Aaron Hoos

In this Inc. Magazine interview by writer Clarissa Cruz, food blogger Deb Perelmen answers questions about what it takes to blog and how she grew her food blog into a (nearly) full-time career.

The recipe for building a successful blog is passion + dedication + time + consistency. A valuable lesson for any brand that wants to blog.

Read the interview here: Building a Successful Food Blog.

A friend of mine wants to start a business. She’s successful at work but isn’t earning what she is worth. Like a lot of people I’ve met, she really wants to start a business but here’s the conundrum:

It’s hard start a business when you’re busy with a “regular” job. On the other hand, it’s hard to quit your job then start a business.

Here’s what I recommend:

START HERE

1. Choose what you want your business to be about. Even if you don’t yet know WHAT you want to sell, you probably have some idea about the topic. Are you a mechanic and want to (eventually) run a business that is mechanical in nature? Do you love jewelery and (eventually) want to do something in that field? It doesn’t matter yet what you sell, but choose your topic. It can be fairly broad.
2. Start a blog. Spend 20-30 minutes a day writing a blog post. Do it every single day. Build up a body of knowledge on the topic. (Okay, if “every day” is too much, then start off a little less — say 3 times a week — and slowly increase over time until you’ve developed a good habit of daily blogging). Aim for high quality, insightful posts that help to advance your reader’s knowledge of the topic.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do in the beginning. If you’re at this stage — a sort of “dreaming the entrepreneurial dream” stage — then this is all you need to do. Don’t worry about search engine optimization, blog design, social media, etc. (That’s good stuff, but it’s not the point right now).

Eventually, you can take it further and turn your blog into a business (as I’ll describe in a minute), but your top priority should be consistent, compelling blog posts every day.

What you want to do is build a body of knowledge, which will:

• Position you as an expert.
• Help you explore the depths of the subject
• Teach you things you didn’t know
• Build an audience (and they’ll be more likely to listen and respect you because you don’t have an agenda of selling them anything)
• Create an asset of information that you can later draw from

FAST FORWARD TO QUITTING TIME
Let’s say you stay with your company for another couple of years. You don’t love it, but the income is nice and the health care pays for your knee operation, but now you find yourself transferred to a department with a boss you don’t like. You can see yourself quitting in a month or so.

The good news is, you have been consistently positioning yourself as an expert for the past couple of years. You have 600+ blog posts and an audience of faithful readers.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Decide what you are going to sell. A product? A service? There are lots of options. Pick one or two that you can do now and shelve the rest for later.
2. Create your sales funnel. Describe the contacts at each stage of your sales funnel and how you’ll engage them at that stage and then move them forward. (Download this Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide to get you started).
3. Implement the contact-engaging marketing that you’ve just outlined in the above step to engage and market to your Audience, your Leads, and your Prospects.
4. Quit your job. Woohoo!
5. Implement the contact-engaging content that you outlined a couple of steps above.

Thanks to your consistent effort, you have positioned yourself as an expert long before you made the leap out of your job into the world of business ownership.

ADDITIONAL TIPS TO MAKE THIS WORK

• Pick a topic you love and know something about and can spend years doing. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.
• This only works if you are consistent. I’ve seen people do this and succeed. I’ve seen people not do this and struggle. It really does work. Set an alarm, brainstorm some topics, and be relentless. Consider it an investment into your escape hatch. (Check out this blog post about blogging frequency and check out this blog post to discover what you should never, ever do).
• I mentioned earlier that you shouldn’t worry about search engine optimization (SEO) at this point. There are probably some SEO aficionados that are rolling in their graves right now but my reason is this: I want it to be a fun and simple effort. And search engine benefits will still be present in your blog, it just won’t be an intentional thing that you’ll do right away. You can always integrate that in later.
• Don’t fret about what you’ll sell while you’re working. That will work itself out, trust me. Here is a blog post about 5 different types of content monetization to get you started. There are other things to sell, too, but content monetization is an easy first step. If you can’t figure out what to sell, send me an email and we’ll talk about it.

Like anything that is effective, this method takes some effort. There will be days when you want to quit. But this is, in my opinion, the most effective way to start a business when you want to start a business someday but aren’t ready to quit your job just yet.

Business success is closely linked to sales funnel optimization: The better your sales funnel is, the more you’ll sell (and the more profitably you’ll sell). And, the more you sell (and the more profitably you sell it), the more successful your business will become.

So here are 5 easy tips to start optimizing your sales funnel today for faster (more profitable) results almost immediately:

Sales funnel optimization tip #1: Collect and use testimonials. Testimonials help Prospects make buying decisions. Go back to your previous Customers and ask them for testimonials, recommendations, and user tips. Collect them from different content channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are natural collection points for testimonials).

Make it a goal to write 1 email a day asking previous Customers for testimonials. If only 1 Customer a week responds, you’ll still end up with 52 testimonials at the end of the year!

Sales funnel optimization tip #2: Enable word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective and profitable forms of marketing because it is so credible. Word-of-mouth marketing happens when your Customers become Evangelists and share their positive experiences of your business with their peers. If you want more profitable sales in your sales funnel, empower your Customers with tools, skills, and ideas to speak positively about your business.

Take a moment and contact a Customer right now and offer them some kind of bonus if they would email three of their peers about you. Or, plan a highly valuable event (online or offline) to which Customers must bring a friend.

Sales funnel optimization tip #3: Don’t ignore the people who don’t buy from you. Although it’s easy to put all of your focus into the contacts who become Customers, there is a HUGE number of contacts who decided not to buy from you. Think about what you can offer them to capture a sale. (It could be a lower price-point for a lower-end product; it could be completely different product to meet their completely different needs).

Take a moment right now to think about a few Prospects who didn’t become Customers. Describe them (how are they similar to your Customers and how are they different) and brainstorm ways to turn them into Customers.

Sales funnel optimization tip #4: List your objections and counter them proactively. Objections can stop a sales in its tracks. But since you already know what most of your Prospects’ objections are, you have an advantage! Collect the top objections you face and do something with them.

Write down the objections you hear most often and then proactively integrate the counter-argument into your sales funnel marketing. (Check out how I countered a couple of top objections in a recent Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge).

Sales funnel optimization tip #5: Be intentional about all of your marketing content! Every blog post, web article, tweet, and press release should have a purpose. Stop generating content just for the sake of generating content and getting backlinks. Remember: backlinks have value for you because of SEO, but the strategic use of backlinks that a Lead clicks to become a Prospect (and ultimately a Customer) offers you value in real dollars.

In the next blog post or tweet you write, think about who is going to read it, where they are in your sales funnel, and what the next step is that you want them to take. Then use that information to shape what you write. (Need help with that? Download this free Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide PDF).