms like the one in the screenshot above and turn them into something more like this:
I ultimately intend to outsource this service, but for the time being I will be designing and installing every single form myself, so that I get a full understanding of how the process can most efficiently and effectively work.
I’m hoping that the service will prove to be successful and will generate some much-needed cash to get me closer to my goal. And if people aren’t interested in signup form design, hopefully they’ll still signup to AWeber or purchase OptinMonster.
Or to put it another way, I’m hoping that a full week’s work wasn’t wasted!
Regarding WP Curve, I haven’t received confirmation of being accepted into their affiliate program, so I’m going to assume that I’ve been rejected.
This could be a blessing in disguise, because as Jamie pointed out in the comments last week, it I could ultimately make a lot more money creating my own WordPress tweaks service than recommending WP Curve. For the time being, my sidebar signup form design and installation service is something of an experiment to see how such a service might work. It’s a small seed that could grow into a mighty oak. I can definitely see the potential, but I’m going to wait to see how much interest there is in the launch of this little service before taking any further steps.
Boosting Traffic
I can definitely say that my traffic boosting efforts have been a failure, because traffic went down down from two weeks ago to last week:
Not exactly what I had in mind. So what did I actually do in the past week to boost traffic?
Not a lot to be honest. I was so wrapped up in writing tutorials that I pretty much forgot about traffic. I only updated author bios on WordPress sites that I write for yesterday, and I haven’t emailed any of my contacts about the blog yet.
Tweaks
My tweaking plans were yet another failure due to my single-minded focus on writing. I did just about nothing.
So, all my previous tweaking plans still stand:
- Updating the course material for WordPress 4.0
- Adding to the the free themes and plugins lists
- Publishing the autoresponder emails as blog posts
- Adding a bottom-right slide-in email signup box to blog posts (split test against the bottom-of-post signup form)
- Adding testimonials to the site (for both the course and the blog installation and setup service)
What Next?
At the time of writing (23rd September) I have made $1,000 gross from the site. That is probably more like $500 net, which means that I need to make another $1,500 in seven days to reach my $2,000 goal.
That could be a tough ask, especially considering that I am going away from Friday to Monday this weekend. That gives me the rest of today plus Wednesday and Thursday to make some magic happen (I will be doing very little work next Tuesday as I am moving house).
So – 2 1/2 days to make $1,500. Very unlikely to happen, but let’s see what I can get done with that time.
First of all, I am going to stop focusing on content and redirect my efforts towards two things: improving the site and driving traffic.
The new sidebar is now up and running (I just finished it!). As I said last week, it will enable me to:
- make new visitors immediately aware of how the site can help them (with some kind of intro box),
- showcase recent posts published on the blog (to capture people’s attention and keep them browsing), and
- add buttons featuring the affiliate products I promote.
I plan to add a link to promote the sidebar signup form service within the sidebar if it proves popular (seems appropriate, right?).
I’m also going to add a slide-in box that promotes the email list at the bottom right of posts.
In terms of driving traffic, I’ve got a few rough ideas, but the next couple of days are going to be about thinking out of the box and hopefully pulling something out of the bag.
I’ll let you know how I got on next week, but if you have any questions or suggestions in the meantime, fire away below!
Photo Credit: ZeePack