Instructor, athlete, and phytonian: a step-by-step plan for creating a blog that will generate income

Personal blogging is a huge job that needs to be taken very responsibly. It will take a lot of time and effort. If you do not like social networking, it is better to abandon this idea at once. If the desire and readiness is there, move on.

First of all, determine the purpose of blogging. Are you a working fitness instructor and want to maintain the loyalty of your existing audience of clients or do you plan to make blogging the main source of new clients and a platform for training? Perhaps there is a desire to sell some related products?

The answers to these questions will determine the following components:

1. target audience (CA);
2. type of content;
3. the specifics of promotion.

I propose to take a specific goal step-by-step to figure out how to run an appropriate blog.

The goal is to sell online training

Step 1: Understand what to talk about with your audience

It’s important that both you enjoy bringing this information to the world (otherwise burnout will happen quickly) and that people respond to it. How do you identify an area?

You can do a simple exercise. Take a blank sheet of paper and write down item by item:

• What are you the best at?
• What are the areas of expertise?
• What are your strengths?
• What do you enjoy doing?

Next, mark the items that answer one of the following questions.

• What do you want to do?

• What are you great at?
• What are people willing to pay you for?

The items next to which you see three check marks will be your greatest strengths to emphasize in your blog.

For example: “I love counseling people on nutrition. I’m great at it. People will pay for it (there’s a demand).”

Step 2: Determine the audience

Now you need to understand who will make up the core of your subscribers. What “pains” these people have. Try to visualize three or four portraits and spell out what content each type might like.

For example, what’s important to moms? They’re losing weight, trying to get in shape after giving birth. They don’t have time for a fitness club, but it’s realistic to work out at home in front of a laptop.

Step 3: Choose a social network

You need to determine which platform will be ideal for you and make it the main one. Content formats are different. You won’t be able to create it for each one at the same time (well, or you’ll have to do a lot of work). Algorithms on some social networks rank content based on novelty. If you’ve posted it somewhere before, then republished content is likely to rank worse.

When choosing, start from where your audience lives. It can be both “VKontakte” and “Odnoklassniki”. There are services for which “Yandex.Zen” is ideal.

Step 4: Think through monetization

This is a very important issue that many people ignore at the stage of blog conception.

You have to decide what your product is and how it will be sold. Our product right now is online coaching. Where will your subscribers find out about this offer? How will they do it? All points are important to think about and then pull specific tools underneath.

In the end, you should have the answers to the questions formulated:

1. Who are you?
2. What will you talk about?
3. Who will you do it for?
4. What subscriber problem are you trying to solve?
5. What will you make money on?

Step 5: Study your competitors

Analyze those you follow yourself. Try to articulate what sets each of them apart and identify how you will be different. What is your superpower, narrow area of expertise?

Maybe you’ll develop very time-consuming workouts (very important for moms) or come up with a specific style of presentation. It will all depend on that very superpower.

Step 6: Be prepared to make an investment

As I said earlier, it’s important to realize that blogging is a lot of work and requires creating a huge amount of content on a daily basis. On top of that, it’s also high-level production.

You’ll need at a minimum: filming equipment, a tripod, lights, and space. Social media audiences are spoiled with good content, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep their attention. Alas, simple ways of increasing the audience are now unavailable. They exhausted themselves somewhere in the year 2019. Today, investing in content is unavoidable.

Step 7: Think through the design

Having solved the strategic issues, you need to move on to the tactical ones. When the content is created, don’t forget about such an important component as design.

If the blog has a convenient navigation, it is immediately clear to a person what you are talking about (nutrition/supplements/exercise, etc.). By creating it, you save your subscriber’s time, which means you can reach your audience faster.

Step 8: Start collecting subscribers

Let’s pretend you’ve accomplished all of the above points. You have cool content and a well-designed blog. Now comes the question of how to grow your audience.

The main ways today are:

• riles (give you great reach);

• integrations into blogs where there is a good audience (help to make “seeding” among other people’s quality audience);
• infoproduct for subscription (people love useful gifts).

Remember that your main superpower is systematic. Of course, when a person is a self-producer and has a main job, it is very difficult to keep social networks stable and regular. But I’m not saying the word “impossible”. There are a lot of successful blogs that are created on exactly such grounds.