 This makes a lot of noise in the home. Help us. Thank you. All right, I'd like to introduce Kimberly Guptier, seven steps to becoming a full-time blogger. Kimberly is a local dog nutrition blogger and author of a now-scattered two-hour feed for dogs. She writes about feeding her four dogs and cat, dieting of fresh food, and has about eight blocks of information. Now she's months away from becoming a full-time blogger and she's going to share with you what she did together. Put your hand together for Kimberly. Yes. Okay, cool. Thank you so much for coming out. I was a little concerned. There are like 10 people in here. My name is Kimberly. My blog is Keep the Tail Wagging. I write about feeding my dogs a raw food diet and what I want to do straight from the start is let you guys know this is not going to be a session that you're going to walk out of here and be ready to go full-time in a week or two. It took me years, so it's going to take you years too, damn it. But what I do want to say is that there's no magic pill. What works for me may work for you. It may not work for you. I'm going to tell you what to do once you start feeling like you're ready to go full-time. And this could be a year from now or two years from now. I honestly wish I would have started doing these things years ago because then I would be prepared today. So this is what I needed to do to get here. My blog's focus. So Keep the Tail Wagging was started in 2011, December 24th, 2011 to be exact. I was complaining about those ASPCA commercials that were driving me absolutely crazy. My boyfriend being the most sarcastic person on the planet told me, why don't you go blog about it? And then I said, because maybe I will, because that's how we communicate in our house. And so I went and I started the blog. I actually had already been working on Keep the Tail Wagging and getting it going. But then I was just like, yep, this is it. This is the purpose of Keep the Tail Wagging is to tell a happy story. And I was going to tell about how I'm raising litter mates and they're so happy and healthy and blah, blah, blah, blah. Mostly people were tired of me talking about my puppies. In the two years it weren't puppies anymore. And people were like, we're tired of looking at pictures, we're tired of hearing, just looking at videos of them barking. And so I figured I'll have a blog and I would just talk about it there. A few years later, after years of my dog staying sick and going in and out of the vet's office, I was introduced to raw feeding, which is basically, yeah, feeding my dogs raw meat. That's a real basic explanation of what I feed my dogs, but that's what I do. And I switched my dog to a raw food diet. Within two weeks, most of his health issues vanished. And I was just like, wow. I continued learning and over that next year, it was so hard to figure out raw feeding. People were mean and judgmental. And I figured if I was having a hard time learning about raw feeding, I bet other people would be too. Plus one of my followers said, hey, Kimberly, would you mind talking about that raw feeding that you're doing? And I decided, you know what? That's what I'm going to do with my blog. I'm switching it to a raw blog. What I didn't realize was that I was one of the only people on the planet writing about raw feeding. So I fell into a niche that turned into a big deal. I got very lucky. So I always tell people if you want to turn your blog into something that will support you full time, you've got to narrow your focus. You can't be a fashion blogger. You need to narrow that focus into an audience. And you know that you're going to get that particular audience coming back to your blog over and over again. And you're not competing with all the huge fashion blogs out there. So when I was just a pet blogger, I was competing with thousands and thousands of blogs out there, not to mention Petco and PetSmart and all of these sites as well. But when I narrowed it down to raw feeding for dogs, I practically had zero competition. So I was able to dominate really quickly. But know that the money is in the list. I don't know if you guys have heard this, but I've heard it all throughout my blogging career. The money is in the list. You've got to start collecting those emails. And I was of the belief that, ugh, I get so tired of people emailing me. I don't want to be that person that's spamming people with my emails. They'll just come and read a blog post if they want to read it. That was wrong. I should have been collecting emails all along. I did it off and on here and there, but I didn't really have a purpose for it. I was just collecting emails and not really emailing anyone because I didn't know what to do with it. Well, guess what? The money is in the list. I now have a marketing consultant that I use that helps me set up my marketing bottles and I use my list to make money. It's very important. We'll talk a little bit about that later on. And then finally, you need to understand and be able to analyze your traffic. That is so important. It's so easy to sit there and put the Google Analytics on our site. Never go and look at it and try to understand what's coming, what's happening, what sites pure, blog post people are visiting, how long they're staying on your site. It may not seem like a big deal. You may be intimidated because it's like, I don't really understand it. You got to get over it. It's important. And that's one of those things that you're going to be able to use that information to leverage your business so that you are continually making money and it's not just like a one-off thing here and there. So that is the secret to get to where I am today. Now what we're going to talk about is what I should have been doing all along as well. In this session, I want you guys to feel free to raise your