When I met Sonia Singh of A Lifestyle By Design, she was still feeling out what she wanted her blog to do and be. She was concerned that her website copy and her blog didn’t match—and that her blog didn’t reflect her true voice because she wasn’t feeling confident in her blogging ability.
“I want my blog to be inspiring and motivating first and foremost,” she told me, “and then a few How-Tos to empower readers to take action… (linking our day to day actions to the bigger picture .. life/society/world)..in a way widening the scope for my readers to see the opportunities available if we just prioritize ourselves and focus on the things that really matter…”
We started out seeing if ghost blogging would be a good fit for her, but ultimately, Sonia decided that she wanted to keep working on finding her own voice, and what she really needed was some strategy around her blog. She invested in a Strategy Session to create an editorial calendar, and that’s where the magic started to happen.
Blogging to Launch a Product
In our very first call, Sonia and I brainstormed an idea for a blog series to launch and promote her home-study product, The Personal Change Toolkit. We came up with the idea to do a blog series that would be something along the lines of, “six weeks to your best new year ever.”
The idea was to introduce the six key concepts of Sonia’s program over six weeks on the blog. It would be a valuable resource for her readers and give them a tantalizing glimpse of the more in-depth work they could do with her home study course. Plus, launching the blog series around the new year was a perfect fit in terms of her ideal reader, who is comfortable with self-help and personal growth, and looking for the next step.
This is a great example of scheduling blog posts around both sales goals and big events. In one fell swoop, we came up with:
- Blog posts that supported Sonia’s sales goals
- Timely posts that fit with what’s happening in her readers’ lives
- And ideas for six weeks worth of posts.
BOOM! Done! Love it.
Building Traffic Through Guest Posts
Sonia’s other goal was to start building traffic to her blog through guest posting. By investing in the Traffic Bump package, she also got the services of our professional researcher extraordinaire, who put together a report that included an A, B, and C list of blogs for Sonia to pitch guest posts to, as well as suggestions for trend-setters to interview on her own blog, tips for social media engagement, and more.
From my perspective, the best bits of insight the research gave were the comments pulled directly from other websites that spoke to what Sonia’s ideal readers were thinking, feeling, and saying.
That, my friends, is blogging gold—and the researcher did all the legwork!
I was able to translate a lot of what she found into blog post ideas specifically crafted to exactly what Sonia’s ideal readers are thinking and saying. That’s incredibly valuable.
In the end, Sonia received a year’s worth of blog post ideas, six months of blog strategy aligned to her sales goals, more than a dozen websites perfectly poised to accept her guest posts, coaching around what and how to pitch to those business frenemies, and other research on her ideal reader that she can refer to again and again as she crafts her blog and her greater social media message.