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Lesson Info

But I Don't Have Time to Blog

Okay, I get it, I get it Megan, I get it. Blogging drives traffic, blogging helps sell products, but I don't time. I'm supposed to be on social media, I'm supposed to be doing all these other things, like I don't have time to do this, too. So does this sound like you, right? Are you thinking, I get why I should be blogging, but I just don't have the time. Does that feel like you guys? Or maybe, it takes me forever to write a blog post, Michelle. (laughs) This is one that I hear from people all the time. I'm gonna let you guys in on a secret, I usually spend no more than a hour on a blog post, and sometimes, I can knock them out faster. I'm gonna show you guys, I'm gonna literally show you guys my entire blog workflow during this class, so that you can see how easy this is to make happen. Or, how about, I don't know what to write about. Who feels like, everyone's like yup, I had no idea. And this one, I don't have time to manage a blog and social media, it's too much stuff. So, a couple...

things to just remember here, as I mentioned earlier, unlike social media, a blog post can continue to work for your business years after you've written it. Years. I get traffic from posts I wrote three years ago. Consistent traffic from posts I wrote three years ago. I don't even know what's on my Instagram three years ago. But I see traffic to my blog, from posts that I wrote three years ago. That is something that works for you. I am always looking for marketing strategies that work magically, while I'm in the studio doing my thing. That's what I want, I want something to do the work for me while I'm doing work. And that's what blogging can do. So that this is actually a post that I wrote in 2014, that still brings me traffic everyday. That traffic comes from Pinterest, so this is a post that I optimized for Pinterest. But it doesn't matter, I would not be getting a lot of traffic from Pinterest without this blog post. Brings me traffic every single day, and it's over three years old. The other thing to keep in mind, for those of you who are like, I do not have time to have a social media and a blog. You can repurpose content from social media to your blog, and vise versa. I do not have separate content creation strategies, and I wanna be really clear about something from the front, because I know this was a big aha moment in our email marketing class, I'm gonna use the word content a lot, and then majority of what I am referring to when I talk about content, are images. So I'm gonna let you guys in on a little secret right now, that's gonna save everyone a ton of time. As someone selling a visual product, you should not have to write long blog posts. We're gonna talk about images, and then a little bit of the right kind of text to make them work. So because we are gonna start focusing on images, this means that you can use content from everywhere. So I'll do a photo shoot, and that content can go on my social media platforms, on my product pages, so initially I shoot my content right, illustrate how my products look, and that's gonna go on the product page itself, where I am trying to sell. But that same content becomes social media posts, becomes blog posts, and that quick content you create for Instagram, that can become blog posts as well, and we're gonna talk about how to do that. I'm gonna save you guys so much time, I'm gonna blow your minds, that's my goal today. Because here's the thing, it does not have to take a ton of time, this does not have to be a long, drawn out process. If it is, you're so overthinking it. If it takes you more than an hour to put together a blog post, you're doing something wrong. I'm just gonna say that. Now, if you are an info marketer, or a writer, and you are writing blog posts, totally different, you can spend more time. If you are a blogger, totally fine. But we are not, we are product people, who are trying to use our blogs as a sales tool, we have to do this quick. So first of all, you need to ignore the advice about needing to write long blog posts. This is something I've been seeing a lot in the info marketing community. Well, if it's not atleast 1500 words it's totally useless. Even I use a plug-in, on my blog, that helps with SEO, and it's always like, you do not have enough words, and I'm like yeah, I don't care, like I'm gonna ignore you. You do not have to write long. This is a long blog post for me, two and a half paragraphs. Really its like, two paragraphs and a call to action, that's a long blog post in my world. That's it, that's long, a lot of times its just a paragraph. So you do not need to write long. The other thing I want you to get into the habit of think about with your blog, is starting with images first. So if you're sitting down because you're like hey, I know I have to do a blog post, instead of asking what do I want to say, I want you to ask, what do I want to show. Just by making that one switch, it's a completely different way to think about your blogging strategy. Because as a maker, as an artist, as a designer, as a visual person, you probably have a lot of things to show, everybody has images of their product. Hopefully you got other kind of images too, whether that's behind the scenes, or whatever it is, and we're gonna talk about some image creation later in this class, too. But I want you guys to flip the script, and instead of worrying about what do I want to say, I want you to start your blog post by thinking about, what do I want to show? What is it that I want my audience to see? It makes your life so much easier. So this is a really good example, right? I wanted to show people, I had just shot these images, and I wanted to show people that this collection was coming soon, I wanted to show off some of these images. That's it, simple as that. The other