After COVID hit in March and I was confined to my apartment for weeks on end, I decided that I wanted to pick up a fun side project and launch a personal blog.
It’s something I’ve always known I would do at some point, but because of the time commitment from running my software startup, I’ve always convinced myself that I was simply too busy.
With COVID though, I really didn’t have an excuse.
So, I jumped onto Upwork and hired a freelance WordPress developer to help get my personal blog off the ground.
With $300 to pay the Upwork developer and minimal effort, I’ve since launched this very blog you are reading right now and have gotten the first 100 blog subscribers.
Of course, 100 isn’t many, but the system I’ve used to generate those subscribers is scalable and anyone can copy it.
So, I thought it might be helpful to break down the simple system I’ve used. The steps are as follows:
- Write helpful content
- Embed Email Opt-In’s to your blog posts
- Strategically Promote Your Content Using a Content Promotion Checklist
I will break these down further below.
Starting The Blog
Here is my setup for my blog:
- WordPress
- Blue Host Hosting (if I were to start from scratch, I’d probably go with different hosting)
- ConvertKit for email list management
Of course before starting, you should have a general topic for your blog in mind.
For my blog, I knew I’d focus on writing content around my approaches to business-building and growth-marketing—essentially documenting the process of marketing and growing my cryptocurrency tax software company to tens of thousands of users and millions in revenues.
1. Write Unique and Valuable Content
No secret here.
Your content has to be unique and eye-catching. It also has to offer TRUE value.
In other words, it really has to help your target audience achieve their goals.
For me, that’s writing content about the experiences that helped me scale my companies or about the mistakes I’ve made along the way. Like how I used SEO to build a pre-launch list in the early days to launch my SaaS and immediately generate hundreds of thousands in revenue or how I started a card game company and got sued by my alma-mater University in the process and lost tens of thousands.
If you can’t write content that is unique and valuable, the rest of this blog post will not help you.
You have to do the bare minimum first and write damn good content.
2. Setup Email Opt-Ins
Before getting started, you need to have some type of email opt-in in every blog post you write. Remember, the focus of blogging is really to build an audience, and the best way to do that is to grow your email list.
At the end of each of my blog posts, I embed a simple opt-in form that I built with ConvertKit (you can see the opt-in form at the end of this post).
You should write compelling copy within this opt-in form and really give people a reason to give up their valuable email address to join your list.
This email opt-in is how I’ve collected all of my subscribers thus far.
At some point, I’ll likely get fancy and start doing lead-magnets to attract more subscribers, but to this point, I’ve only used a basic opt-in at the end of each post.
3. Promote Your Content
Okay, so you’ve written your first blog posts and have your email opt-in forms ready to go. Now you need to spend time doing what 90% of bloggers don’t: promoting your content.
To start, I recommend creating a content promotion checklist that outlines all of the places on the internet your target audience hangs out.
This checklist likely should be a combination of Facebook groups, Subreddits, Hackernews, Slack channels, Forums, Twitter lists, and really anywhere you can think of where your content would be well-received by your target audience.
The more places you have to spread your content the better.
You can check out the content promotion checklist I created for my blog posts here.
It’s pretty barebones, and I definitely could improve on it, but by sharing my blog articles across all of these groups everytime I write a new article, I’m able to generate some great traffic.
After sharing across all these “internet hangouts”, many people read my posts, share it with their friends, and spread it around the internet. Last time I wrote a blog, it went viral on the r/entrepreneur subreddit. You can check out how I did it here.
Rinse and Repeat
So that’s been my formula so far.
Write really good content, run it through my content promotion checklist, and collect email subscribers.
I’ve written about 8 blog posts so far.
Of course, my strategies will evolve and become more sophisticated as I spend more and more time developing and building out my blog and my audience.
Overtime, I will focus much more on SEO for my personal blog (something which I’m not concerned with right now). I will also incorporate lead magnets and free content courses to attract more and more subscribers. I will also turn to paid traffic (i.e. FB ads) once I have a way to monetize my email subscribers. I will likely monetize my email list through my own course on SEO where I will teach people how to do SEO for their software companies. After all, SEO is the core channel I used to grow my SaaS to millions in revenue and tens of thousands of users.
So… You can see I still have a lot of work to do in terms of growing this blog!
This is only the beginning.
If you want to follow along my journey of growing this personal blog from 100 to the next 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 subscribers, just join my email list below 🙂 I will continue to write blog posts like this explaining how I am doing everything!
I will see you in the inbox!
David