hand and answer a question. I will repeat the question so we can make sure we get it on the floor or you can go to that microphone and ask a question and I'm going to try and make this quick so that we can have a question and answer session at the end. Also, these slides are going to be available at KeepTheTailWagging.com backslash WCSEA 2018. They're uploaded right now. If you go to the WordCamp website and go to my session, those were my slides that I just turned in really quickly to meet the deadline. That's not what this is. So, Overwind Rays my idol so I had to put something about her in here. So, the first thing, you want to create a plan. I'm going to let that sit there. I'm actually not going to read that to you because you guys can read on your own but what I am going to tell you is that I have. When I started realizing that I might be able to do this full-time, I knew that I needed to create a plan because I'm a partner. He is my best friend and he was not comfortable with me saying hey, I'm going to go out full-time. I'm done. I'm quitting my job tomorrow because he was just sort of like okay, so what about benefits? What about the retirement plan? What if something goes wrong? And those are the things that I didn't even think about. I was so excited about the fact that I was finally making money. So, what I did is I took a step back and decided how much money am I going to need to replace my day job. And that includes not only taxes but also benefits and then my 401k. I'm going to have to take all that on for myself. And then I'm going to need to maybe not double that dollar amount but at least get a little bit more than that because I want to be able to put away money for savings. I want to be able to have a little nest egg. I want to start saving money to be prepared for that. So that's what I did. I looked at the calendar. I chose a date on the calendar. The date is actually probably like in a week or so. That date has now since moved out another six months because I'm not quite ready yet. But I have a date on the calendar now. It's June 30th, 2019. And what I'm going to do between now and then and what I have been doing is paying off debt. So I'm not going to be able to pay off the house. I'm not doing that well. But I'm going to pay off as much debt as possible. And I'm also going to save up six months worth of income. So that if anything goes weird or wonky, I have a nest egg. I also need to spend this next six months talking to someone about an investment account. I need to get the benefits down. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get the benefits down. So I might have to work a part-time job just to have benefits. But those are the type of things that I'm figuring out right now. So if you are thinking of using a blog as your full-time income, start making a plan now. Start really thinking these ways because you do not want to be in a place where you didn't think about this and then all of a sudden you're hit with the fact that to get just basic benefits is going to cost you six to seven hundred dollars a month. And those are really great benefits. And so those are the type of things you don't want to be shocked about that. Know your work. Too often I get emails from bloggers who are telling me that, oh my gosh, someone's going to pay me to do, name it. And they tell me they're so excited they're going to pay me fifty dollars. And it's just sort of like what exactly is fifty dollars going to cover in your life? If you are doing this full-time what is that fifty dollars going to cover? For me, it will cover a third of myself on bill. It's nothing. So know your work. Actually take the time and understand how much your bloggers are going to be getting paid. If you don't know bloggers who are open up about their finances that you could ask, I personally am very uncomfortable talking about money. So if my friends ask me, I'll tell them, but if a stranger comes and asks me how much I get paid blogging, I'm probably going to hand them off and just be like, I'm off. But find someone that you trust that can tell you how much they're making. If you can't find that person reach out to brands and see how much they're willing to pay. Find someone you know and start learning these things because you're going to need to use that to figure out what your hourly rate is. On the other side, figure out what your hourly rate is. Look at all the bills that you have to cover and then boil that down to how much do you need to make an hour or a day or a week or a month to cover all those bills and then meet in the middle so you can figure out how much you need to charge. So the thing that I'm noticing a lot of bloggers doing is that they're taking things for free. They're accepting that they're thinking, well, I'm going to do this work for exposure. That is a lie. There is no exposure. Or they're basically billing 50% of what they're worth. One thing I found is that if I say, oh, this is, I charge $300 for that. If a brand tells me, okay, where do I pay? Then I know I just shorted myself. And so the next time I'm going to charge $600 for it. And believe it or not, I know it's scary and I'm going to say something to the ladies of the audience. Sometimes we tend to be like, oh, I don't want to make someone mad. I'm uncomfortable. No, you set your rates. You do not let a stranger who doesn't know anything about your business set your rates. I finally recognize that I get over 200,000 people visiting my blog in a month. I have worked hard over the past few years to build an audience and people have over 20,000 likes on Facebook. And to me, that's nothing. I mean, I should, I feel like I should have over 50,000 likes because I'm awesome like that. But that's something that I work for. I am not going to allow a stranger to knock on my door and