Blogger 2 Business Woman Phase 1 Notes
Blogger to Business Woman-‐Phase 1-‐Building Your Brand
Copyright © 2015 by Courtney Sanders All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Introduction: Courtney started blogging 6 years ago as a college student. At the time, she was trying to balance being a college student with wanting to be an entrepreneur. She ultimately did start her own company at 19 years old, Material Gurl (a natural hair product line), which is no longer in business, but along the way she learned so much. Over the preceding years, she studied how to really be effective and one of the books that really inspired her was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The turning point for Courtney was realizing that she needed to stop being a blogger and become a business woman. When she had that mindshift and thought more globally that’s when things started to take off for her. This mindshift is what led her to her current success and she shows you the steps through her new program today, Blogger to Business Woman Secrets.
You CAN turn your blog around and grow it. What do YOU need to do to make that pivot? Let’s discuss the common mistakes new bloggers and online brand-‐builders make: 1. The belief and expectations that you need a large following and thousands of readers to be successful from a profitability standpoint. 2. Preoccupation with their blog design and logo and a focus exclusively on “looks” and not content . a. Design and logo are important but should not be your first concern. It is not necessary to spend that money up front. Your first concern should be content. i. At the same time, your content needs to be QUALITY, not QUANTITY. More of that discussed later in the class. 3. The “we” thing. a. People who start saying “WE” as if there’s a large group handling the blog although it’s only 1 person. i. People WANT to connect with another person even more than they want to connect with a person or content. ii. “WE” is inadvertently creating a distance between you and your reader. 4. Not having a clear idea of who you are going to be to your reader-‐your USP a. USP-‐Unique Selling Proposition i. At the most basic level, you are selling your content for attention. ii. Your USP is going to determine your “branding” and who you are and what makes you special to your readers. iii. Your USP means you need to decide who you want to be to your reader. What kind of role model are you going to be ? Why should people follow you? It sets a tone for how you brand yourself going forward and will play out eventually in everything that you do, including your blog design, like colors, fonts and images. 5. You’re going to make a lot of money running sidebar ads and getting sponsorship.
a. Not sustainable. It’s actually the worst way. There’s easier ways to make money. b. We’re actually going to discuss this much further in phase 3 of B2B Secrets
“Content is King” -‐ How to provide meaningful and compelling content 1. Your content drives all of your branding. You get to meet the needs of your readers in your own unique way. 2. The questions you need to ask yourself are WHAT are you writing about and WHY. What is your ENDGAME? What is the point of writing about it in the first place? 3. You want to be UNIQUE. That means that although there may be 3500 fashion blogs and you want to write a fashion blog, you have to come at it from a unique standpoint. An example would be that you are writing about being fashionable on a budget and then you narrow down your unique viewpoint that you are fashionable on a budget because you were a college student who put themselves through school financially. a. If you can’t answer why someone would want to come to the blog you have to think about that. You want people to connect and resonate with you. 4. Ask yourself who your readers are-‐-‐Who are you trying to reach a. What kind of woman is she? b. What are her beliefs? c. What is her outlook? d. What is her sense of humor? e. Is she a reader? f. Does she like connecting with other women, making friends? 5. “Pains and Promises” -‐-‐The most important questions you can ask are: a. What is she struggling with? What does she want more than anything? Then you ask what is preventing her from getting it (This is the Aspirational Line which we discuss next) b. You need to meet the needs of your target audience/ideal reader to keep growing your brand. THAT’S why your blog exists! i. Change your mindset from they need to pay attention to me to I need to pay attention to THEM and then structure the blog to be attractive to them to invest their attention. Keep reading on next page……..we have so much left to cover!
“The Aspirational Line” Let’s pretend your reader is Dorothy from Oz. Her line is the Yellow Brick Road. She is between where she came from and where she wants to be. Where is she right now? What pains are preventing her from getting to the “Wizard”? Example: lack of time management, self-‐belief issues about past mistakes, lack of self-‐ discipline, financial roadblocks.
What are those promises that are pushing her towards the “Wizard” despite the obstacles? Example: the promise of creating a dream business for financial and time freedom, availability to friends and family, the overall promise of figuring out her purpose so she can wake up every day and feel motivated.
A Simple Way to Write Your Blog Posts
At the top: start every post with what your intention is. Once you set this up, go into your email and act like you are talking to ONE person and just free flow. This is how you invest feeling in your subject. If you have to, direct your subject to a person you know who is going through that same issue (just don’t address the “to” line in case you accidentally hit send. Whoops!!!) . After you’re done free-‐ flowing, then you can go back and edit.
