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 is the great blogging paradox.
My blog gave me credibility. And the credibility helped me land lucrative consulting gigs. And as a result, when I compare my blog income (which is a few thousand dollars per month) to my consulting income, I still make more money consulting. This is frustrating!
The Great Blogging Paradox
If the aggregate of both your blog and consulting (or day job) income is hard to ignore, you’re stuck in the blogging paradox. You end up working longer hours to achieve both blog and consulting success. And this is not sustainable.
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 blogging checklist.