This article is a part of my FREE Fan Focused Blogging Course. If you want to discover how to grow your blog while serving your fans, then my course is exactly what you're looking for.
Welcome to lesson 5 of my free Fan Focused Blogging course! Today we are going to be talking about a specific example from my own blog, that may help tie things together in your mind.
So I want to give you an example of how this process worked for me...
You've heard a lot about how the process works, but reading about it and seeing it can be very different things. In this expert event from Megan Porta and Eat Blog Talk we talk through multiple examples of coming up with solutions to problems, how to implement them, and how to eventually monetize them. Thanks so much to Megan for letting me share it with all of you.
A huge problem for new sous vide cooks is "How long do I sous vide my steak for?". It's probably 30% of all posts in my Facebook group!
There's a ton of solutions to this problem, up through and including a whole video course designed to educate them on the science of how sous vide times work based on the equations of thermodynamics, Douglas Baldwin literally had an article about this published in a math journal.
But I started with the simplest thing I could think of...a chart.
Here it is, this chart will tell you how long to cook your steak for.
And it took me about 10 hours to research the data, format it well, write a post around it, take some photos, all the things that go into a blog post about how long to sous vide steak for.
It was a decent amount of work for a single post, but definitely not much compared to doing an entire video course.
And this page started to take off because it very clearly solved my Fans' problem.
So I revisited it. What could I do to make this a better solution...and what I did was turn it into a PDF that a fan could download, print out, and then hold up to their food.
When people saw this, they lost their minds and raved about how great it was. Incidentally, I only made this available if you signed up for my newsletter, it was a fantastic lead magnet.
Now, I still haven't made money, right? But this is all growing my blog, adding valuable content to it, and better serving my fans, all without a big time commitment. It's important to remember not every problem you solve has to lead directly to income, especially if you start small.
I probably tried solving 3 or 4 other problems at the same time, and they didn't resonate as much with my Fans. They were still driving traffic to my website and serving my fans, but the timing guide was the one that people really loved. So I kept going back to it.
At the time I had been dabbling in iPhone app development, so my next step was to turn the guide into an iPhone app people had to purchase. And we sold a few thousand of them.
Finally, we developed a sturdy, plastic, machine washable version sous vide ruler that people can purchase directly from us, and we've sold over a thousand of them.
Oh, and the number 1 page on our website...the original page with that chart on it. So a decade later it's still driving a ton of traffic and helping in multiple areas.
Starting small, focusing on what resonates, and continuing to serve your fans and clients is a surefire way to keep moving your blog forward.
Today's homework is to take what we've talked about over the last several days and apply it to your list. What solutions can you get done quickly, which ones attack multiple problems, and which ones can help move you forward in the direction you want to go?
Let me know in the Makin Bacon Facebook Group or the comments below.
Tomorrow we'll conclude the course with some more action items to get you on your way to serving your fans.
This article is a part of my FREE Fan Focused Blogging Course. If you want to discover how to grow your blog while serving your fans, then my course is exactly what you're looking for.
If you want to read some more about this, here are a few helpful links.
Hi, I'm Jason Logsdon! I'm an adventurous home cook and the head writer and photographer for Amazing Food Made Easy. I grew my income to 6-figures by focusing on serving my Fans by providing massive value, and I want to help you do the same.