ask me to promote their products to my audience that I work hard to build for $50, or for $300. I'm going to charge them an insane amount of money. And if they don't want to pay for it, then they can know I'm okay with that. But I'm not going to allow someone to stand on my shoulders and access my audience for free or for treatment. And that's hard to get used to, but you've got to start doing it because if this is going to be your full-time business and this is how you pay bills, you can't afford to be giving away your time or your services for free or for treatment. Diversify your income. A few months ago, I woke up. I think it was a Saturday or Sunday morning. And I had a shock in my life. A shock? I don't often have meltdowns anymore. I used to always have a meltdown. I went to my blog and all of a sudden the white team did that. I'd have a meltdown. I mean, if something didn't work, if I felt like if I couldn't figure something out, I had a meltdown. I hated my website. I hated my computer. Everything was hard. How am I working? Why am I doing this doing this blog? Everything is frustrating. But then I figured everything out. Everything clicked and I kind of calmed down. And I was like, you know, I'm going all right. But a couple months ago, I had a complete udder. I was laying on the floor like, oh my god, this sucks. Type of meltdown. And the reason why is I got an email from Amazon.com telling me, hey, guess what? We're kicking you out of the affiliate program because you're not following the rules. Oh my god! Amazon affiliate was probably about a quarter of my income. That is about $2,000 a month that I just lost. And not only that, when Amazon kicks you out of the program because they pay you like what, 30 to 60 days later, all the money that I had accrued gone. I lost over $3,000 that day. And yeah, damn right. That's exactly it. I was worse. I was screaming. Yes. Why did they kick you out? I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you. I actually did break the rules. When you go to Amazon and if you have a product that you're promoting, you cannot do screenshots of the products on Amazon. Why? Because they don't always own the images. So you can't take another brand's images and put them on your website. That is a no-duh type of mistake that I made. I was stupid. Another thing you can't do is you can't screenshot reviews. So if you're trying to convince your followers that, hey, everyone loves this. You just got to tell them everyone loves it. Go over to Amazon and we'll get it. You cannot screenshot reviews. They have certain ways in which you can put images on your website. I just don't like the way it looks. So I was just doing a screenshot. It was a stupid, stupid, working mistake I should have known better. But in their email, they said, hey, we emailed you three weeks ago and told you to get this fixed. And since you didn't fix it, we're kicking you out. I never got that email. And so I called them and said, I never got an email. And they were like, well, let's look into this. And then I got an email probably a couple days later. It was four days total. Where they said, sorry about that. We reinstated you. And I fixed everything that they saw. And then I had a great conversation with the Amazon affiliate people, which I thought were impossible to reach. They were awesome and got everything fixed on my site. And now everything's good. But from that lesson, I learned, one, when you join an affiliate program, you gotta read those documents. And if you don't understand it, if you don't feel like reading it, you need to find someone to get on the phone and have them explain it to you. And so now, whenever I join a new affiliate program, I ask them about one link clothing. You can't cloak leaks for Amazon. I've never done that. But that's a lie. I did it years ago, but someone warned me about it. And so I stopped doing that. So what I mean by link clothing is that if there is a cloak key, if there is a product that I promote all the time, it's just easier for me to say, keepthetellwhacking.com backslashproduct. I can't do that with an affiliate program. They want to be as transparent as possible. Another thing that you can't do is you can't use your mailing list with some of the affiliate programs to promote affiliate links. So if you join MailChimp, if you join Aweber, make sure you understand what you can use that mailing list for and what you can't use it for. There's just a lot of rules. And so I learned from that, understand the rules. I got all the money back from it. So I was happy. But I learned that I don't want to be without a day job and find out that one part of my income drops away and is gone forever because I was told that if you get on the bad side of Amazon, you were done. There was no recourse. There is a recourse. You just got to be lucky enough to get someone on the phone. And I got lucky. This is how I monetize my blog. I have affiliate marketing and for those guys who don't know, that just basically means that if you buy something through a link on my site, I might get a commission for it. I have display advertising. A lot of people don't want to do display advertising because they don't want people to come to their site and be inundated with ads. I got over that. That was a big money maker. And 80% of my traffic is organic traffic. These people are used to going to sites with ads on them. It's okay. I have sponsored posts and sponsorships. Yes, they are different. A sponsored post is a one-time post, at least on my blog it is. A sponsorship is over a period of time. I will not allow anyone to sign up for a sponsorship on my blog for less than six months. It's just not worth my time. So it's six months or 12 months or it's nothing at all. I create products right here. I have a book. I'm writing my second book