Yaro Starak is a professional blogger and serial Internet entrepreneur. As the founder of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, he teaches others how to build a sustainable online business through blogging, selling digital products, and more.

Yaro began blogging in 2004 in an effort to get traffic to his essay editing business. At the time, he didn’t know anything about blogging—and he isn’t even an editor himself. These two factors made those early days challenging.

He remembers those early days of blogging being like school: he had to write blog posts about things he didn’t really care about. Yaro soon realized he preferred to write about entrepreneurship and so he began to pivot the original blog. He wrote more about how the business was going and less about the subject of editing itself.

Soon he realized that this wasn’t the best way to use his editing business blog. That’s when Yaro decided to start www.entrepreneurs-journey.com as a place to tell stories and explore blogging. He never intended for it to be his primary business; Entrepreneur’s Journey was supposed to be a hobby and a way for him to discuss what he was doing with his business.

Even back in 2004, Yaro had years of experience selling different things online. Before his essay editing business, he had an online store selling collectible cards. So he had a wealth of stories to draw from when blogging at Entrepreneur’s Journey.

In 2007, after a few years of blogging and talking about entrepreneurship, Yaro produced a membership site that was really a course on blogging. He was one of the first people to actually use a blog to sell his own product.

Today, his business focuses on helping people learn the art of blogging and build an email list to sell digital products.

Yaro has a lot of experience with blogging, both for business and for fun. The best thing you can do, of course, is to make sure that you love your topic, even if you’re blogging for business—that passion shows through.

If you started a blog for fun and now want to make money from it, there’s a few things you can do to make the switch.

Be very clear on what your topic is. What strategy are you going to use to cover that topic?

What problem are you helping to solve for your audience? And how are you helping them solve it?

In order to succeed online, you have to build an audience. You have to get visitors to your content and you have to give them reasons to keep coming back.

If you’re going to start a blog and be the main content creator, you have to figure out where you’re going to pull value from. Where will you get your ideas? How will you develop stories?

If you don’t have a success story of your own to tell, you can report the success stories of others.

You can also do research and gather statistics and data to help your audience.

Once you’ve gathered an audience, the next step is to build an email list to help you connect with that audience outside of the blog itself.

Every new subscriber should be taken through a sequence of emails that leads them to an opportunity to buy something from you.

Remember: You want to sell solutions to problems your readers are having.

Once you’re clear on who your target audience is and what their problems are, you can set up a simple funnel system that will allow them to give you money for the value you provide.

Here are the steps to set up your funnel:

When you’re starting to build your business, you may have to do everything yourself. Creating content and products as well as email sequences and sales messages takes a lot of time and energy. As your business develops, you should create evergreen content to populate an email sequence that sells an evergreen information resource you’ve written.

This is your true end goal: to create an automatic money machine that provides value to your audience and makes money for you, whether you’re actively working or not.

You can use your own experiences as case studies on your blog.

Yaro had an online essay editing business when he started his Entrepreneur’s Journey blog. One of his earliest case studies was about how he changed the way he did pricing for his essay editing business.

When he started his essay editing business, the process went like this:

This was a very cumbersome process, so Yaro implemented a standardized pricing structure based on the length of the document and how quickly the editing needed to be done.

He blogged about this experience on entrepreneurs-journey.com, using it to show readers how they could simplify their businesses.

Case studies are basically success stories. The best case studies start with someone who has the same problem as your target audience; they talk about how that person dealt with the problem.

Case studies are good at converting your target audience into customers because they show how somebody facing the same problem they have solved that problem. It’s easy to pivot from a case study to selling the solution presented in the case study.

The secret to being successful as a blogger in today’s world is intentional blogging.

Intentional blogging happens when you ask yourself, “What do I want my target audience to do after reading this blog post?”

Do I want them to:

By starting with your end in mind, you can craft a blog post that communicates your point better and serves your audience better.

It’s important to differentiate between traffic and traffic that leads to customers.

— Yaro Starak

Usually Yaro sends the first blog post to his entire email list. In that first email, he allows his audience to express interest through clicking a special link. He creates a list segment based on whether they click the link or not.

For the people who express interest, Yaro make sure that they receive all of the blog posts and all of the promotional emails related to that product. If they’re not interested, they don’t get the additional content.

In the case of a larger course, Yaro will only finish the first module of the course before beginning the autoresponder sales sequence. He’ll do the rest once the work of setting up the sales sequence has finished.

When you’re launching your first product, joint venture partners can help, because they take some of the work out of creating new material and let you gain exposure to new audiences.

Later, you may have different needs. Yaro got out of the habit of doing joint venture partnerships because he didn’t want his email list to become overwhelmed with pitches for other people’s products.

There are two metrics that matter when it comes to blog posts in 2017:

Engagement is key. That is why longer blog posts usually end up performing better. Remember, your blog posts are there to convert readers into customers.

The longer your blog post is, the more time you have to engage your audience.

When deciding on what type of blog posts you should create, deliver them in whatever way is most comfortable for you. As long as you provide an opportunity for your audience to engage with your content, it doesn’t matter how you deliver that content.

You can:

Platforms are forever.

You build a platform one time and it continues to deliver value forever. You work hard once and you get paid over and over again into the future.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to build your platform. The internet isn’t going anywhere. However long it takes you it is time well spent.

https://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/ — Yaro’s blog.

Platform Launch Plan — Watch Yaro’s webinar on how to build a platform.

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