ProBlogger: How One Couple Drastically Changed Their Life by Blogging

How One Couple Drastically Changed Their Life by Blogging

Posted: 25 Aug 2015 07:00 AM PDT

This is a guest contribution from Gina Horkey.

Two years ago, my husband and I were just like any other American couple.

We were both working in Corporate America, had a one and a half year old and another on the way. Our work schedules and commutes weren't bad, we just weren't doing work that we were passionate about.

Someone else was also raising our child. It could have been much worse – our son was maybe in daycare for 30 hours per week. And the provider was great! It just wasn't what we wanted. Plus, with another on the way, daycare was about to get real expensive!

Since I'm not one to sit back and accept less-than-ideal circumstances, we decided to make some changes. Here's our story of going from a dual income, Corporate America household, to a single earning one dependent on just my freelancing income. Buckle up!

Finding a Better Solution

Even though I was a financial advisor, we never thought it'd be possible for one of us to quit work and stay at home with our growing family. After a couple failed nanny attempts and the end of my pregnancy looming, we got desperate and finally entertained the idea.

My husband had always expressed interest in becoming a SAHD and my career was more promising at the time, so we set out to see if it was possible for him, the carrier of all benefits to quit.

By significantly cutting our expenses (cutting cable, reducing our dining out, raising our insurance deductibles, stopping our retirement savings, etc) we were just able to make it work!

Thank goodness we had the good sense to pay-off most of our debt the year or two before.

Fast Forward a Year

Our second child was going on a year old and Wade was enjoying staying at home. All should be well then, right?

Wrong. It should have been.

But I couldn't help to acknowledge the growing discontent I was experiencing with my work. My clients were great and so were my colleagues. I just didn't really enjoy talking and reading about investing, tax law or compliance all day long.

I tried to throw myself further into my career by enrolling in an accredited program and pitching a plan to buy into the larger practice. I began studying and we began talks to make it happen.

But then I realized it wasn't what I really wanted. And I actually listened to myself for once.

Starting a Freelance Writing Side Hustle

So, I did what any other "normal" person did and turned to the world wide internet!

I explored my passions, my available options and started freelance writing on the side a little over a year ago. I secured an unpaid contributorship with The Huffington Post, got some samples by guest posting elsewhere and started my own blog.

I would get up every weekday morning at 4:30 and write for an hour or two before my family woke up and I had to get ready for work. I also had a four-day workweek at the time, so I used Fridays to work on my writing business as well.

I even hired a babysitter from time to time on the weekend to give Wade a break and get some time-sensitive client work done. It was fun, I saw the potential and I was committed to taking charge of my own career future.

All of my hard work and perseverance started to pay off. My income grew month-over-month and I figured out I really enjoyed this world of freelance. I had blogged socially for years, but this was the first time I was treating blogging like a business and reaping the financial rewards.

Putting In My Notice

Eventually things came to a head at work. I opened up about my freelance success and that I had changed my mind about what I wanted for my career future.

I was super nervous about it, but the conversation went better than I had expected. I had been an advisor for almost a decade at this point and with this particular practice for six years. We had a great relationship and I considered them almost like family. But it was hard to disappoint a father-figure!

Due to our great mutual respect, we worked out a plan for them to buy my small practice, for us to find my replacement (for the support duties I performed for the office) and that I'd have a long transition schedule to both train in said replacement and continue to build up my freelance career into a viable business that would support my family.

Becoming a Full-time Freelancer

Right around Christmas, 2014 I had my last day of work. I was now officially a full-time freelancer!

It was exhilarating and a bit frightening all at once. But now, six months later, I can happily say that I made the right decision.

I may work more than ever, but it's work that I'm passionate about (I write, am a virtual assistant, coach newbie freelance writers and have a course to help aspiring writers for the web launch their own business in as little as 30 days). We also own our schedule, our time and choose how we get to spend it.

Better yet, we choose WHO we get to spend it with.

In Conclusion

Blogging changed our life.

We now decide our schedule, rather than our Corporate America jobs dictating it.

For us, it’s not about being rich or continuing to earn more money – it’s about defining and living out our own priorities, which just so happens to include spending as much time as we can raising our own children.

Want to know my favorite part of each workday now? Coming in for lunch with my family and laying my two toddlers down for their naps. I never would have been able to do that a year ago!

