Happy 2 years to Sincerely Jean (2/1/2017)! Last year I did a review of the best decisions we made from our first year blogging. I want to keep the tradition going because it is SO important to look back and review and evaluate your progress! This was a great year for us and we made TONS of progress. I feel like our first year was all about building a foundation. Because we had that foundation we were able to experience a lot of growth our second year.
We still really love blogging and were actually able to make pretty good money this year! Wahoo! Right around our one year mark we got our first sponsored post and we were crazy excited! Once we started working with brands, it was like a snowball effect. We kept getting more and more sponsored posts. We also had one of our pins go a little viral on Pinterest and it brings us a ton of traffic everyday which in turn brings us more ad revenue. We also had a few seasonal post pins get really popular so those really increased our traffic during those seasonal months. We actually were on our local news station 3 times, had a recipe featured by MSN, and had a DIY project featured in the Huffington Post. If you are interested, you can check out our press section to see those features and segments. The key to all this growth was consistency and continually learning!
If you are looking for more info on starting and monetizing your own blog, read our “How to Start a Blog in 5 Steps” and “5 Ways to Make Money Blogging” posts. You can also check out our full recommendations page.
If you have any blogging questions, please send us an email to contact@sincerelyjean.com. We would love to hear from you.
Let’s dive into the 5 best decisions we made our second year blogging:
#1 GROWING OUR EMAIL LIST
Growing our email list was one of our top priorities this year. We created a free “30 5-Ingredient Dinner Recipes” ecookbook opt in for our readers. They give us their email and we send them their free ecookbook. It actually leads into our sales funnel which we will talk about in #5. It has been a great way to build our list! We have an opt-in form in several locations on our blog. We currently use and highly recommend Thrive Leads for highly effective opt-in forms. They offer 10 different types of opt-in forms including pop-up box, sticky ribbon, screen filler, and scroll mat. You can also split test your forms to see which ones are converting the best.
#2 TAKING ECOURSES
Be very careful about the ecourses that you purchase. There is so much free information online! Most of our learning has come from free resources and Googling our questions. I really don’t believe that you need to spend a ton of money to start an online business if you are willing and able to put in the time to learn. That being said, we did purchase three courses this year that were extremely valuable and that we highly recommend.
- The first was “Food Blogger Pro” from Pinch of Yum. This course is designed for food bloggers but there is so much great information for any blogger. Get our Food Blogger Pro Membership Coupon for $3 off your first month! This is a monthly membership but you can cancel at any time.
- The second was “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” from Making Sense of Cents. This blogger makes $50,000 a month in affiliate marketing. I have never heard of a blogger making that make in affiliate marketing and I liked her other blog posts and decided to purchased it. It has been a very helpful course!
- The third was the monthly lab membership from Digital Marketer. You can get your first month for $1 HERE and can cancel at any time.
Also, I just wanted to add that the best book we read this year was “DotCom Secrets” by Russell Brunson (creator of ClickFunnels). This book was AMAZING and definitely a game changer for us in our marketing. You can get a FREE copy (plus shipping).
#3 CREATING A STYLE GUIDE
This was another game changer for us and I wish we would have created it sooner! We used to use any font and colors on our website and pins. This year we really started to brand ourselves better and having a style guide was one of our main focuses. We now only use the fonts and colors from our style guide on everything we do. We recommend choosing 2-3 fonts and 3-4 main colors. People will start to recognize your brand, especially on Pinterest. There are a few blogs where I can spot their pins immediately without even looking at the name because of their style guide.
#4 NICHING DOWN
When we first started blogging, we blogged about anything we wanted. We used to do fitness, fashion, food, crafts, you name it. We called it “lifestyle”. We soon came to realize that this was NOT a good direction and that we needed to become more niche and focused. We wanted to stand out and break through all of the online clutter. We decided to only focus on simple recipes and simple DIY projects. With the recipes, we got even more niche and focus on 5 ingredient dinner recipes. Our readers started noticing and they often tag their friends on social media saying things like “This is right up your ally – 5 ingredients!”. Our email list has also grown a ton because of the free “30 5-Ingredient Dinner Recipes” ecookbook opt-in we use to attract our ideal reader.
#5 SELLING OUR OWN PRODUCTS
We just recently started selling our own products. I wish it wouldn’t have taken us two years to get our own products out there, but it did. On one hand, I am glad we waited because we now have a large audience and email list to sell to. On the other hand, I wish we would have started selling our own products from the beginning because I think it is an important part of blogging and a great revenue source.
We currently use a program called Click Funnels for our landing pages and sales funnels. We highly recommend them and you can get a FREE 14-day trial! We are currently selling our “6 Week Meal Plan + Grocery List” through a funnel that begins with our ecookbook opt-in. We are also about to launch our “How to Start and Monetize a Creative Blog” blogging course which is also right inside of our Click Funnels account. In the future, we plan to add more products including physical products, more ecookbooks, and a continuity program.
Again, if you have any blogging questions, please send us an email to contact@sincerelyjean.com. We would love to hear from you!
Sincerely,
shari jean
