Christy Price joins Elwyn Davies for an ad hoc interview to discuss her new course
Earlier this month, Elwyn met up with Texas-based web designer Christy Price and discussed her new “Make Money with your Blog” course.
The conversation ranged from the course’ conception, how Christy began using affiliate marketing through her blogs and some wise words from Christy to the entrepreneur looking to get started.
Our technical lead Will Hammond has taken the course and has found a wealth of knowledge to apply to our own blogs, so we definitely recommend it.
You can find Christy’s “Make Money with your Blog” course here.
“The golden nugget would be to get started! You don’t have to be perfect when you start and in the course, I talk about that. If something’s too hard, put that in the ‘too hard’ pile and just get started on what you can do today.”
We are in awe of the volume and quality of work and training resources that Christy creates, and are delighted to announce that we will be featuring her course in our new Campus (more on that exciting development soon).
The Make Money with your Blog will also available at a discounted rate for all PixelHaze Academy members.
What gave you the idea for this particular course?
I have been blogging for quite a while, and a little over a year ago, I put my first affiliate link on my website and it was magical. It was a link to a plugin that I use all the time in my own work, and I thought that other people should know about this too. Then I started seeing people click on it and buy the plugin, and so it was this dual happiness that people are reading my posts, they're taking my advice, they're excited, they're using this plugin, which is making their life easier, and also I'm being compensated for my time that I spent creating this article and providing the walk-through.
I started, over time, integrating more affiliate links into my work, always with the eye to support my readers. I always want to maintain integrity when I serve up affiliate links, and I only want to link to products that I've used, that I would highly recommend to my mom or my daughter.
With that in mind, I started creating content that included affiliate links: I would say somewhere between 20 and 30% of my blog posts include an affiliate link to a service or product that I use. I kept seeing the income from that grow, and it was really exciting for me because I am serving others with this content, but I'm being compensated for my time and expertise as well. Along that path, I wrote a blog post because I was struggling with how to add affiliate links to Squarespace blog posts, and I figured out some workarounds and I wrote an article about it. Before I moved my site to 7.1, (before I lost my blog comments), I had so many comments from others on that post, so I knew it was something that really resonated with my audience - they were trying to add affiliate links and there was a lot of confusion around it - what's the best way to do it; and how to write blog posts that support your audience. With all of that together, it was just the perfect storm that led me to think about, more than a blog post, this could really be a course.
I dabbled in a couple of smaller courses in the past, I have a very short mini course on image optimization in Squarespace that's still running. At the time I had another course on Squarespace about email campaigns. Kirsten Martin is developing one and it works better with her suite of services, so I've removed that course from my offerings. But at the time I thought, I should look at creating a larger course, and with the interest that I had from that one blog post and the payoffs that I was seeing for my own work, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for this particular course.
How far into the process were you when you started using affiliates? Was your website brand new or had it been established over a longer period of time?
I had already been posting blog posts for a year off and on, so I had an established audience when I started doing affiliate marketing through the blog. I started seeing payoffs pretty quickly because I'd already built up an audience. I can't remember the number of hits per month, but there was significant traffic to my blog at that point. That's definitely something that this course focuses on, how to write blog posts, not only about affiliate income, but to position yourself as an expert in your field. I had some experience doing that and all the time, you're growing traffic to your blog, which means not only can you get income from any affiliate links you might provide, but you are establishing yourself as an expert because you're writing blog posts about what your audience needs to know. That means you're going to get more traffic to your blog and it means more of those readers will likely become clients if you offer a service.
For me, that meant that I could then raise my prices for my services because I had more people coming than I had time to help. You're always hesitant when you raise your prices, but one really interesting thing I found was at a certain price point, my clients became so much better clients because they were truly hiring me to be the expert at that price point, they trusted me to do my job well. Whereas at a lower price point, I felt a lot of clients just viewed me as someone who they were handing off tasks to and they felt that they were in charge of design. I had one client five years ago and we spent an entire Tuesday looking at shades of blue for a website - at that point you just want to bang your head against the wall. Over time, I've curated my expertise, my blog posts and this whole ecosystem to attract a particular type of client and blogging has helped tremendously with that.
Without giving any secrets of the course away, how has your strategy changed since that first success of your link to articles that you're writing at the moment?
One of the things that I get into in the course that has been really helpful for me is I created systems that work. I've learned how to choose my blog post topics, and that's something I go into in the course. Finding out what to write about and that people want to know about has been really useful instead of just shouting into the void. You're actually creating relevant content for your audience. The other thing too is I don't use a content calendar. I had tried, and you hear experts recommend this all the time, to create a content calendar and plan out for a month exactly what to post on what day but that never worked for me. In the course, I share the alternative that I used instead of a content calendar. I also learned really early on because I wanted to preserve my integrity and not be sleazy, that I only wanted to blog about items that I would recommend to my mom or my daughter that I had used myself, that I knew there would be good customer service for. All those things together are part of the course and they're the systems that I've used to help me refine my process.
If there's one piece of advice, if you were to give to an entrepreneur looking to set up and monetize their own blog, what would that one golden nugget of advice be?
The golden nugget would be to get started! You don't have to be perfect when you start and in the course, I talk about that. If something's too hard, put that in the ‘too hard’ pile and just get started on what you can do today. It may mean that things aren't perfect when you start, that's fine because what you need to do is create momentum. I think there are two pieces of advice I'd give.
One is to get started and the other is to be consistent. With blogging, like almost any endeavor, consistency pays off. If you blog today and you don't blog again for six months, you're not really creating a system where readers will want to come for more information, you're not offering up information to Google so that you're going to rank higher in SEO. Blogging consistently will pay off.
So get started and be consistent.