really important thing is, you don't wanna set yourself up for failure, by choosing blog post types that stress you out. So we're gonna talk later in this class about different types of blog posts. You're gonna leave here with so many content ideas, you're not even gonna know what to do with them. But it's really important that you don't pick things that are gonna set you up for failure. So awhile back now, I was like, I'm gonna do this type of blog post, with every day I'm gonna do a photograph of myself, like a style post, every day for a year. Do you know how many of these I did? Two, I did two, because here's the thing. I literally hate having my picture taken. Like I cannot stand to have my picture taken. And on top of that, most days, because I'm just in the studio I look like a bum. Like I'm like Oh, okay where's my sweatpants? And my like 20 year old sweatshirt, Okay cool, we're good. This was a terrible idea. So then I got a little smarter, and I was like, what if I do these outfit collages? For me, this was a completely sustainable strategy, because first of all, I love to shop, so I'm on the internet all the time anyways and I'm like ooh, I liked this thing, and I liked this thing, so lets pull it together into an outfit post. This is a completely sustainable strategy for me. I think I've created easily over 300-350, somewhere in that range, of these types of blog posts. But I also know people who are like Megan, I saw this, and I tried to do this, and it takes me forever. If that's you then don't do it, right? It doesn't have to be like this. Now that said, I'm actually gonna show you guys how I create these collages later in this class, because I know it's something a lot of people wanna see, but you can use this strategy to create any kind of collages, it doesn't have to be an outfit. So maybe it's a way to just round up your products, or round up your products and things that are related. So you can use this kind of collage strategy, to create content without it being specifically about an outfit. And the same strategy works, it can work for home products, it can literally work for anything, so we're gonna look at that a little bit later in this class. But the idea here is that you wanna set yourself up for success, so if you're like Megan, I cannot come up with outfit ideas, never in a million years that's not my thing. Rochelle's like, I'm not into style, she's made that comment and stuff. Cool, don't make style posts, right? Don't set yourself up for failure. So I wanna talk about how to make the most out of this class, and your time. So, for starters, just think about committing to one blog post a week. Later on in this class we're gonna talk about a couple of other strategies, if the one blog post a week idea is not quite right for you. You may actually decide you wanna jump into content creation a little more heavily, but for now just try that on, right? I'm gonna commit to one blog post a week, and remember we're gonna figure out how to do that, in less than an hour. So all I'm asking you to do, is mentally commit to an hour a week, for blogging. Does that feel doable for everyone? Everyone can carve out a hour of their week? And you're gonna do that by actually carving out time. So maybe it's 20 minutes a day, for three days until the blog post is done. Or maybe it's okay, I'm just gonna carve out my hour, one morning a week and get it done. And if you got more time, you can carve out more time for more posts. But actually put that time on your calendar. For me I like to get up, first thing, do my blog post, it goes with my like, quick morning marketing time, then get in my studio and I don't have to worry about it, and then it's done. I also want you to start to keep a folder or list of post ideas. There are gonna be times, probably about three-quarters of the way into this class, where you have a ton of ideas for blog posts, and then there's gonna be mornings where you wake up, and you're like, I'm supposed to blog today and I have no idea. That's why we're gonna keep our ideas somewhere organized. Your sketchbook, EverNote, maybe you keep a secret Pinterest board. Have you guys noticed that when you hang out on the internet, it seems like, there's a lot of content, I think I've seen something like that before. It's cool, you can be inspired by other peoples content. You can take those ideas and re-purpose them and make them your own. So start to keep a list, or a folder, or something that helps you organize these ideas. The other thing I want you to do, is I want you to prioritize action over perfection. Your blog is not perfect, your blog will never be perfect. My blog is not perfect, my blog will never be perfect. In 10 years, I've been through multiple platforms, I've been through many redesigns, I've pretty much have tried every possible type of blog post that I could think of, and it's fine. The reason that it works, is because I'm focusing on action. Now it might take you guys a little bit of time, to find the right thing, the thing that's actually attracting your audience. But the only way to figure it out, is by doing the work. You can't solve that problem by sitting here and just overthinking it. So I want you guys to focus on action. And so the goal of this class is to get you blogging as quickly as possible, help you build a consistent blog habit, and then we're gonna use that blog habit to drive traffic to your site and sales of your product. So hopefully that person who said, I've been blogging for years, I got the consistent piece down, and I'm still not seeing results, we're gonna work on, maybe why that is throughout this class, too. Hopefully we are going to get you guys working, because right, none of this action matters if we're not driving traffic or sales. So that's our goal for today, I want you guys to do it, be consistent, and use it to make money. Sound good?