In today's episode, Jami tackles how to be a ROCKSTAR affiliate! She covers her favorite tips and tricks to make money as an affiliate, and she goes into several specific programs she recommends.

Join us today as we talk all about Goal Setting. We go into why we do it, how it can help you to grow your business, and some tools we use and recommend to make it easier and more consistent. And we even give some book recommendations on the topic, because of course we do.

Listen in as we break down our work/life routines, both before and after going full time with our business.

Listen in as Jason gives you recommendations on some of his favorite business books, and talks about how reading to develop your business skills is a great idea!

Let's talk all about podcasting, and how starting a podcast can be a great asset to your business! 

Hello everyone! We are back! In this episode we discuss how our business went in 2018, why we had a long hiatus from this podcast, and we go into some exciting 2019 plans!

Welcome to our new show! We laid the ground work in the first 10 episodes, but 2018 is the year of OWAHL and we are going to spend a lot of time this year on what has been our secret to success: sales funnel. 

So we are going to take you deep inside our biggest product to date, the product that allowed Jason to quit his job, our annual conferences! 

We've been doing a series lately on the podcast about social media. And the next question we often get is, "how do you launch/grow a blog??"

So that's what we are talking about today! 

Our Launch Strategy Behind Our New Blog

Our main business is Young Wife's Guide. I (Jami) started this blog in 2012 and the landscape of blogging has changed so much since then! So are you wondering how to launch a new blog/business in 2017 and beyond?

Here's how we took on the challenge of launching this new blog in the middle of 2017 and how you can do it too! Inside our private Facebook group, many of you have been asking how we are going about our launch strategy. So here's what we are doing:

Jason and I did a lot of brainstorming about this new blog, the goal of it, the purpose behind it, and our mission for it. Before we had a name or a website or a strategy, we spent a ton of time really thinking through what our missions was going to be, how much time we would spend on it each week, what my roles on the blog would be, what Jason's roles would be, etc.

You don't want to spend a year in this phase and your goal and mission probably will change over time. But try to think through the purpose behind your new business so you can better know where you are going with it. 

Now, I first want to say that people get way too hung up on picking a name. Yes, it's important. But it's not the most important thing. Don't spend forever on this step and never actually write or launch your blog. You want to be intentional, but in the end, you just need to get going! 

When picking a name, the #1 thing you need to look for is if the URL is available. Just go to a domain register (such as GoDaddy, Bluehost, Namecheap, etc) and search for your domain name. You can quickly see if it's available or not. (And even if it's available, some premium domains can cost into the thousands.)

RECOMMENDED: You can use any domain registrar that you want. But after trying several (and having most of our domains with Godaddy, we have landed on Namecheap being our favorite! They are easy to work with AND are often the cheapest for the domains). You can search for a domain name here. 

Anytime Jason and I are brainstorming a name, we have Namecheap open next to us and we check each name before we get too attached. Because chances are, it's already taken! And a .com website is a must for us. We won't consider anything else. But you could do a .org website as well.

Every one of our websites is on wordpress.org. This is a big discussion for a different day but if you want to grow a blog or business, then wordpress.org is where you want to be. 

ONE EXCEPTION: Our one exception is in fact, this website. For a variety of reasons, we decided to host our store AND our blog through one platform: New Kajabi. I plan on covering these reasons in a future video/blog post so stay tuned. But for now, just know that we've been using Kajabi for well over a year now and are IN LOVE WITH it and highly recommend it to everyone. So Kajabi could be a great option for you as well. (Email us with any questions about Kajabi! I would be happy to discuss your individual situation.)

If you are hosting with Wordpress, one important thing you need to note is there is a very big difference between wordrepss.org and wordpress.com. You want to use wordpress.org. Here's a good article that shares the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

What it Costs to Launch a New Blog:

Buy Your Domain: Once you've picked your name, you need to purchase your domain name. This will normally run you around $9-12 for a year. So not a huge investment. (With Namecheap, you can often get it even cheaper than that.)

Sign up for web hosting: This is the important step if you are using wordpress.org and also the part that most people get hung up on. It's really not as hard, expensive, or confusing as it sounds...I promise! 

Most web hosting will run you $6-10 per month. My personal favorite option is SiteGround because they make it so easy. If you are serious about getting your blog up and running, this is what I suggest you do.

We have to use a fancy dedicated server thing for Young Wife's Guide now because of our traffic. But if I was starting out again today, I would use SiteGround. (This is after having used GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator throughout the years and never being very happy. Out of those three however, Bluehost is my favorite).  

Last week we discussed how to develop a social media strategy. I did an overview of how I handle social media on my main blog, Young Wife's Guide. 

Today I'm back to discuss how you can use Pinterest specifically for massive growth! Pinterest is an amazing way to build up your community and reach a massive audience. And Pinterest doesn't have to take very much time at all.  

