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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