If you’ve not yet read my flagship blog post on The Redwood Strategy, I recommend you do now. It should be very clear that I’m big on the long-term use of a blog post.

I like to build leverage… not a hamster wheel.

In that post, too, you will see a content upgrade.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet which is highly specific to a single blog post. As of this writing, that content upgrade is converting at 11.27%.

This is a simple, concrete action you can take to more effectively build your list.

Pick one post. Preferably one already getting some traffic. And make a content upgrade for it.

This week's (and the first) Weekly Update. :) On the docket this week...

• The latest on The Daily
• An update on the Coffee Break Blogging podcast. Is it coming back?
• What's new inside THE LAB
• #AskBMA

For #ASKBMA this week, I'm answering:

• Third party landing page creator (like LeadPages) versus Wordpress landing page builders. Which is better?
• Should you put your customer downloads behind a login, or send it via email?
• Thrive Themes and SumoMe?
• Should you use a pop-up on your site to build your list?
• What (in my experience) works even better than a popup but isn't so annoying?

Quick Links:

• THE DAILY - http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/daily/
• PODCAST - http://www.coffeebreakblogging.com
• THE LAB - http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/lab/
• ASK BMA - http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/ask/
• Thrive Leads - http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/go/thriveleads
• Thrive Architect - http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/go/architect 

“Subscribe to our Newsletter” is quite possibly the dumbest call to action ever to litter the internet. It might have worked back in the 90’s when “You got Mail!” made people feel special. But, today? Ha!

Today, you need to give people a damn compelling REASON to subscribe to your email list. And that reason is simply an opt-in offer, otherwise known as a lead magnet.

Now, for most of you, I would imagine the concept of a lead magnet is nothing new. However, ask yourself this…

Do you have only one or two lead magnets?

If so, then time to get busy. Because…

The more lead magnets you have, the easier it is to grow your list.

It has been a long time since we've done a new episode of Coffee Break Blogging. I've had many people ask if I had any plans on bringing it back.

With this short episode, I explain what happened. And, what's coming.

Do you run a service business? Are you a consultant or a coach?

If so, then you’ve likely thought about the issue of how to scale. The idea of trading time for money is something many people grow allergic to. There’s nothing wrong with it at all, however every service provider eventually starts to look ahead at how to evolve the business beyond that.

How can you scale a service business? How can you turn it into a product? How can you begin to set things up so that it isn’t simply a trade between time and money?

In this episode of Coffee Break, I’m talking specifically to people who run service businesses. We’ll be discussing 7 specific strategies to begin executing so that you can begin to scale a time-based business.

This isn’t a transition one just jumps into. And I’m not going to recommend you just jump into the world of membership sites and online course creation. There are certain systemic things you need to be doing internally to strategically AIM your business toward more systematization and productization.

It is a myth that the kind of marketing and revenue generation strategies we discuss around the Blog Marketing Academy somehow don’t apply to service businesses. They most certainly do.

In this episode of Coffee Break, we're taking a little side road off the usual fare and discussing the issue of money itself.

Specifically, Bitcoin.

The reason I think this topic is important is because we have to understand the very medium we deal in when it comes to generating money with our business. Most of us deal in the US dollar and we tend to think that higher quantities of dollars is automatically better. But, when you look at the nature of the dollar itself and it's colossal lack of purchasing power over the last few decades, we see that more isn't necessarily better.

We run our businesses - or seek to build them - in order to provide purchasing power to ourselves.

So, we discuss Bitcoin here as something new. We'll discuss the cryptocurrency and its advantages. Plus, we're talking about 6 specific reasons why I think all business owners (but, especially online businesses) should be considering accepting Bitcoin payments as a payment option on their checkout pages.

For the longest time inside The Lab, my private community was running inside of a closed Facebook group.

• My members most likely are already on Facebook
• They find it easy to use
• It saves me hassle
• Notifications will mean they see conversations

As I now sit here a couple years later, I realize I was mistaken.

In this episode of Coffee Break Blogging, I share with you 7 specific reasons why I decided; after a couple years of having my member community on Facebook, I switched to a privately hosted forum for our Lab Community.

I also recommend that anybody else looking to have a private community inside of their membership site should set up from the start on a private forum that you own and control.

Make time for this episode... and learn from my mistakes.

Every blogger on the face of the earth wants more traffic. But, what are the most effective ways to get it? What are the best promotion strategies that are working in 2017?

In this episode of Coffee Break Blogging, we dive into the world of blog promotion yet again... this time covering the top 10 most effective strategies for promoting your blog.

We are most definitely leaving behind the content "hamster wheel" that most bloggers run on to try to promote their blog. You know the one. It goes like this:

1. Post a new blog post.
2. Share it on social media.
3. Rinse and repeat as often as you possibly can.

Simply put... this technique doesn't work. Not anymore. Content volume shouldn't even be a thing in your mind at this point.

What IS working are things such as:

• The Redwood Strategy
• Paid Advertising
• Guest Posts
• Guest Podcast Interviews
• Facebook Live
• Building Your List
• Link Building (correctly)
• Content Worth Sharing
• Product Launch
• Webinars

I discuss each of these strategies in much more detail in this episode of CBB.

In this informal episode of Coffee Break Blogging - and the first episode in some 6 months - I cover the question of...

This episode is primarily an internal look at the Blog Marketing Academy itself, this podcast, and some general news. I discuss:

• Why the podcast was originally discontinued
• Why I'm bring it back now
• What I've been working on behind the scenes

Continuing our topic of webinars, this episode is a walk-through of a general layout for a 60-minute webinar.

You can download the reference for this episode at: http://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/webinarplan

• Introduction (10 minutes)
• The Content (40 minutes)
• The Close (10 minutes)