right now. This was crazy easy to write. It started out as a series of blog posts that I downloaded it into a Word document, cleaned it up, added some chapters, and then published it on Amazon.com. It took me about six months to do this. Just off and on working on it. Then I also offer a service. You can offer consulting, coaching, speaking. I do workshops on Ross eating. I do some up at Marysville and some of it, like a lot of dog traders will have me come out and speak to their clients about feeding their dogs or off their diet. I'm also going to start offering recipe cards that are completely balanced because that's a concern with my readers is how to do that. This, understand how your income fluctuates. There are people who do their business on a calendar year. That makes sense to me. Then there are the people who do it on a fiscal year. So it's July to June. What I've learned this year is that a lot of pet businesses do their business on a fiscal year. In about August, September, everyone stops paying for advertising because they're trying to figure out what they're going to do. My income drops drastically because of that. By drastically, I lost about $1,000 to $1,500 a month on advertising. Not the end of the year, but if I were working this full-time and not prepared for it, it would have freaked the hell out of me, especially after losing Amazon. So take the time to pay attention to your traffic over a 12-month period. Get to know the Google algorithm changes. What I found is that on August 1st, Google did a medic update which impacted all health blogs and websites and not just all health blogs and websites, but those that uploaded natural health. And in my traffic, I lost 2,000 on page views a month. Compared to a lot of the bigger sites out there, it's not a big deal. But that is another reason why my income dropped is because I lost, I went from making $200 a day in advertising to making $100 a day in advertising. It's a huge, huge difference. Pay attention to how your income grows and falls. That way, you can cover it. You can save money in the high months. You can be a little frugal in the low months. Or you can make plans for advertising campaigns during the low months. Those are the type of things you want to keep thinking about. That right there just shows you the little drop. But overall, my traffic is pretty okay. And then that below is just showing you that close to 80% of my traffic is organic traffic. Just people who are googling something and they come across my site. And so knowing these things helps me plan for how I'm going to schedule campaigns, how I'm going to monetize all of that. So you can track your income using a spreadsheet. I started out that way. I used good machines. But I have since gone to QuickBooks, which is a much easier way to do it because now we're in the years where I need to send my QuickBooks off to my CPA and you can do my taxes. Take the time to learn why your income increases and decreases. So increases are great and I love them, but I need to know why that happens so I can do it again. If my increase drops, I need to understand why that happens so I can avoid that in the future. When my income decreased in August and in September is when I saw it, I was on the phone with people trying to understand what was happening. Since I work with an advertising company and they have a vested interest in my traffic, they were on top of it as well. But as far as they were concerned, I was doing great, but I found out later about the the medic update. If you're not confident with SEO, you need to work with someone. I love SEO. I think it's fun, but I don't know everything about SEO. But SEO is so very important. You do not want to do this and get involved and just quit your job and be working full-time and not understand why your blog does what it does. And then finally, and this is not finally, I'm just saying that because I say that all the time, you need to work with your blog. So, this is how I promote my blog. I go crazy and keep in mind I work a full-time job still, but this is, it's so important to take advantage of all the things that are out there. It's easy to sit there and just, oh, okay, I'm just going to write a blog post. I'm going to publish and I'm going to share it on Facebook. But I also take my blog posts and I turn them into videos. There are programs that allow you to easily do that. There are programs that allow you to create content and it will import your content and help you get started on a video so that then you can then edit it up and then upload it to Facebook, upload it to YouTube. Create graphics. I actually think it's, you know, I'm going to tell you about it later, but I hired a graphic artist as an intern to help me create graphics for my site. There's all these wonderful, wonderful things that you can do but you've got to promote, promote, promote. I'm going to give a site called Missing Letter. So Missing but Letter without the last beat, L-A-T-T-R. Missing Letter will just basically import your R-S-S speed. It sets up shares for a 365 day period so it's not every day but I think it's like six to nine shares that is going to be over a year and it makes it so easy to go in and schedule out your shares and boom, that's one less thing that you have to do that's super easy to do and if you're lucky you can find someone to do it for you. I know because I have not found anyone that knows how to use Missing Letter. Put your blog like a business. This is a big mistake that I see so many bloggers making where I will go to events and bloggers address like they are tourists in Florida and no one will take you seriously. Each summer I go to a trade show called Superism in Las Vegas and you would think oh my gosh, you're going to be in Las Vegas for a week. That's going to be fun. Yeah. For