Jason Brubaker

How To Solve The Great Blogging Paradox This Year

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When I started blogging, my goal was to pay all bills and travel at will. I also planned to share all my blogging successes with you. What I didn’t anticipate was just how much blog notoriety can distract you from your goals. And this situation is what I think of as the great blogging paradox. Let me explain…

Growing my blog gave me credibility. And the credibility helped me land lucrative consulting gigs. And one of those gigs turned into a six figure salary, complete with a VP title. As a result, any time I thought about blogging full time, I first compared my online income to my blog income. And without fail, I always made more money on the job. Ugh!

blogging paradox

The Great Blogging Paradox

You’ll know you’re in the blogging paradox when your job income continually surpasses your blog income. And no matter what you do, you can’t seem to find any way to get ahead. Then when you combine your blog income with your job income, it’s a lot of money. At those moments, it hardly makes sense to quit your job. So you end up working longer hours to improve both your blog and job success. And it’s an endless cycle.

To break free from the “day job” you need to get super serious about your blogging goals. When I started out, making $5 dollars a day was the goal. Now I’m aiming to make at least $500 dollars per day. I imagine your goal falls somewhere in the middle. To break free of this blogging paradox, you need to increase your numbers (while keeping things simple).

Here Are Some Numbers To Focus On:

1. Increase email subscribers: Despite what the latest and greatest blogging trends will have you believe, focusing on getting email subscribers is the primary goal of your blog. Focus on increasing email subscribers and the sales will follow.

2. Find the value per email subscriber: You can roughly find the value of each email subscriber by dividing your monthly revenue by your monthly subscribers. With my blog, each subscriber is worth $2.40. This number is considered low by most internet marketing standards. But theoretically, it means I can spend up to $2.39 to acquire a subscriber and still be profitable.

3. Get more organic email subscribers: Aside from being free, organic subscribers are often the most engaged (and the most ready to buy). So you need to figure out how to get more. Since a lot of people find my blog through my daily article posts on Facebook, I started sharing more articles each day. This sounds obvious, but it has already increased my organic subscriber rate.

Again, my goal is to create at least $500 dollars per day in blogging revenue by the end of this year. If you are interested in following my journey, you may want to download my toolkit.

Want Success Online? Find A Business Mentor

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Wouldn’t it be great to find a business mentor? Someone who could guide you through the ups and downs of growing a successful online business? This was one of the questions asked during an inspirational talk I was presently watching on YouTube. It was 3AM and I couldn’t sleep…

This was during the 2008 economic collapse and I was running out of money. I am not sure what YOU did during the time, but I was living in a state of worry. And the only thing that kept me sane was watching success gurus drone on and on about all the stuff successful people do when times get tough. And times were tough.

business mentor

Want Success Online? Find A Business Mentor

One dude mentioned about how birds of a feather flock together. I heard it before, but he went on to talk about how you become the people you spend the most time with. If you want success, you need to hang around successful people. And that got me thinking. Most the people around me were losing jobs and running out of money too. Everyone was worried. And that sucked.

He also went on to talk about how success leaves tracks. And if you want to accelerate your own success, one thing you can do is find someone who has accomplished the things you want to do and see if that person would be willing to serve as a business mentor.

If the whole mentoring concept is new to you, I’ll make it simple – A mentor is someone who takes an interest in your success. He or she will be available for advice and to commensurate, but may not be directly involved in your business. If this is interesting, here are some tactics for finding your own business mentor:

  1. Compile a list of people you want to meet.
  2. Write them a letter. Follow up with a phone call.
  3. When someone answers, reference the letter and ask for the meeting.
  4. If you get the meeting, awesome! If not, try again later.
  5. Repeat the process.

Finding a mentor will go a long way towards helping you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate your success. To get started, figure out what you want to accomplish. What do you want out of life? From there, find people who have achieved your goal. And if you want a really awesome resource for finding a mentor, check out SCORE.