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9 Types of Videos for Bloggers to Level-Up Growth
Here are 9 types of videos for bloggers to grow traffic and income while supporting branded images for your blog. Options include on- and off-camera and you need video, so let’s get started!
How to Repurpose Blog Content to Video and Cash In!
Learn how to repurpose blog content to video and make more money with your blog. Using existing content and photos for video, you will earn more from these efforts. Includes a video tutorial!
Lifestyle Blog Growth: Focused Work
Focused work is how to grow a lifestyle blog in this noisy online world. Learn how to focus your work and time to grow.
Read This to Learn How Focused Work Equals Growth
In this article:
- what focused work is and does for blog growth
- what “important” work is and does for traffic and income
- how I narrowed down my tasks to essential important work only
- a brief introduction to hyper batch tasking for blogging
Recap and How to Use This Series
The articles in this series are meant to be read in succession. I understand that this is a huge undertaking, growing a lifestyle blog. I have many blogs I’ve turned into businesses which bring income consistently. I get it – it takes work, focus, and tenacity.
If you need help narrowing your focus or defining your important work, book a free, 30-minute call with me here.
- 1: How to Grow a Lifestyle Blog in a Noisy World
- 2: Lifestyle Blog Growth through Focused Work (this article)
Blog Growth Begins with Important Work
Before I get too far into this, I want to note that many bloggers skip this step. Some will read this entire thing without taking action or change what they’re doing with planning or execution.
Dig in here – it’s the foundation for important work. Why?
Because “important” work is what creates growth.
The Myth of Productivity
I going to be blunt: being busy doesn’t mean anything by itself. You can do less and get more by concentrating on meaningful tasks. Focusing on “important work” means that you have a clear plan on what you will do, why you are doing it, and how it directly supports your goals.
The benefit is that being efficient with important work brings growth!
But so many in our field do not identify the important things. They try to do ALL.THE.THINGS!
- idea creation and execution
- blog posts
- SEO
- videos
- Facebook Pages
- accounting
- managing guest posts or contributors
- create products
- develop lead magnets
- pitch partners or collaborators
- Facebook groups
- create courses
- back-end technical issues
- build tribes
- algorithm changes
- participate in a mastermind
- engage and be a resource in Facebook blogging groups
- blah, blah, blah.
The people who try to do all of these things will grow slower, get burned out, and/or spin their wheels for years. Sometimes people will focus for a brief time and go back to their old ways of doing ALL.THE.THINGS!
Takeaway: you not only have to identify how you’re going to get there, but you also have to stay the course. Plan the work, work the plan.
How Do We Focus?
So how do we maintain focus with all of that on our plates? We identify what is important to our business and we get granular with goals. We detail what we will do and we stick to it with a laser-like focus.
Answer these questions for a single goal.
- “What do I want to accomplish this month?
- “What will I do each day to accomplish it?”
- “How will this focus help me achieve this goal?”
- “What are my most common distractions?”
I’m sharing what I did well (and didn’t do well) in this area in order to spur you into action or self-analysis. You must identify that which is important to your business’ growth. If you need a push, set up that free 30-minute call.
The “How I Did It” Section – Focused Work
In order to get and remain focused, I narrowly defined goals. Very, very narrowly defined goals. Overall, here is what I planned and executed when planning focused work for Ruffles and Rain Boots.
One: New Content
First, I decided I would use new content to grow because I didn’t have content to repurpose. It was an easy decision for me, but yours might be different. There’s more here – so much more – but it’s rather specific to your website. We can chat about your situation if you’d like.
Two: Narrow Content Focus
“But Sarah!” you scream. “I have a lifestyle blog so I don’t have to focus on certain topics! Don’t box me in!”
M’kay. But… I identified three content topics to focus on every 30 days which allowed me to explore my important work while also giving me room to explore.
Remember, this is a non-niche site, so not only did I have to keep up with popular categories, I was constantly testing new content, as well. I’ll share more on this later, but I used data, social listening, and my own interest to decide my topics. You can do the same.
Three: Newsletter Focus from Day 1
THREE: Building a strong newsletter is an essential part of building a website. I made sure I set a call to action to sign up for my newsletter in every post – even if I didn’t have a lead magnet for the category! There’s so much more I’ll share with you on this.