that trip, I actually go shopping for the trip but I mostly go shopping because that's fun and then I plan out my clothes for the entire event because I have meetings to go to quick brands, I have events to go to, I actually was on the news when I was in Vegas this past year so I have a very particular outfits and I dress based on corporate casual, I would call it. I do not go to Vegas wearing, I wear dark jeans because dark jeans seem a little nicer than light jeans and never wear ripped jeans but the reason why is because I am walking around I'm actually just supposed to be there to report on SuperZoo I'm not really there to have people say hey, I want to hire you to promote my products but that does happen and the reason why it does happen is because I look like a person who knows what I'm doing. If I walked around SuperZoo wearing ripped jeans and a t-shirt with a big old kitty on it and a baseball cap no one is going to trust me with their money I need to look like someone that is trustworthy that's a business person so treat your blog like a business so I have we are still practicing on understanding what office hours look like in our office but we're going to get there yeah my boyfriend one day I was on the phone with a brand and he came to me and said hey I need your help wrote like do you really need my help yes and I'm like do you really need my help yes so I go okay let me call you right back I'm so sorry no problem I go outside and he's like fixing a bicycle he says put your finger here and I'm just like what's been kidding me and that's when the etiquette started we were understanding when I'm sitting at this desk I am at work and he will say but you were in your pajamas it doesn't matter I'm at work right now you cannot interrupt me so get a little office these are work hours you know make sure you set aside any time it's easy to get really super stoked and do all of this especially after an event like work camp I'm going to do all these things I'm going to do it and then all of a sudden you're completely another overly well and burned out do not allow yourself to do that treat it like have a weekend I sometimes have a day or two and it's hard I feel guilty because I keep doing stuff but I will not touch my blog I allow myself real housewives all the cities are on right now except for New York it's so great maintain an editorial calendar I want to have that out for you but I am old school I have to have a paper calendar so I can look at the entire calendar and make plans of what I'm going to do it's so important to me to be able to be organized and know every single day what I need to do and the reason why is because I have so much on my plate right now that it's easy to become overwhelmed and then before you know it two weeks have gone by and you haven't done anything Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up I have to be planned for that and so that's what I did yesterday Friday and Cyber Monday by creating a new marketing funnel you need to track your income and expenses you need to hire a CPA unless you're an accountant I'm an accountant I don't do my taxes I don't know how to do business taxes I know how to do personal taxes but my blog is not a person so I have a CPA I have an attorney as well my blog name is Trademark I am an escort now I have no idea what that means when my CPA said that it was really important that I be an escort so now I'm an escort I said that sound like I said escort that's not what I said opportunities because these are the things that you're going to need to get help the marketing consultant that I work with on my blog I got because I network and I know it's hard and I'm going to put something in here these are the ways you can network but hey most of us are introverts I know it may seem like I'm an extrovert because look at me I'm smiling I'm talking I'm happy but I am going to sleep like the dead tonight when I wake up tomorrow morning I'm going to be like I'm not going to work here that's horrible exhausted when you see me tomorrow morning I'm going to be a zombie because it takes all the energy out of me after a super zoom I sleep for an entire day where I just don't do anything it's horrible but you have to take breaks for yourself find a quiet place to hide in me so you can have a time to do yourself you also want to get to know people's names I don't know about you guys if I suck you suck at people's names and I'm looking down looking for my it's over there but I look around and when people's tags are flipped over it's like you are you're saying hi to me I don't remember your name I'm sorry I'm good at faces I know I knew you I know I signed you somewhere but I will never ever remember your names and repeating a name three times does not work I'm still figuring out but one day I'll get there but networking is important so I do not know how much time I have but I wanted to make sure I have plenty of time for questions so these are my resources these slides are available there is a do you guys want to take a picture of that because I'm gonna so there's the slides right there WCC SEA 2018 questions because I just look at it and I'm like okay no I totally understand and that's where I was too and I'm the first person but what I did is I mean there are services you can use that make it easier or supposedly make it easier I just feel like it's a little out of this in a different package I'm not learning anything so what I finally did was just sit down and focus on one section of Google Analytics and I focused on the posts that people were visiting the most and getting an understanding of what about these posts were making people visit my site and that's actually when I really started monetizing was because I went and looked at those posts and figured out what's so special about them and noticed