At the bottom: a made up quote that I want my ideal reader to say when she’s done reading. Create content that is going to illicit that response. For example, “Girl, I better go look at my bank accounts now. You are so right and I’ve been a mess. It’s time to get this under control!”
Let’s Talk about Design! 1. You want to have cohesive graphics throughout your blog. a. Decide on your brand colors. For example, black and white are sophisticated. Grass green is mellow. Purple is feminine but not “girly”. b. Big Useful Tip: Create a secret board on Pinterest . When you like a design you see online, pin it to your board. When you step back different elements will jump out at you. Colors, shapes, fonts, etc. 2. Incorporate these into your pictures and your theme as well as your sidebar elements and any e-‐book covers if they are advertised on your blog 3. Consistent themes, colors and fonts allow for a clean and seamless look. 4. If you’re not a great designer, don’t worry. There are a lot of tools you can use: a. Pixelmator (www.pixelmator.com) -‐similar to Photoshop but easier and less expensive.
b. Web-‐based tools that are not design software downloads: i. Canva (www.canva.com) ii. PicMonkey (www.picmonkey.com) iii. Pixlr (www.pixlr.com) –stripped down, web based version of Photoshop
A few notes on about Blogging Platforms 1. WordPress—this is Courtney’s favorite. We will come back to this again and again through the B2B program. a. You want wordpress.org (not wordpress.com). b. WordPress.org sites allow the site to become “yours”. It is YOUR platform with YOUR chosen URL, i.e. “website name”. c. It gives you the most creative options and the most flexibility and is always being updated with improvements d. It has the most plug-‐in’s (plug-‐in’s are like blogging “apps”-‐things you can make your blog “do”) 2. SquareSpace a. A lot of people like this one as well. It is probably the 2nd most popular. b. However, it IS newer and does not have the full functionality of WordPress, so for business needs such as membership pages, etc., you are going to be limited. 3. Wix a. It’s kind of “buggy” and not as much technical support as SquareSpace or WordPress.
A few last little notes to think about:
Blogging 1.0-‐live journal era. Online diaries with no rhyme or reason
Blogging 2.0-‐got very specific and niche.
**Blogging 3.0 – this is the phase we’re in now ** Your blog is now everything you do online. It’s all of the experiences that you create for your target market. You want to keep creating non-‐blog post experiences that will drive people back to your blog. You are doing them on a different platform and driving readers back to your blog. For example, doing google hangouts/google interviews. People then share them and then new people experience it and go back to your blog. Same for podcasts. Same for webinars. Really, the sky is the limit!
Keep reading for some Q & A ………………..
A Little Q & A Session…. Charlene: How do you getting people to subscribe and join your email list? Can you give some tips on how to gain subscribers? She has 3 different “reminders” to prompt readers but is still not getting the numbers she was hoping for. Courtney: Suggests that she have an opt-‐in gift. The caller does not be/c she doesn’t know what to give them. It’s a promise of the quality they will get if they keep coming to your blog. It can speak to a promise they are trying to get to or a pain they are trying to get away from. Courtney is going to discuss the Opt-‐In Gift much more in detail in Phase 3 of the B2B program. Pepper: Wants to revamp her blog that is currently based around her show Brown Betty. How did Courtney keep her audience when she changed paths on her blog over the last few years? Courtney: She started digging into things that the former audience were into that would be in common with the newer direction. Where is the point that overlaps between Pepper’s show fans and the new direction and keep zooming the lens to find the commonality. Next Caller (no name provided): If you’re starting from scratch, what is the best way to start getting readers? Courtney: In her future sections in B2B, there are actually 5 different ways that she goes into on a deeper scale, but the fastest and best way is “OPA”-‐other people’s audiences. Go to where your target audience is that is similar and get in front of them. A portion of those people will then follow you back as well. Dija—Owner of The Inspire’d Café (www.theinspiredcafe.com) and a coach-‐ee of Courtney’s. She feels that if she wants to inspire creatives and work creatively professionally she has a deep seated conviction that she needs to share her struggles more. She is looking for tips on how to be more open with her struggle. Courtney: Think of the end goal in terms of how it’s going to help others and release yourself. It is embarrassing in the beginning. She herself had to from the dependency on external factors. It’s hard to share when you feel you have lost/not experienced those factors that mean success in our culture (i.e. a certain car, failing at school, etc.) But, you have to realize that nothing that happens externally takes away your value. You get rock solid in your personal value and you will be able to face those fears about making your struggle public.