Four: Tribes and Support Systems
I relied on my tribes and my husband to help me maintain focus when I got all squirrely and wanted to go off on some tangent. They were invaluable in offering suggestions for topic tangents, lead magnets, and so much more.
Sometimes all it takes is someone saying, “How does that bring you closer to your goal?”
Five: Control Distractions
I’m quoted as saying, “Doing all the things isn’t a strategy.” Why? Because it spreads focus on too many things and they ALL get diluted. And hey, I like to get at least a few hours of sleep and dedicate time, love, and interest to my marriage and parenting efforts. Plus I have like a million hobbies.
All this to say – I had to drop non-essential things. What did I remove?
- My promotion took place only on Pinterest. If you remember from the first article in this series, I decided only to focus on search (text and visual).
- I did not keep Facebook open but had set times to check it. Be honest: the time you spend there is not “all for work.” You scroll that feed as we all do because the platform is DESIGNED to suck us in. Try NOT doing that and use browser extensions to block it for certain time periods.
- No share threads. I don’t like them and there is a lot of speculation as to their benefit. Some even say there are penalties (I’ve not seen proof of that).
- Extremely limited link drops. I didn’t join link parties (yes, they still exist) or troll roundup groups on Facebook to drop links. Check FB roundup groups once a week.
- Start my own distractions. For example: Did I have at least 3 very, very good ideas for new Facebook groups? YES. But my focus was on growing my business on my own domain, so those got tabled.
- No new courses. This was hard to do for 8 months, but so worth it to maintain focus.
- The TV was off. The occasional evening show with the fella was good but if you want a lot more time, turn off the box. Additionally, put down the cell phone!
This section is to help you start thinking of non-essential tasks you do for your business OR that you consistently do to sabotage working on your business. Know your distractions and eliminate or reduce them.
Six: Find Your Work Style
Discover the best way for YOU to work by trying many, many, many work styles. My favorite for blogging is below and it’s hyper batch tasking (yes, I just made that up because I thought “crack batch tasking” had a negative connotation).
Hyper batch tasking is my best friend. Sticking to my focus topics, I published nearly 300 posts on this site in 2018, even with taking December off from new content. How?
Over the course of about 3 days, I would complete 4-7 posts within a single topic focus and get them scheduled. I would:
- do keyword, title, and hashtag research for the topic and 4-7 posts
- create content (I also used purchased content) for 4-7 posts through strategic planning of my time, camera and lighting setup, and more.
- edit or create all images for those 4-7 posts
- write those 4-7 posts
- SEO/optimize images for all of them
- add calls to action for all of them, including newsletter and what to read next
- make or edit videos for those 4-7 posts
- schedule all to non-focus platforms like YouTube and Facebook
- live-share to Pinterest when published and drop other pins randomly (I am too lazy to put together a system with a spreadsheet and all that, but you do you).
The key takeaway is “…within a single topic,” not the work I did or how I did it. The focus on the topic allowed me to limit my brain’s switching costs and really ramp up productivity.
You don’t have to work like this – you can start testing general time blocking or another work style. The point is that if what you are doing right now isn’t working to achieve your goals, change it.
What You Can Do NOW to Narrow Focused Work
Scroll back up and identify your important work by answering those questions now that you’ve read through this. And remember saying, “I’d like to earn $10,000 this month.” isn’t enough.
Focused work starts with important work, not productivity.
“In order to earn 9k in ad revenue, I will increase my page views by 100k by publishing 3 cupcake posts a week for 5 weeks. The data says they generate the most shares and page views of all current categories. Primary post promotion will be on Pinterest with 4 images published for the post and in a Facebook desserts group. I will also publish 2 easy and traditionally popular appetizer posts a week because they earn me the most affiliate income and I can add 1k to my goal through them this month because of the Super Bowl parties.”
Then, identify ways you can work smarter, maximizing your efficiency. Will you shoot all 4 cupcake recipes on Saturday? Will you host a party so you can rope your friend into being your kitchen helper when shooting the appetizers? #noshameinyourblogginggame
Get granular. I’m here if you need help.
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How to Grow a Lifestyle Blog in a Noisy World
Learn how to grow a lifestyle blog in today’s noisy environment from someone who blew the roof off with a side blog.
Read This if You Want to Grow a Lifestyle Blog
This article will:
- share the amazing results from 8 months of work to grow a lifestyle blog (spoiler alert: it did a LOT better than predicted).
