How to Scale Your Blog to 1,000 Articles a Year all While Working Less with Spencer Haws

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Goal Digger Podcast. Today, we'll be breaking down how to scale your blog to 1 ,000 articles a year, all while working less. To drop these value bombs, I brought Spencer Haas and the EO Fire Studios. Spencer has been a full-time digital entrepreneur since 2011. He's the founder of Niche Pursuits blog and podcast and the WordPress plugin Link Whisper. In today's foundation, we'll talk about blogging in 2024 for decision about going big with publishing goals.

0:40We'll talk about replacing ourselves from day-to-day operations, setting up systems, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Spencer and our sponsors. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business. Oh, and it's the UK's fast-growing business podcast. A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist.

1:15Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Spencer, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, Fire Nation, it's good to be here. Thanks so much for having me on the show. And one thing that I believe about being an entrepreneur that a lot of other people don't believe is this hustle culture, this belief that you need to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week in order to start a successful business. There's a lot of people out there. I was just looking up some of these people like Grant Cardone that says, hey, I work 90 hours a week.

1:54Gary Vaynerchuk, I think, has been quoted saying you need to be putting in 18 hours a day in the first year to start a successful business. I disagree with that. I believe that you can put in a solid three, four hours of focused work with no distractions, truly focused, and you can probably accomplish just as much as a lot of these guys that are putting in 60 to 70 hours a week. So that's my one contrarian thought is that focused work is a lot of times a lot more effective than long hours. That, and I also believe, Fire Nation, you need to sit down at one point and say, what does success mean to me?

2:35Because what success means to Grant Cardone and to Gary Vaynerchuk and other people in that ilk is different than what it means to other individuals. And I love this word that's called enough. You need to know what enough is for you to live the lifestyle that you dream about, that you really want to have. So a couple of things to think about there as we talk about scaling your blog to 1 ,000 articles a year all while working less, which goes along with this theme. So to a lot of listeners in Fire Nation and just maybe your average person off the street, blogging kind of feels so 2004. Does blogging still work in 2024?

3:19Yeah, you know, blogging does still work. People are still consuming written content. And no matter what they're looking for in their life, whether it's business or raising a family or other areas of life, people are consuming written content still. So as long as that happens, blogging will still work. Now, a lot of things have changed with Google, for example, over the years. I'll be honest. SEO is more difficult than it was five or ten years ago. but are people still going to Google and searching things? Absolutely. Is Google still ranking websites? Absolutely. But that is more difficult, but starting a blog can involve a lot more than just trying to get traffic from SEO, right?

4:07Uh, you can be very active on social media. You can tie in your blog with your YouTube channel, with your podcast. Um, you can be sharing your blog posts in a lot of other ways and getting traffic from a lot of other places. than just Google. So I do think it's important, especially in 2024, that people take a holistic approach that they shouldn't expect to just write an article, rank it on Google and get a bunch of traffic, but they need to do a little bit of promotion, a little bit more effort and be smart about their blogging approach. And then it absolutely can still work right now. So Spencer, you decided to go big with your publishing goals.

4:47Let's talk about that decision now? I started nichepursuits.com in 2011. Uh, so over 13 years ago now. And for most of that time, I wrote all of the content myself. I wrote all of the articles and as I kind of mentioned, right, I don't want to work 70, 80, 90 hours a week. And so some of that content was limited, right? I was limited by myself. I was the bottleneck. Uh, but as I looked at my traffic and the history, I could see that things were growing. What I was doing was working, right? I just needed to go bigger. Uh, and so, uh, I either needed to work a lot more myself or I needed to get some help.

5:32And so that's what I decided to do is I made this decision. I'm going to go big instead of just publishing at the time. It was, um, gosh, less than a hundred articles a year for sure. Right. It was like 50, 60, 70, right? I was maybe doing four or five blog posts a month. It was kind of my standard. Uh, but then I thought, you know what, what if I double triple 10 X this, uh, the amount of content, my traffic should in, in sync with the amount of content, the traffic should go up. And so that's basically, I had this epiphany moment of just, I need to remove myself as the bottleneck. And if I go big, my business should also grow with the amount of content that I'm publishing.

