blogging wizard

This week is the first week of our Q&As, a series we’ll be doing weekly with experts in our field, so we can learn and grow from their wisdom. Stay subscribed so you can read them weekly! We’re excited to present our first one: last week, we had the chance to (virtually) sit down with Adam Connell from Blogging Wizard. We asked him all about blogging—and he gave us some awesome insight and great blogging tips. It’s a must-read for any serious blogger. Essential Blogging Tips: Interview with Adam Connell, Founder of Blogging Wizard & Julia McCoy If you’re at any stage in blogging (just beginning, several years in the game, etc.) you’ll love what Adam has to say. Let’s get started! 1. What inspired you to create Blogging Wizard? Before starting Blogging Wizard I’d launched a few different blogs and the success I’d had helped me land a marketing job. After working at the agency for a while I wanted an outlet to share what I was learning, and in particular help other bloggers. One night I woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled “Blogging Wizard” on a piece of paper and went to sleep. The following day I purchased the domain name and started planning. 2. Tell us a little about your success story. Like most new blogs, it took a while to take off. Especially as I didn’t have much free time to grow Blogging Wizard. But as time went on I landed some good guest blogging opportunities on the likes of Problogger, and Search Engine Journal. I focused on connecting with other bloggers and began being featured in group interviews, as well as some coverage in HuffPost and CIO. In June 2014 I’d grown my blog to the point where I could leave my full time marketing job and focus 100% on blogging. Since then I’ve been mentioned on the likes of Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. At the moment I get around 60K-70K monthly readers. 3. What’s one piece of advice you would give someone just starting out in blogging? The most important thing to get nailed down at the start is what you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you make sure that you get there? Sure, you might end up there by chance but if you take control of your goals, you can make sure it happens. The next step is to work backwards from your end goal and figure out exactly how you’re going to get there. Break everything down into smaller, more manageable steps. Look at it from a tactical level too. You want to grow your audience and be able to keep more people coming back to your blog, so what’s the best way to do that? For most blogs, it means building an email list! So once you know what to focus on, you can build your blog around it and prioritize other things like social media accordingly. For example, I get more traffic from my email list than my social following, despite my social following being larger. So while I still work on improving my social presence, my blog is geared more to encourage email sign ups than social follower growth. The bottom line is this: know what you want to achieve, break it down into smaller steps and you’ll achieve your goals much faster. These are my blogging tips. 4. What’s a good way a blogger can narrow down on the right audience? First you need to make sure you’re in the right niche. I see so many blogs that start off so well and then fade into obscurity, this is usually because the blog owner has lost interest or they weren’t able to make the blog financially viable. So, start off right and consider 3 things – what you love, what you know and can you make money in that niche? Even if your goal isn’t to make money now, it may be in the future, after all, we’ve all got to put food on the table. The truth is that there’s usually a way you can make a blog profitable with some out of the box thinking, but when all other methods fail you can offer the skills you’ve attained as a blogger as a service – still, it’s good to consider revenue potential at the start. Having knowledge and experience you can draw upon is a valuable asset but I’m a big believer that you can learn anything you put your mind to, but the bottom line is that it helps. Above all else, the biggest consideration should be what you’re passionate about. You can make a success out of a blog that you’re not passionate for but it’s VERY challenging. And it defeats the point of starting a blog, most bloggers blog because they want to do what they love. By focusing on a niche you’re passionate about you will grow an audience faster (passion shows through in your writing) and you’ll be far more motivated to succeed. This is just the starting point though, the next step is to get as clear as possible on WHO you’re helping and HOW you’re going to help them. Be as specific as possible and really get to the core of who your target audience is. Creating an elevator pitch is a good idea, something like “I help ____ to _____”. For example, for a new project I’m working on, our elevator pitch is “we help solopreneurs streamline their life and streamline their business”. So get clear on who you’re helping and how you’re going to help them (i.e. the problems you’re going to solve) and your blog will grow so much faster. You’ll find it easier to speak to your audience and your audience will immediately see why they should follow your blog. To get clear on the WHO and the HOW, you could try to find online communities in your niche and ask people to fill … Read more