Welcome back to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode, we’re going to dig into 5 FREE tools that can help you save time.

• Google Slides
• CopyClip
• LunaPic
• Attract.io
• RescueTime

And that’s it, those are 5 free tools that will help you save time. I hope you find them helpful, be sure to tune in next week where I’ll be sharing with you why you absolutely need to be using templates and systems.

And remember, if you want to make sure you never miss an episode, make sure you hit that subscribe button to be notified when new episodes go live, I’ll catch ya next time.

View the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode we’re going to be talking templates and systems.

Remember if you want to make sure you never miss an episode, be sure to hit that subscribe button.

Okay, let’s start with systems.

First of all, systems do not need to be complicated. Simple usually works best.

Systems are important to make sure you don’t miss things, a system could be as simple as a checklist.

If you want to get a little more sophisticated you can build in some automation with various tools. Zapier can be great to connect and trigger automations with various tools.

I’m sure you know that consistency is key to blogging, but it’s not just being consistent in publishing blog posts, it’s being consistent with your promotion too. So making sure you’ve got the elements you need to promote, through the various channels you choose to promote. But at the very least you should be letting your email list know about your content.

Which is why you don’t want to miss a step and why you need to make sure you’re using systems in the management of your blog.

Next up Templates.

Are you hard coding everything on your website? No. Why? Because you don’t have to, there are tools available that make running a website available to everyone, even people like me who have no idea how to code.

So I want to ask, why don’t you take the same shortcut when it comes to other parts of blogging? Social media templates, templates to help you create products faster (slides, promo images ect)?

I mean it’s fine to want to make things harder on yourself, but the reality is that starting with a template and then customizing it to make it yours is not only easier than starting from scratch but it usually takes less time too.

The next problem when it comes to templates is spending forever finding and or deciding on which templates to use. I’ll say that I find templates by Kara Fidd at Simplifying DIY Design to be pretty awesome, my only qualm about them is they are in Canva, so I have to break them down to rebuild them in Google Slides, but it works for me and saves me time in the long run.

There are tons of other great templates out there, but once you find ones you like, stop and start using them, don’t debate, don’t keep looking for better, just start using them to create.

I hope that helps you better understand why you need both systems and templates as a blogger, if you have any questions be sure to hit me up on instagram and let me know. And be sure to join me next week when I’ll be talking about the fastest way to make money blogging. Until next time, have a great day.

View the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

Want to make your blog the go to place for your readers? Focusing on your readers’ needs is a the best way to pull readers in and make them want to read your content. In today’s episode, we are going to learn small, easy changes you can make, that will draw the focus away from you and onto your reader.

View the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode I’m answering a question a few of my readers sent in before the podcast was launched. The question is What is the fastest way to make money from my blog?

Let’s dig into the answer...

First, let’s touch on the different ways blogs make money. Typically there are 4 different ways to make money on your blog:

• Display Ads (ad network or private advertisers)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Sponsored Content
• Creating and Selling Your Own Products
  

Part of the answer to the question of “what is the fastest way to make money blogging”, depends on how much you want to earn and if you want it as a one off or consistently. I’m going to assume you want to earn money consistently from your blog and ideally as much as possible.

You can do display ads, nearly from day 1 with Adsense, also media.net, but based on my own experience I would do adsense over media.net. The thing is you won’t actually earn a decent amount until you have a ton of pageviews.

Even then you will likely move ad providers. You likely hear a lot about MediaVine and with their 50,000 sessions requirement, it may take a while to get there. But I don’t think qualifying for MediaVine should be your goal, for one there are lots of other ad providers in the game. And by the time you qualify for them you should be earning a lot more from other revenue streams.

Affiliate marketing you can also start doing from day 1, or close to it. The thing with affiliate marketing is that you’re really planting seeds to earn money down the road. You might not earn a lot to start, and it will likely take some time for it to become consistent, but is something that is easy to start with and can grow with time.

I personally am not a huge fan of doing sponsored content, because to me it feels like trading time for money and so it’s only scalable in terms of what you charge. The more you can charge the more you can earn. But it usually requires you to have some following first.