oh there's a lot of errors in this site and then wow there's an opportunity to monetize I monetized my first blog post it was five alternatives to raw high cheats for dogs and the next month I made 50 bucks and that was like what and so I went through that entire list I think it was like 10 or 15 and I did the same thing for each post I cleaned it up I optimized it and then I monetized it and then I slowly started going through that way so just start with a section instead of trying to take it all in at once and do another section of it and become really good at understanding what's happening there and then do another section and don't try and do all this in the next month it took me years to get here and I know it sounds discouraging but if you have a day job be grateful for that day job because that day job is allowing you to take the time you need to learn everything that you need to learn today I still don't know everything about my Google Analytics but I know a lot more than I did in the beginning another thing I do is let's go back I use a second site called Clicky I do two different analytics programs I do the Clicky is a premium program so I pay for it every year and the reason why I have two is because one Google Analytics is free and there is no customer service for Google Analytics I need sometimes to talk to somebody so a Google Analytics is doing something wonky I want to before I freak out go and check if the same thing is happening over on Clicky.com if it's happening on Clicky then ok then this is real if it's just happening on Google Analytics then it's like you know I need to dig a little deeper and figure out what's going on fortunately for me both of them have trapped with each other and I haven't had a problem yay yes one is called absolutely what are the programs that will help you turn your RSS feed into videos Lumen 5 is one it's not perfect but it's great what it does is it will give you a bunch of slides with words on them that are directly from your blog post it'll give you the images it won't take images from your site it has its own stock images and then you can go in and edit and create it you can add music to it I believe you can do a voiceover if you want to but it's super quick and easy to do but I prefer Annie Motow now Annie Motow will not take your RSS feed but it's crazy fast and easy in fact yesterday I made three videos with Annie Motow it's super easy to do and those videos look amazing I mean people think that they're professionally done and so that is I believe you're gonna do that I'm gonna not Annie Motow is A A-N-I-M-O-T-O Annie Motow yes yes sponsored blog posts do you charge a flat rate and do you keep them up for the whole time do they expire because it just seems like you charge a flat rate and then you leave it up it seems like they're getting a pretty good deal on that kind of stuff they actually are so this question is how do I charge for a sponsored post I do charge a flat rate my sponsored posts are really in depth and so the reason why I don't mind charging a flat rate and just leaving it that way is one I'm making income on my traffic so my traffic is monetized through the advertising revenue but I write a sponsored post not in it like hey look at this brand they're awesome I always leave it into a story about me and my dogs so that it has legs and that just means that this is gonna be a valuable post for years to come and so it's always going to attract traffic so that's benefiting me and that's gonna add to my advertising income so I don't mind doing that one thing that I will do is because I have advertising income for one month I'll leave that post ad free so they don't have to compete with their competitors ads showing up on a sponsored post that they paid for it's just gonna be one blank post and then I'm done and then you turn the ad back on we're gonna add it back on okay that's my traffic okay yes okay I spend money on Facebook or Instagram ads I do pay for Facebook ads but they are like campaigns only I will not pay for a Facebook ad campaign for a sponsored post I feel like my traffic and my audience is enough and one thing that I do is like for instance if I do a sponsored post for name a product so they want me to promote those Apples because no one knows about Apples I'm gonna write a blog post about the benefits of Apples for Dogs I might even do a video about the benefits of Apples for Dogs I might even do a video going hey guess what guys these guys just sent me these great Apples look at how shiny they are in a few weeks there's gonna be a blog post just about how great these Apples are but all of this stuff ultimately benefits me and that's who my people who come to me for sponsored posts they're actually not looking to they can pay for their own Facebook advertising if they're looking to spread awareness of their Apples what I want to do is for me to tell my audience about Apples I don't have to do Facebook advertising to reach my followers on Facebook and Instagram I treat Instagram as a here's a pretty picture of my dog's meal and leave it at that simply because I only have so much time and I like to spend most of my social media time on Facebook and YouTube if you go back to the beginning don't know what you know now the first 500 or 1000 subscribers what would you do differently? what would I do if I can go back to the beginning and that is stop being afraid of email marketing I was terrified of it I was really afraid not only of email marketing but of advertising as well I quickly gained a lot of traffic because I was so alone in this niche and I didn't monetize it at all I didn't take it, I didn't know how to I didn't want to annoy people and I didn't know what I was doing I had so many people telling me about that type of traffic and I was just like I don't know, I did