How would your life look different if you felt empowered to make big changes?
Gina Horkey is a writer for hire, with a background in personal finance. She also offers coaching services and really enjoys helping other freelancers gear up to quit their day jobs and take their side hustles full-time. Please stop by Horkey HandBook and say hello and download a free copy of 8 Tips to Start Your Freelance Career off on the Right Foot!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How One Couple Drastically Changed Their Life by Blogging

The post How One Couple Drastically Changed Their Life by Blogging appeared first on @ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Through Your Archived Material on Facebook

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Through Your Archived Material on Facebook

Posted: 23 Aug 2015 07:25 AM PDT

This is a guest contribution from Jonathan Goodman.

I love discovering systems that work in the background so you can focus on your blog.

What I'm going to detail is like the concept of compound interest.

At the beginning, the effects will be small – but over time, as the system continues to work and you keep adding into it small bits, it becomes a monster.

It involves Facebook. And while much has been said about Facebook's diminishing reach, it still stands as the best platform to find and gather a purposeful audience and promote a blog.

What I want to share with you isn't how to spam. It's not how to copy and paste a quote onto a pretty picture and hope that it somehow goes viral. And it's definitely not how to steal somebody else's video and upload it as your own. I want to share an intelligent way to generate a perpetual promotion engine.

A couple screenshots taken on a random day to show that I'm not some guy who just talks about this stuff. I use it to build my own site.

But don't get me wrong, this is not about vanity metrics like Facebook likes. It's about email list growth.

A good string of days for email growth, admittedly, but it does happen. 150-350 email leads per day, much of it from Facebook, is where the site sits at right now and each week those numbers continue to inch up.

So what is this magical system?

First, it's nothing magical.

This is about embedding videos from your Facebook page on your blog. After showing you how to do it, I'll describe the power with it for promoting your blog and gaining leads. Beyond that there's a few details to generate more traction both on your videos on your blog.

First, the tech stuff

In order for the embed to render on a WordPress site, you'll likely have to embed some code into your site. I'm technologically illiterate but sent this post from Facebook to my web guy.

From there, it's easy. Here's a walk through:

Step 1: Upload a video to Facebook (sharing a YouTube link won't work. You'll have to upload the video manually)

Step 2: Navigate to the videos permalink page by clicking on the date just under the video's name.

Step 3: Click the "embed video" link on the bottom right side.

Step 4: Copy the embed code that pops up.

Step 5: Paste the embed code into the HTML editor of a blog post wherever you want the video to appear.

On the top is the technical mumbo-jumbo and beneath it is how the video renders on your site. The above is from an article that serves as a good example of this system teaching how to fix butt wink in the squat.

Note: You can take any video from any page on Facebook and embed it into your blog the same as you'd embed a YouTube video. Not a bad idea but you miss the real value of these embeds.

Now that you know how to embed videos, let's look at all the components of the video once it renders on your site:

The video will show two ways: One if it's not currently being played, and one if it is.

If the video isn't being played there's three places to click other than the play button:

Along with the clickable parts, the existing video views on the bottom left adds a level of social proof.

The video name – takes the user to the video's permalink page hosted on your Facebook page.

Your Facebook page name – takes the user to your Facebook page.

The Facebook logo – takes the user to the video's permalink page hosted on your Facebook page.

Note: All links open in a new window so don't worry about it navigating the user away from your blog post.

If the video is currently being played there are five places to click other than the regular video navigation buttons:

The video name – takes the user to the video's permalink page hosted on your Facebook page.

Your Facebook page name – takes the user to your Facebook page.

A Facebook "like" button – The user can "like" the video right from your blog.

A Facebook "share" button – The user can share the video right from your blog.

The Facebook logo – takes the user to the video's permalink page hosted on your Facebook page.

Now comes the ninja stuff

Facebook's putting a big push on video. They autoplay all over your feed and spammy videos stolen by unscrupulous page owners are everywhere.

Before going further – don't steal videos! I'm sure that you see other disrespectful page owners doing it. Not only is it illegal but you'll also get shut down. It's simply a matter of time. I'll show you the different ways to get videos to use in a bit.

The first benefit to using video on Facebook is that it has a high organic reach.

You can then embed that same video into as many blog posts as possible. As you've seen above, each video embed has a number of different options to generate traffic for your Facebook page but also share and/or like your video directly from your blog.

Having a video embedded into your blog will also increase the average time a user spends on your site decreasing "bounce time."