I know tons of people love monetizing with sponsored content and it can be pretty awesome, if it’s something you’d like to explore I’d recommend checking out Tracie Fobes, who spoke about this topic as part of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit in 2020.

Selling products is something that won’t make you money right away, but you likely don’t need as big of an audience as you think to do well with product sales. When it comes to selling products, it matters more how engaged your audience is rather than how big your audience is.

Which is not to say you won’t have a product flop. I definitely have, but it’s always a learning experience, and you never know those products make work for some other time down the road in some other way.

Okay, so what is the fastest way to make money blogging, probably display ads, but long term with the potential to grow more and more, you’re looking at affiliate marketing and digital product sales.

I hope that helps give you a bit of clarity, and with that I invite you to join me next week when I’ll share 3 things you should stop doing to start earning more, I’ll catch ya next time.

View the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

It would be great if Google would just tell you what else people are looking for so you could answer all of their questions…oh, wait, it does! In today’s episode, we’re going to learn how to use Google’s own tools to help your readers, lengthen engagement, and raise your ranking.

View the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode we’re going to be talking about some things you should stop doing. So I’m going to talk about taking some things off your plate.

There is a time and place for social media, but you need to not get sucked into it and spend a ton of time on it. Only spend as much time on it as necessary.

Personally, I’ve found taking the apps off of my phone and logging out on the internet browsers, to keep the temptation of checking them at bay.

That means not only cutting back on one promotion method, it’s better to go deep on 2-3 promotion channels, than spread yourself thin and not get anywhere on 4-6 channels. It also means not trying to cover all the topics on your site.

Stick to one thing and do it really really well before branching out to other topics.

This goes along with my first point because chances are social media is a task or action with a small return on the time invested.

So what else do you spend a lot of time on that doesn’t really produce a result that was worth the time you put in? That is something you should be asking yourself about everything you do.

For me, one thing I do that doesn’t really move the needle, is constantly tweaking my site.

Sure there is a time and place for tweaking a website, but there also comes a point where it just becomes a procrastination method…

“I can’t send out publish more posts until I get this one thing on my website fixed”

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? It says that 80 percent of your results come from just 20 percent of your work.

Well, what if you really focused on the type of work that made up the 20%? Could you work less and earn more? Yes, yes, you could.

I have on more than one occasion worked 70 hours a week, when I was a full-time entrepreneur, living alone, it became particularly more common for me to do so.

It was awful.

Part of why it would happen was because there is always more work I can be doing, I’m never really “done”.

The other reason I was working so much? Parkinson’s law.

Parkinson’s law states that work will expand to fill the time you give it, meaning if you give yourself four hours to write an article it will take at least four hours.

If on the other hand, you set a limit of one hour, it will take about an hour.

Setting boundaries not only helps in making you focus to do your work meaning you get more done in less time but also helps you to find work-life balance.

I also found that once I was tired it took me way longer to get things done, than if I were to just stop take a break, recharge and start again later.

So those are my suggestions of things you should stop doing:

• Stop wasting time on social media
• Stop trying to do everything and be everywhere
• Stop doing things that produce small returns, and
• Finally, stop working all the time

I hope these tips help you feel better about pushing things off your to -do list and giving yourself a break. Join me next week for when I share some simple SEO tweaks you can do to help you your site, I’ll talk to you then.

View the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

• Pin Generator in a Box
• Yoast SEO
• iMark Interactive
  

Grab the transcript here

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise

Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about when it’s okay to skip a blog post

This episode is brought to you by Pin Generator in a Box, a course designed to give you all the tools and resources you need to create your own personal Pin generator so you can keep feeding the Fresh Pin monster quickly and easily. Learn more about elizabethstapleton.com/PGIB

Okay, so talk about blogging schedules. Because you likely know that staying consistent with your blog is a major key to blogging success.

But life happens, so when is it okay to skip a blog post and how do you keep it from becoming a bad habit?

Grab the Transcript

Subscribe to The Blogger Breakthrough Podcast on Soundwise