not know but there was all that information out there and I would hear about it but I didn't know how to do it and I was kind of afraid to do it I wish I would have reached out and gotten the help that I needed a long time ago yes so keyword research can be kind of tough with like a real niche niche do you have any tips for how to come up with topics and how to optimize those and that sort of thing I really thought I had that on here but oh it is, right there, hop keyword I learned that from Amy right here I have a word a word press meetup group called, it's a DIY meetup group and Amy was kind of had to come and talk to our group about SEO but those are the type of things that I use I also do things like I don't use a whole Google Google keyword tool I just type in and see what comes up and I go and I look at what is ranking high and then I try and use those type of keywords I mean and it's just it's not, it's funny because I know a lot of people put a lot of time and money into keyword research I never really have I've been pretty fortunate and lucky about it and also it helps because I'm very involved in the raw feeding community so I know how we all talk and many of my blog posts like many of them are about my own personal life and what I'm learning and the questions that I'm getting from my readers so I have the keywords right there the email that they sent to me and your big job still and how much time do you, I mean it could be super, super busy I am super, super busy, how much time do I work in the day and how much time do I work on my blog my big job is a 40 hour a week job my blog is probably a 30 hour a week job I am a superhero I have about 27 to 28 hours in a typical day and I probably sleep for an hour and a half every day so if you guys can't do that you're in this show yes different social media sites that you've been in mind? no, I actually mostly post to Facebook oh I'm sorry, do I post my blogs to different social media sites I used to post like to LinkedIn to Twitter and to Facebook one is to sort of like, my audience isn't on Twitter so I was just spamming Twitter because I wasn't spending any time over there if anyone had a question about something I shared they were, you know, I wasn't going to see it because I wasn't over on Twitter I was on Facebook, I have groups I have my pages I have my profile, so I do everything on Facebook and then I take my blog post and this is a session that Bob Dunn is doing I believe after this one where you can convert that blog post into different types of media basically what I do, I turn it into videos I turn it into graphics I use them on my mailing list I do all of that, sometimes I will like, Facebook has notes last weekend I was at a conference and so I was logging in Facebook notes and then I'll take those notes eventually it leaves them to update and create new blog posts on my site and then videos and so on and so forth so that is what's worked best for me is find the social media sites that work for you, a lot of times you'll end up spinning your wheels don't do that, go where your audience is and then talk to them there yes how often do you email subscribers? email subscribers every Tuesday I do it once a week except when they first join my list they get a follow up series of three emails and it's just sort of like, hey thanks for joining, my name is Kimberly this is what I'm all about this is some great information for you yes, thanks again for joining you're going to get one more email the last email is like, hey, buy my book then they go on a regular weekly email email them on Facebook I'm finding myself using looking at my email less and less all the time because my friends just send me messages on Facebook so, how do I respond to that? do you ever send an email on Facebook? do I use the Facebook Messenger for my email list? no, I actually think that that is atrocious and maybe I'll change my mind in a year or two but it drives me crazy when I accidentally end up clicking something and it means that someone is going to start emailing me via Messenger I am kind of popular in the blogging space not blogging space, but the pet rocky world I get so many messages via Messenger via email, everything that I can barely keep up with it and I can't have people sending me random stuff that I don't need so I don't want to do that to people I find that email and I use Gmail and then people do message me via Messenger and I email or message them back but I try not to use that service and another reason why I don't want to use it is if Facebook goes away then I just lost a valuable thing I want my list to be mine not Facebook's and I'm worried that Facebook might just go away I don't know, anyone else? I'm an email service provider Do I use an email service provider? I use Aweber Aweber I just switched to Aweber I was with MailChimp for a really long time I use Aweber and I just started using lead pages and I didn't want to have to do it I know I use Divi that's my theme for my blog and Divi allows you to do landing pages and things like that I just didn't like the way the sign up pages looked they weren't as glossy and pretty and so I would lead pages I figured that it's hard to spend money and this is something that I should have said be wary about dumping dumping a lot of money into different things it's easy to get excited about something and give someone a few hundred dollars thinking that it's going to change everything and it changes nothing or you end up not using it don't waste money that way really take the time and educate yourself, ask people questions before I went with lead pages I talked to everybody about what my options were I could have done the same thing for free but it wouldn't have looked as nice and so my thought was that I'll go ahead and pay for a service that looks great and