Facebook views your page as more valuable if users click a link from your page and stay there for longer. It's also an important determinant for search engine visibility.

That's not the fun part – this is:

In August of 2013, Facebook announced a change to its algorhithm called "story bumping." Facebook's old formula, while not completely known, was largely determined by something they called "time decay" — if your status update was more than a few hours old, there's not much chance it would ever be seen again.

Story bumping changed things. If an old status update (i.e., a video) is getting new interaction, Facebook will selectively "bump" this story to the top of the news feed for people who haven't seen it.

Both users of your page who didn't see it the first time and new users who might be highly relevant to you based off friends of theirs who "like" your page.

The result is that old, archived (video) status updates that are getting new interaction can and do get "bumped" to new viewers. The result, well, looks something like this every time that you log in when you do it right:

Two random screenshots of my notifications list for the page. In the second one you see 11 different things being shared within a 12-hour period.

And this process compounds upon itself. I can't login to Facebook after leaving for a few hours without at least 40 new notifications (that's 40 different things happening when I was gone. 100 people sharing one status update counts as one).

I should also note that all shares and interaction are not equal. Aim to share high-value materials and include a call-to-action to join your email list on almost every one.

Interaction is the name of the game. What I'm about to describe will get you interaction perpetually on old status updates. Archived materials go to work for you while you sleep finding you new readers and email subscribers.

Here's why: Embedding videos into blog posts allows them to sit forever on your blog. A user who sifts through your archives and "likes" a video embed from a year ago could cause that video status update to "bump" in Facebook, thereby showing it to new users who then bump it more and give it new life.

Apart from hoping that old blog posts rank in search engines or users sifting through your archives, we also re-share old articles periodically on our page. An old article share with three Facebook embeds is like sharing four status updates at once.

Let’s say all get interaction and all have a call to action for a squeeze page at the bottom. Now you've got four status update sharing to four different audiences, all promoting your email opt-in.

How to Generate Videos to Use?

To share videos you've got to have ones that you own or have permission to use, obviously, but too often people scrape videos and upload them as their own without permission. Here are three ways to get videos to use:

Scrape your own YouTube channel: If you've got an existing archive of videos on YouTube, start systematically uploading them to Facebook one at a time. We do 6-10/week now. YouTube is Google property and Facebook will look at them as unique content.

Ask for permission: I never did much with YouTube, so asked a few dozen fitness coaches who had great channels to repurpose their videos at my discretion on my Facebook page. I've got access to over 2500 videos to use. In the video description I give full attribution with links to the owner's materials and make sure to note whom the video belongs to and that it's used with permission.

Film your own: For every article that you write, film a 1-2 minute video highlighting the benefits of the main points. Upload this video to Facebook first and embed it into the blog post.

After you've started to upload some videos, you can organize them into playlists on your video page as well.

Some notes on the small details to get more out of your videos

Generally videos lasting 1-2 minutes work best. That said, I've had 10-minute videos that have done well, but they've got to be good.

The title and video description is where most miss the mark. A video simply uploaded to Facebook won't drive a lot of email opt-ins or generate a lot of videos if you don't do it right.

Write the video meta-data the same as you'd write a sales letter:

Title – Give the video a short, descriptive and punchy title.

Lede – Use 1-2 short sentences to hook the reader and expound upon the benefits that he/she will gain from the video.

Steps to solving (optional) – I'm not sold on the importance on this yet. We've got to do more research, but it doesn't seem to hurt. Add a paragraph or bullet list summarizing the actionable steps gone over in the video to achieve the benefits in the title/lede.

Call to action – Tell them what to do next. I use a short line to first identify them as a personal trainer and then entice them to come to the PTDC's about page (that we use as an email opt-in).

"Set it and forget it" systems that work for you and get better with time are fun to discover. Facebook video embeds aren't being used but can explode views on your website, generate a perpetual audience to your old material, and grow your email list.

I hope it works as well for you as it has for us.

Jonathan Goodman likes to think and experiment with better ways to “do” new media and live a fun, successful, and fulfilling life. He's been called "Sun Tzu" buried under 40 layers of fun. If you want to know more about high-potency Facebook promotion, click here to claim a free guide to improve the reach of your status updates.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Through Your Archived Material on Facebook

The post How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Through Your Archived Material on Facebook appeared first on @ProBlogger.