- detail why this goal was set and why I spent my time working on it.
- provide an overview of how I did it.
- advise you how to start on the same path.
This article is part of a series here on NDC.
- 1: How to Grow a Lifestyle Blog in a Noisy World (this article)
- 2: Lifestyle Blog Growth through Focused Work
Expectation Versus Reality
Most people who create a blog have NO IDEA how much work they take to grow and actually earn a livable income from. I blame other bloggers for that, honestly.
There is no shortage of people who grew one website and now teach courses on how to do it. I’m not calling anyone out here – everyone can go after their dream how they want. But…
The expectation of earning from a blog is this:
- Someone comes across an article telling them how easy it is to earn online in only a couple of hours a week with a blog.
- They sell them an affiliate link to a partner to get the site started, even providing a step-by-step guide. How helpful.
- There is an offering to learn how to blog for profit, how to use a certain style of writing to grab readers, or even the promise of ranking quickly. All that sounds good, right?
- Pretty soon, reality sets in that the Internet is a noisy, noisy place and growing a lifestyle blog as a source of income is hard.
Noisy. How noisy? More than 4 million blog posts are published every day.
The Experiment to Grow a Non-Niche Blog
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m sharing what I set out to do with the experiment to grow a lifestyle blog and what happened with growing a non-niche site.
- I’m going to share how I defined my focus.
- I’ll be divulging the exact strategies I used for promotion.
- The tools I used? Yep, sharing those, too.
- I’m going to share my work style (step-by-step) so you can determine if this level of hyper batch tasking is for you.
- Mistakes. We all make them, and I’m no exception. I’m going to share those, too.
Who Am I and Why Did I Set This Goal?
For those of you new here, I am a growth strategist. I LOVE to watch things grow by testing, tweaking, and analyzing. And I’ve grown quite a few websites over the years. 😉
As you can likely tell, I run a consulting company to work specifically with bloggers because I love doing this and want others to succeed at it, as well. Heck, I created the Elevate Everyone Facebook Group to do just that (you should join).
The Results in Growing a Lifestyle Blog in 8 Months
First, let me state that my goals were ONE-THIRD of the results. Yes, I set my goals high. Yes, I have been doing this for a long time. Yes, I was surprised.
Here’s the summary of results for Ruffles and Rain Boots:
- the site got to more than 300,000 page views a month!
- it was accepted into a respected ad network after 4 months of work.
- she earned more than $6,000 in a single month but income was immediate.
- it operated VERY lean with a team of 1 (me) for nearly 5 months.
- I grew email subscribers to more than 8,000 with > 30% open rate.
The “How I Did It” Overview
Friends, it’s too much to put into a single article, but here are the high points and some of what I’ll be sharing.
- Focused Work – Whatever I did had to be efficient (work as productively as possible) and effective (it must be meaningful to the site and directly tied to earnings).
- Investment – my time and any earnings into content
- Promotion/platforms – text and visual search promotion only (search and Pinterest); all others auto-post the minimum
- Content –
- categories: a very narrow focus on 2-3 at a time
- video: make them short; put in the ad network and on YouTube
- supplement: buy content to support non-focus or test categories
- Email – grow through multiple content categories (> 1 lead magnet)
I did not deviate from anything listed above. Were there other things I wanted to do? Oh goodness yes! But I tuned out the noise and got the heck to work. The result is that I now have blog revenue streams from ads, products, and affiliates.
What You Can Do NOW to Grow a Lifestyle Blog
While I’m typing up all my findings and getting these articles on how to grow a lifestyle blog published for you, here’s what you can do now.
- Find your focus. Productivity is only half the equation for success. Focusing on what will build your business is more important than how much do. Book a free 30-minute call and let’s chat about that focus.
- Get a support system. If you aren’t in a tribe of your peers, seek one out. It can be niche-specific or not – I’m in both types and love what they each offer. Choose people who have similar growth goals. Go-getters get frustrated with hobbyists.
- Tailwind (surprise – that’s an affiliate link) – If you have the money, I strongly believe in most sites will benefit from Tailwind. I’m lazy and have a lot going on. I don’t want to (and won’t) pin manually every day. Tailwind kept my account active before I could hire help.
I’m going to be sharing in more detail about this experiment in each of the areas above. But if you can only focus on one, let it be the first. Book your free 30-minute call here.
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