Hate blogging? How to make it easy and profitable!

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Cinnamon Wolfe is our guest blogger today. She is a former corporate gal turned photographer, private photo editor and business coach. She is a retired Army wife, stepmom, pet mom and the friendliest introvert you’ll ever meet. She is obsessed with helping others know that they are capable of so much more than they think they are. She is a self-proclaimed podcast junkie and hosts her own show… Focused Podcast! Her life goals are almost as big as her Netflix obsession and she can always be bribed with a grande Americano + deep conversations. She is a whiz at blogging and is here to motivate you to do just that!

What Blogging and Vegetables Have In Common

Have you ever watched those funny videos that parents take of their kids eating vegetables? It’s amazing the great lengths kids will go to in order to avoid eating their broccoli, carrots or cauliflower. I am quite positive that dogs around the world are incredibly thankful for kids and their extreme dislike of vegetables!

As we get older, we develop a deeper understanding that vegetables provide a lot of valuable nutrition and we learn that if prepared the right way they can actually be really appetizing and palatable. You still run across a lot of adults however who still don’t want to eat vegetables because of their bad experiences as a kid or maybe they just haven’t given them a second chance because they already have their minds set about how they taste. So what does blogging have to do with vegetables? Welllll, blogging is essentially the creative business owner’s version of broccoli for kids. 

It’s always entertaining to see the looks on creative business owners’ faces or see their noses scrunch up in distaste when they hear someone say that blogging for their business is SO GOOD FOR THEM!!!

“But I HATE blogging”

“I never know what to say”

“No one cares or reads blogs anymore”

“I am NOT a good writer”

“Everyone else has already written about this”

Sound familiar? I know I have said (or at least thought) one or more of these exact thoughts and I have heard HUNDREDS of creative business owners saying the exact same thing. 

And the frustrating part for me as a person who has seen a ton of growth, visibility, and success in my business in HUGE part because of my blog, is that it doesn’t HAVE to be a struggle. There are specific things you can do to help make blogging more palatable. I’m going to share FOUR specific actions you can take TODAY to slather some butter and salt all over that blogging so that you actually WANT to do it.

I can’t wait to see the benefits that come to your business because of it!! 

How to Make Blogging Easy and Profitable

Blogging provides a ton of benefits for your business. Your website is your online home. No matter what happens with social media, unless you cancel your website, people will have a place to go to find out more about you, what you do and what it’s like to work with you. 

Even though you can display a good amount of info on the various pages of your site, your blog is where you can really shine. You can expand your portfolio, you can provide super helpful information for potential clients and you can share about yourself and your interests which helps to skyrocket the know, like and trust factor that prompts people to actually GIVE YOU MONEY. And isn’t that one of the foundation blocks for why we are all in business? 

But in order to actually start seeing a return from blogging we have to actually do it. So we need to come up with ways to help blogging feel more manageable instead of like an impossible chore. 

1. Stop obsessing over quantity

Gone are the days when you need to blog five days a week to gain any sort of traction. Google (and in turn, your clients) cares WAY more about the quality of a post instead of how many posts you have on your site. Blogging daily has worked in the past for many people, but as the online noise has continued to get louder and louder, that strategy doesn’t really work anymore. 

Give yourself permission to relax and focus more on quality content rather than pumping out post after post.

One thoughtful, helpful post a week… heck even one post a month is going to benefit you and your business more than posting a blog just to post and not putting a lot of time or thought into it. People searching for information want QUALITY. If you reframe your mindset to maintaining quality information in your posts you will see huge returns over time.

2. Understand that blogging is a long game

This goes hand in hand with item #1. Blogging is a long game. It takes time and patience to see the fruits of your labor.

I have worked with people who have posted two or three blog posts and didn’t see an explosion in their business and got frustrated and never blogged again. 

I’ve also seen people who see more immediate results from social media and so they put all their time and effort into social media efforts only to realize that two years later what worked for a while wasn’t working any longer and they had no solid content to refer back to on their website when they needed it. 

Your mindset has to be in the right place when it comes to blogging. You have to understand that you are building a foundation and that is not something that is done overnight. But once you have laid that foundation you’ll find that the rest of the structure goes up faster because you have something solid to lean back on. 

Take your time and don’t get frustrated if you aren’t seeing quick wins. Be patient, your hard work WILL pay off. 

3. Create a system and stick to it

Creating a system when it comes to blogging can be the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to actually hitting publish. Many people have great ideas for posts but feel overwhelmed when it comes to putting the post together and getting it out into the world. 

Once you have the system put together, however, the publishing process becomes SO. MUCH. EASIER. 

You don’t have to spend the additional brainpower trying to remember what to put where and what things to click on or how to upload or size photos.

Spending a few hours to really nail down a process that works for you and then documenting it (so you don’t forget later) will exponentially increase your blogging skills and you’ll find you are more motivated to actually get blog posts out there into the world. 

If you want to fast track a system, book a coaching session with me and I can walk you through the exact steps to take to put your system together so you’ll be set up for success going forward! 

4. Don’t forget calls to action

This is the #1 mistake I see most creative business owners making. They forget to put calls to action in their blog posts. This all goes back to mindset and how you think about your blogs. 

If you think of a post as something you are supposed to do because everyone else is doing it, you will likely approach your blog as if it were a boring chore instead of a tool to help your potential clients learn more about you or figure out how to book you. 

If a potential client lands on your blog post, they need to be able to get to more information quickly, be able to easily get more information from you about how to work with you or at least easily know what to do next. 

If your blog post only provides two tiny arrows at the bottom saying to go to the next post or previous post you are doing a disservice to readers and potential clients. 

  • Provide a sidebar with more links to other posts or other places on your website.
  • Provide related posts at the bottom of every post with similar blog posts for them to click on. 
  • Provide a button or a link with some text that says “Ready to talk about booking a session?” that links to your contact page

These are just three ideas about various calls to action you can put on your blog post that show that you have the CLIENT’s best interest in mind when it comes to your blogging. Making this ONE change on my own blog has skyrocketed the number of inquiries I get and the number of clients I end up booking. 

Go back and update ALL of your previous blog posts with at least ONE call to action. NOW!!

I hope you found these ideas helpful and I hope that you are now motivated more than ever to eat your broccoli and get to blogging!!

If you loved learning about blogging from Cinnamon, take her blogging class at Reset to go even deeper. You don’t need to sign up for the breakout session in advance, just snag your ticket ASAP. Feel free to message Cinnamon on Instagram for an extra $50 off!

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