then my list will pay for that and then I don't have to worry about it but just really be careful about what you want to spend money on it's easy, so easy to get people to talk to you into paying for their service that'll teach you how to monetize their blog you don't need that all the information is out there you just got to take the time and go and find it yes, five minutes I got five minutes you guys yes did you find that you also use Mailchip and their templates you know what I stopped using Mailchip because Mailchip became too expensive for what I was using it for which was basically nothing and so I switched to Aweber the reason why I switched to Aweber is because they reached out to me and said hey, you want to come and join us we'll give you a month for free and we'll teach you how to use it and they did I actually have a person at Aweber that emails me each month to see how I'm going, they check how my emails go and they contact me and say hey, that last email you did did this well you had this new opens, you know here's an idea for you, why don't you start doing this they are amazing and so I was, yeah someone I could have gone to even another one but I'm really happy with their customer service and I don't know if this is normal or if it will last but I'm happy right now so I'm going to stick with them and they're super easy to use how big is your list? how big is my list? my list is very small I left a list of over 5,000 on Mailchimp and now I have a list of about 1,000 right now I just started it on Aweber you can't transfer it I didn't want to take my list with me because I don't trust that those people join the list for the same reasons I want to build this list through my funnels and I want to know exactly because I have 3 lists these people joined this list because they're brand new to raw feeding and these people joined this list because they want to know about how to save money on raw feeding and these people joined this list because they want to give away and they want to win something and that I know how to deal with each of those lists also I didn't want to have a bunch of people add it to this new list and then I start emailing all the time and then they just all unsubscribe or something I want people knowing exactly what they're getting into on that note, did you even though you didn't have the save that list did you send one final email saying hey I'm leaving the service and you want to stick with me and resubscribe so he's asking did I warn the people on my whole list that I was leaving and yes I did I posted all about it I sent people 2 reminder emails to say hey this is the last email that you're going to get and here's the link and yes just how about you just ask people about monetizing and stuff can you explain what's been the best thing for you for monetizing I'm sure you covered it already but isn't it a show so the best way so I'm just going to say the best ways to monetize my blog have been the most profitable ways number one is the advertising line and it is fantastic that company is amazing they have a vested interest in me making money because when I make money they make money and the resources that they have for bloggers they have a group they have you can talk to them I mean I am blown away and because I have a natural focused blog I don't need science diet ads showing up on my raw feeding blogs but if I go through and say hey no more ads that's going to cut into my revenue so they worked with me to find a way to deliver the most amount of ads so I can make the most money without sacrificing my message I mean ultimately with ads if you're visiting my site it's going to be your search history that drives the ads that show up on my site but I still want to be able to control some of the content that's showing up on my site and they have been amazing about it the second one is affiliate marketing I've gone to several affiliate marketing programs I'm very particular about what I would join because I only promote the products that I use or have used or believe in with my dogs to my audience and that's because if they have questions I can answer those questions and so it makes it just so much easier but that is my second money maker and then after that would be the sponsored posts and the sponsorships I think one more question one more question please so how do you take the lead pages and integrate that into your use of WordPress it always seems like why not just WordPress or why not just lead pages and lead pages doesn't have a good URL I think my brain goes weird a lot so how do I integrate lead pages in my WordPress website there is a plugin and that helped me integrate it and the reason why I went with lead pages and not just WordPress is because it just didn't look nice I've seen other sites that have collected emails in exchange for like here's a guide to help you do this and it looks so nice when I was just doing it with WordPress it just looked awful because they would be on my site and they click a link and they're taking off my site to this really weird page where they have to put in their email address and it's not clear if it's mine or not and I couldn't figure out how to make that look nice so I had to come to another page when I just integrated lead pages into my website they just entered everything into my website and that was it it was just so nice and easy so that's what I ended up doing yes do you have an incentive for the email like did they get a guide yes I do have incentives for emails what I do is I just pick up the best incentives I've found are my list posts so 22 ways to save money I just turn it into a slide share like this export it into a PDF and give it to them I save it into Google Docs and then have that ring so people can go and get it that way the easiest thing to do so thank you so much