Blogger Generates $2,500 a Month With One Post

Quote of the Day:

“Very narrow areas of expertise can be very productive. Develop your own profile. Develop your own niche.”

– Leigh Steinberg

Today’s episode is a special one, as we have Gael Breton from Authority Hacker as our guest speaker.

Authority Hacker is Steve’s favorite resource on building an authority site. It is full of actionable advice, and Steve often gets lost on the site, losing hours without even realizing it. Gael, in turn, recommends Robert Cialdini’s Influence. He tries to emulate Cialdini’s approach to marketing, breaking down processes, etc.

Self-published authors are generally focused on books. But if you want to branch out and blog, then we’d highly recommend Gael’s strategy of QUALITY over QUANTITY. When beginning a website, create long-form content first, then make the website beautiful and professional. When you begin to have a bigger audience, that is the time to create shorter-form content.

When an author is starting out, they are generally busy with books, and don’t have a lot of time to blog. What would be your recommended strategy?

My recommended content strategy for beginners when they have no time for a blog is as follows:

Start a podcast or YouTube channel with transcription (short-form content).
Produce one or two pieces of epic content every year.
Be sure to spend time promoting it.

Example: How to Make Money Blogging: What We Can Learn from 23 Successful Bloggers

Would you recommend driving traffic back to your site instead of YouTube or iTunes?

Yes. Getting traffic to your site should be a primary goal. Include a transcript, description and links.

I recommend the following services for podcast transcription:

Why Content Upgrades Are the Single Thing That Will Rock Your Email List (Plus, the 2 tools that will make creating them a breeze)

One of my favorite posts is the podcast episode “How We Transformed a Successful Blog Post into $2,500 / Month Passive Income.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

That started out as an article about juicing on Health Ambition. It started with 400 to 500 visits per day, and I was making around $200/month through Google Adsense. Then, as the article really took off, we created a juicing ebook as a content upgrade in exchange for readers’ emails. After two months, we had an email list of 24,000. Then we found an affiliate offer from Clickbank and offered it to our subscribers. Then we followed that up with more ebook content. We also used Pinterest to drive views to the post. And when it came to creating the ebook, we hired a nutritionist to provide a lot of value. It took us three weeks to create the book, then we put up a sales page. Ultimately, it was all about recognizing an opportunity and then finding creative ways to capitalize on it.

Let’s say a site is getting good traffic to a few particular pages. What would you recommend to scale that up?

First, ask yourself if you could make money from that topic. If so, put up a cheap product (approximately $7) on the page in week one. Also put it on the Thank You page. Then check your stats to see if between 0.5% and 1% of your traffic will buy. If they do, try to create a more valuable product, and also think about creating an upsell product.

What do you recommend to authors who have already self-published a few books and want to upscale their business (so as not to rely completely on Amazon)?

First of all, this is much more complicated if you are a fiction writer. As a nonfiction writer, you have more options. You can create your own video course or other products, or include a free bonus at the end of your book. You can also do affiliate marketing by integrating mentions of other people’s products into your content.

What are your favorite resources or tools to build an authority site?

In 2016, you decided to relaunch the podcast and ramp up things at Authority Hacker. Can you talk about that?

In the beginning, I just wanted to share my experience building authority sites. But after one and a half years, we decided to expand it to a community who do the same things. Authority Hacker Pro was launched in September 2015. We documented all the processes, templates, etc., that we use to build authority sites, and shared this with our readers. It just blossomed from there!

That’s it for today. Thanks everyone for tuning in, and a special thanks to Gael Breton from Authority Hacker. When you get the chance, check out the Authority Hacker Podcast. Gael mentioned that he gives free access to some of his premium videos for reviewers on iTunes.

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