We get traffic from Pinterest in two ways:

1) Through my own personal Pinterest account for my blog.

This is where I pin my own content and other people's content. I typically follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of what I pin is other people's content, 20% is my own. Althought sometimes this shift on Pinterest is more like 50/50.

2) Through other people pinning my blog posts.

This is the beauty of Pinterest! As long as you've got good pictures (see below) and have some strategy when it comes to Pinterest, other people will start pinning YOUR content and you will get traffic from Pinterest without ever being active on Pinterest. Although being active yourself certainly helps.

(HINT: Here's the Wordpress plugin I use to install a Pin it Button ON MY BLOG, very important!!)

The best thing you can do to increase traffic from Pinterest is to make your blog posts more Pinterest friendly. When someone lands on your blog and finds your blog post interesting, make it easy for them to "pin" it to Pinterest.

The biggest thing you want to do is create long graphics to have in each blog post. Each blog post doesn't have to have a picture with words on it, but I always do. Here's a good example of a blog post with a tall vertical image at the top with words on it.

Please note: When I recorded this podcast episode, PicMonkey was a FREE option. However they have no moved to a subscription only service so you need to pay to use it. I think it can still be worth it, but it will cost you $3.99-7.99 a month now. Canva is the free option I now recommend. 

PicMonkey is a free, really easy to use tool that allows you to put words on your pictures.

Canva is another excellent free website that gives you even more options (but can be a little more complicated to use). 

I personally use Photoshop and have for years but this definitely has a learning curve to it. If you are not a techy person, the first two options will work beautifully for you. With Adobe Creative cloud, you can get access to the full newest version of Photoshop for just $9.99 a month (which is now almost comparable to PicMonkey)! 

You need to be very careful about where you find images to use on your blog. It is illegal to just go to google and pull any photo you find (EVEN if you link back to the original source). It has to be a royalty-free photo, which means the original photographer or artist has given permission for it to be used on your blog.

There are some places to find free photos, but I caution you to be very careful about these free stock photo places because many of them have fine print that means you can't crop, add text, change, use for commercial use, etc. So just be careful with any stock photos you find (free OR paid for).

I personally have used 123rf.com for years. Their photos are usually $1-3 a piece and have been very affordable for me. But ask around because there are some other good sources out there. However I haven't purchased a photo on there for a long time now because...

I do still use some stock photos, but I'm moving more and more to using my own photos. I was hesitant to do this for a long time because I am NOT a photographer and felt like I just didn't have the time. But now I'm realizing that that authenticity IS worth the time. 

But now when I plan out a blog post, I set aside 5-10 minutes of time to snap some photos of my own. They may not be professional quality, they may not always be the best lighting but I have found that they show more about my life. My own photos help my readers connect with me on an even deeper level.

Moving forward, I plan on spending FAR more time doing my own photo. Even if they are not great. NOTE: If you are a recipe/food blogger, your own photos are a MUST!

Here's a good example of my own photos. I wrote this blog post and asked Jason to spend 5 minutes following me around the house taking a few photos for it. (You can notice a difference with one of my earlier blog posts using all stock photos. You can connect a lot more with the one with all MY photos.)

Now, when pinning to your own Pinterest account, it's important to think strategically about it. Pinterest now runs on an algorithm which means they no longer show your pins in chronological order.

Like Facebook, Pinterest now watches its users to see if you are pinning high-quality content. If you consistently pin things that other people find interesting (i.e. get a lot of pins and click-throughs) then Pinterest will show your pins to more people.

So it's more important than ever to be strategic about what you pin and to pin fantastic things!! QUALITY over QUANTITY now! This means when you are hunting for things to pin, watch for those that have been pinned hundreds or thousands of times.

I pin about 60 times a day on my account (or my social media manager does). And of those 60 pins, 20% of them are my own pins from my website and the other 80% are pins from other people that I know will serve my audience well.

I know that might sound like a lot, but we use a website called Tailwind that helps us to schedule everything. We've been using it for about a year and LOVE it. I schedule inside it as well as my social media manager! 

This is the only social media website that I pay for to schedule things so it makes it really worth it to me. I schedule my Facebook posts directly in Facebook and I don't schedule Twitter or Instagram. Most social media schedulers are $50-70 a MONTH. So $9.99 being my only cost is well worth it to me! 

You can sign up and try a FREE month of Tailwind to see if it's right for you, which is what I did. And then it's only $9.99 a month after that. It's highly worth the investment in my opinion as Pinterest is our #1 source of traffic year after year.

I know it's overwhelming to try and keep track of your social media and work on growing it. That's why I created these social media worksheets for you! Keep track of everything from your social media numbers to what you post and schedule and even track your growth from quarter to quarter. 

You can download your social media worksheets for FREE HERE!