People have been blogging since the advent of the internet. To me, nothing is more fun, expressive, and lucrative than putting my words on the web for all to see. I started my blog, Growth Marketing Pro in 2017. Since then, I’ve been able to scale it to nearly 100,000 readers per month on a shoestring budget.
But with growth came complexities. Before I knew it, I was not only writing for my blog, but building my brand by writing for other blogs as well. More, I was using my blog to capture leads for my consulting business — so in essence, I had a sales funnel on top of my site.
That’s why project management became absolutely essential to my process. Messy spreadsheets eventually don’t cut it. In order to stay productive and keep everything streamlined, I started using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud.
In my opinion, most bloggers eventually graduate to some sort of project management software. These are the three reasons this blogger did.
1. Blogging
Blogging takes coordination.
Between my business partner, Hailey and I, we have produced over 200 posts in the last three years. That’s about 400,000 words to keep track of! While it’s really fun harnessing my creative energy and perspectives in a post, there’s a lot of legwork that goes into getting a piece written.
Our process usually begins by performing keyword research with an SEO software tool. Once Hailey and I have a viable list of keywords and topics, we use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud to create a backlog of articles and then prioritize. Eventually, written pieces make their way into an editorial calendar, so that we know when posts go live, when to share them with our email list.
Moreover, a lot of people are surprised how many hands may go into crafting a blog post. While the final words are mine, some of the legwork and research is done by freelancers. I give ghost writers access to my boards in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, enabling them to follow along, read outlines, and mark their progress on each article. Rather than fire emails back and forth, we communicate directly in the platform — which spares my inbox and streamlines all of our communication. Everyone appreciates it.
2. Link Building and PR workflows
Anyone who blogs with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind knows that creating content for your site is just half the battle. The other half is convincing Google that your content is worth ranking in its search engine results page (SERP).
While Google’s ranking algorithm isn’t fully understood, all search marketers agree that one of the best ways to ensure Google ranks your posts is by getting backlinks from reputable publications on the web. Inbound links to your site are a very strong trust signal to Google. So when the algorithm decides which posts to rank, the ones with this extra backlink authority usually rank high in the SERP.
Getting published on other websites isn’t as easy as it may sound. In fact, it gets really hairy, really fast. There are a dozen ways to get links to your site, including via link exchanges, PR, and guest posting. Plus, there are usually hundreds or thousands of target sites. For a lot of search marketers, this means messy spreadsheets with columns including contact information, statuses, owners and comments.
But once I began using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, I realized there was a much tidier way to maintain my lists and points of contact. staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has a direct integration with Gmail, which means I can communicate with my link building targets and update statuses and due dates all in one click.
Plus, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has an import feature for Excel/CSV sheets, so you can create a board for existing workflows. That turned my messy spreadsheet into something a bit easier on the eyes.
3. Integrations
Like I said, Growth Marketing Pro started as just a blog. But when we decided to monetize it and we began capturing prospective customer leads, things became much more complex. We needed a way to see our leads come in, schedule calls, and divvy up clients. We basically needed a customer relationship management tool — CRM. And in addition to the Gmail integration we found quite useful, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud makes scaling easy with countless other integrations with modern tools.
Hailey and I found an incredible lead capture solution in Typeform — it seamlessly integrated into our blog and before we knew it, we had multiple sales calls per day scheduled. Fortunately, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has a Typeform integration, which means that we can capture leads and send them directly to a board, mapping each Typeform field to an appropriate column. So when a user inputs their contact information, business name, estimated marketing spend, goals for the call, and any number of other Typeform fields, the information ends up in the right place.
All of this allows us to run our blog like a business. We have sales pipelines with estimated revenues and contract timelines, plus statuses next to each client. Running our process like this enables us to nurture each prospective client through the funnel and re-engage with older leads to win their business.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has a ton of integrations that are helpful in managing your business. I know bloggers who connect staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud to their Mailchimp account for easy email maintenance and others who connect with Jira and GitHub to keep track of engineering tickets. The possibilities for integrations in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud are really endless.
Conclusion
Calling staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud just a CRM or just a project management tool would be a misnomer. As a blogger, my business is all about scaling my time. With tons of different workflows related to blogging, guest posting, and maintaining relationships with our clients, I would be remiss not to use a comprehensive platform that connects all the dots. staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud enables me to move faster and make more money doing what I love. That’s the dream, right?
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