Ever wonder if you aren’t getting the return on investment that you hoped for with your blog? Are you maximizing not only your time but also seeing the results you’re hoping for? How can focusing your efforts pay off?
Today we speak with Rosemarie Groner from The Busy Budgeter about her strategy to get her maximum ROI when it comes to her time and energy.
Time Stamp
Intro – Rosemarie Groner – Wife, Mom, Blogger, ROI Ninja
2:50 Where is your highest ROI going to come from?
4:25 The ROI Roadmap – Where to focus your attention
4:35 Foundation
8:25 Getting Traffic
11:50 Stop wasting your time and focus on what matters + how to do Pinterest
15:30 What should I write about?
17:00 How Rosemarie built her sales funnels
23:00 Cold subscribers–should you delete them?
Highest Forms of ROI and Where They Come From
Rosemarie started her blog about 3 years ago and she currently has around 120K people on her email list. Income wise, she is making an average of $100K per month from the blog.
You heard that right, folks. 100 grand per month. And some months, it’s way over that amount. The Busy Budgeter sees her highest ROI from her email list, Facebook ads, and funnels. Rosemarie stresses though, that ROI changes as your business changes.
When you first start blogging, your ROI may come solely from writing posts. There was a time for Rosemarie when her highest ROI was from sponsored posts or affiliate launches. She now sees a pretty great ROI from SEO but when you are a beginning or fairly new blogger, SEO won’t get you anywhere and it won’t get you there pretty fast.
You need content, and a lot of it, to start ranking for Google searches. The most important thing, according to Rosemarie, is to know your own business. Pay attention to where your money is coming from and where potential money could be coming from. If writing posts is all you can do right now, then optimize those posts. Build up a library of content that you can later use to rank for SEO.
The ROI Roadmap
How do you determine where your highest ROI will come from? Rosemarie has something to help. Her ROI Roadmap takes you step-by-step through how to move from beginning blogger to money-making machine. It all starts with the foundation-
Foundation.The first thing you have to do is understand how bloggers make money. If you can’t get that, you won’t be able to do it yourself. You have to understand things like how to write to your audience, avatars, etc.
Do you know what a “polarizing passion statement” is?
If you don’t, you need to listen to the full episode to get this down. It’s crucial to know exactly who your people are and how they identify with you. You aren’t writing to everyone so figure out from the very beginning who wants to hear what you have to say.
Getting traffic. It’s very hard to monetize a blog with no traffic so you must get traffic from some source. There are 2 possibilities when it comes to traffic; user-to-user sources and user-to-content sources. Rosemarie is a huge believer in focusing your time on user-to-content traffic sources.
What are these user-to-content sources? There are 2; Google and Pinterest. People go to Pinterest or Google to look for blog posts or websites. This is where you want to put the majority of your time. Facebook and other social media platforms are user-to-user sources.
When is the last time you went to Facebook to look for a new blog post to read? Never, right? Exactly. That’s Rosemarie’s point. We need to focus on the sources that will actually drive traffic to our site. Google and Pinterest would fail as platforms if they stopped promoting content because that is what the platform itself is built on.
Stop Wasting Your Time
The takeaway here is to stop wasting time on things that aren’t going to give you any kind of ROI. Don’t keep spending time on Facebook thinking that it is driving traffic to your site. Spend your time on Pinterest at first while you build your library of content and then start to focus on SEO and getting found on Google.
Later on, you can start to work on Facebook ads but when you’re just getting started, you need to focus your attention on the things that bring you a better ROI. You start with your business model and you go on from there. That business model determines everything you do in the future with your blog. For example, Rosemarie’s business model is-
“To help as many people as possible, make as much money as possible, and do the least amount of work as possible.”
Whoa, you might say. This woman is lazy. And Rosemarie would say you are dead wrong. She isn’t lazy; she just knows what she wants. And what she wants is to spend as much time with her kids as she can. That means never working more than 20 hours a week and preferably less.
She has a passion for helping people but in a way that allows her to be the mom she wants to be. For her, there is another choice besides being a CEO who works 80 hours a week or being a stay-at-home mom. Her business model decides what she spends her time on and which avenues of growth she focuses on.
SEO, Keywords, and Passion
We hear so much conflicting information about how to choose our blog post topics. Should we write about our passions? Should we write based on keyword searches? Or should we just focus on SEO and leave the rest?
Rosemarie writes about her passions and uses SEO for those posts but she also uses keywords. You have to start by knowing your avatar and what their needs are. For every problem that they face, there are infinite post ideas to offer answers.
So start with those answers to get post ideas and then look for keywords that are going to rank well. Rosemarie uses a tool called Ahrefs for keyword research. Once she has keywords that she knows she can rank highest for, she goes for long-form content.
Why long-form? When it comes to competition, Rosemarie wants to have the most in-depth, best piece of content for whatever her topic is. She wants her post to stand head and shoulders above any competing posts.
Making Money Off Your Cold Subscribers
A cold subscriber is someone who is not opening your emails. Once you hit a certain number of people on your list you have to start paying for them, so most bloggers delete their cold subscribers. Rosemarie has found a better solution for her cold subscribers. She makes money off of them.
How in the world do you make money off of people who don’t open your emails? First, Rosemarie segments them out of her main list into their own list. She then emails them separate flash sales. This allows her to know exactly how much money she makes from them. And the ROI? She’s seeing a 22% conversion rate from these cold subscribers which is absolutely crazy high.
Before you delete your cold subscribers, maybe you want to try segmenting them out and offering them their own flash sale or affiliate deal. You’ll never know what your ROI will be unless you try.
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About Our Host
Joe Saul-Sehy is the co-host of the Stacking Benjamins personal finance podcast and operates the Stacking Benjamins blog.
Join Us for #FinCon18
Hear from over 200 speakers, like Rosemarie Groner, at FinCon18 September 26-29 in Orlando, Florida. Register for your pass today!
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