I’ve suddenly been seeing a ton of growth in my blog traffic and subscribers. My subscribers have jumped from a daily gain of ~20 a day to over 150 a day in the past week. It’s all relating back to a post I did which gave away a budgeting printable pack.
My blog expenses are growing rapidly with my increasing subscribers but I’m not sure my income is going to do the same over the next month.What would you do in this case?
I’m thrilled to see my subscribers and page views increasing, but I’m a little scared by the financial commitment I’m making to pay out a larger sum of money without the money guaranteed to back it up. -Kaitlin from The Simple Organized Home
If you have a blog and you’re worried about your expenses exceeding your income, I totally get it. I’m constantly having to be strategic and plan ahead to make sure that our income is growing faster than our expenses! And there are definitely times when it can produce stress — especially during periods when your blog has a huge growth spurt!
Here’s what I’d recommend to Kaitlin:
- Promote your own products to new sign-ups and regularly in your email newsletter (if you don’t have any of your own products, it’s time to create at least one or two!). As soon as people subscribe, send them a series of 2-3 emails that introduces yourself, introduces what you do, and offer a special coupon code for your products.
- Make sure you are emailing out at least one or two affiliate links/promotional-type things every month. Of course, be sure you really love and feel you can get behind these things wholeheartedly. Email marketing is highly, highly effective when it comes to being able to actually encourage people to click through and buy something. Plus, when you’ve built a relationship with a reader and they trust your opinion and experience, they are much more likely to pay attention and take your recommendations very seriously. (Read more about affiliate marketing here and here.)
- Set up a good followup sequence when people sign up for your email newsletter that sends them an email every few weeks that points to one of your top posts on your blog from the archives. Make sure that these top posts have great affiliate links in them.
- Maximize your potential with sidebar advertising so that when people come to your site through links in your email newsletter, you are getting a payout for the traffic. (Read more about how to set up sidebar advertising here.)
- Remember: Quality over quantity. A large email list is great, but if you aren’t nurturing your list and increasing your readers’ engagement by providing them good content and opportunities, your list numbers won’t reflect well in your payouts.
- Network! Getting to know other bloggers and the strategies that work for them is a great way to increase your income-earning arsenal.
- Never stop experimenting! If one idea doesn’t work well, tweak it and try again. Or, go back to the drawing board and try another idea. The more you’re willing to keep experimenting, the more chance there is that you’re going to find something that really, really works.
What tips and advice would you add to my list? I’d love to hear!
P.S. Are you a beginning or intermediate blogger who would like to take these tips and go deeper into the hows and whys of a successful blogging strategy, sign up for my 4-Week Blog Coaching waiting list here to be notified of our next 4-week coaching event!