6:20Fire Nation, I hope you're taking this information and applying it to your own thought process and saying, what kind of business do I want to create? What kind of process do I want to go through? What kind of decisions do I want to make with my personal goals? And at some point, as we've kind of been talking around and about, we just want to take the pedal off the metal. We want to stop just grinding our faces off, if in fact we were doing that at one point. So let's really get details, Spencer, about how we can replace ourselves from day-to-day operations. If we find, like you found, that we're the bottleneck, that we really want to find a way to keep growing our business or still be profitable, or at least create our version, our definition of success by stepping back from the day-to-day?

7:08The answer is simple but also complicated, right? I mean, it's as simple as saying, hey, well, you hire people to replace yourself. And I mean, that kind of at its core is the answer. But how do you replace somebody that is the face of the blog, right, that's written all the content? How do you do this? Um, and of course, one book that I'm sure you've talked about a lot, uh, John and a lot of other people have talked about, um, is, uh, the E-Myth, E-Myth revisited by Michael Gerber, where he talks about this concept of essentially removing yourself from your business, right? There's, you can be either, you can be in the restaurant flipping the burgers, you know, doing all the work yourself.

7:49Um, you can become a manager and sort of manage the burger flippers, or eventually you can totally remove yourself. So you're not even in the store. You're just, uh, you're the business owner, right? You maybe hire a general manager and they run everything. Uh, and so you maybe need to go in phases, right? From day one, you're not going to a hundred percent remove yourself. But what I did is like, okay, um, I've been writing all the content myself. What if I get some authors and it's, it's a long process to find somebody that can write in your own voice, uh, or write, you know, in a similar style to what your niche pursuits, my niche pursuits, readers were accustomed to.

8:28But I was able to find a few writers and then I kind of moved up the food chain, if you will, to the editor, right, where I would read their content. I would edit all of that, provide feedback, and then we would produce content that was, you know, I felt like on par with what I was producing. And I did that for, I want to say, maybe six months where I kind of acted as the editor and was still very hands-on and it was working well and I had developed all my processes and procedures and this is very important is to have written out standard operating procedures. I had spreadsheets for how everything was organized, what content was coming up, what was on the schedule, what would be published next, you know, who was assigned to that, what keywords, all of these minute details that I used to just kind of do on my own.

9:22I had to flesh out, write out and make it easier for somebody new to come in and go, OK, here's where the blog is going and here's how I can jump in and accomplish that, make that really easy. So after maybe six months of being the editor, I then brought in a managing editor and I trained that editor on my processes. And so at this point now, I've been able to completely remove myself where new content is being published and edited 100 % without my involvement for the most part. I kind of do a spot check here and there to make sure everything's looking good. But because of that process, these procedures, I've been able to remove myself, and I was able to scale my content exponentially.

10:10And in fact, I was able to go from, like I said, publishing maybe 50 to 100 articles a year to last year in 2023, I published over 1000 articles on niche pursuits in the year. So I essentially 10x the output that I was doing all by myself, all while working less, was able to scale that content. Fire Nation, I really hope you're taking inspiration from this process that Spencer went through because it is possible. And again, he 10x'd, sometimes 20x'd his output from his 50 to 100 articles. I mean, think about those numbers. That's exciting stuff. And we have a lot more to talk about around systems, etc.

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14:06Visit BetterHelp.com slash fire today to get 10 % off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash fire. Spencer, we're back. And as I kind of mentioned right before the break, systems. because I love systems. I love processes. So I want to talk about setting up systems specifically for scaling a blog. I mean, you went through a process before the break that was really interesting, but let's really hone in on this now. It's sort of simple to say, hey, I'm going to replace myself or I'm going to set up a system. But once you get in the weeds, right, it is a little bit of work to get set up just right.

14:45Right. So my system, like I mentioned, it does start with a spreadsheet where I lay out some of the general guidelines. And I think that's important for the voice, the formatting, the type of content I'm producing, explaining who the end reader is so that somebody new that comes in can just step in from day one and understand this is who we're trying to reach. This is the type of content that I have. But for me, step one that I am still involved in a little bit is keyword research. for a blog specifically. So we get some keywords. We have a list of keywords. We pop that in the spreadsheet. Then the author can go in and self-assign their name next to that spreadsheet or next to that keyword of a topic that they want to write about.

15:31And then begins the writing process. And I use Trello. I have a large Trello board to make sure that this system, this process works out very smooth. And so as soon as the author assigns themselves a keyword, they create a Trello card and they write the outline of the blog post. And then once they do that, they move it to the next column. The editor then comes in and reviews that outline before the author ever starts writing anything else. And they adjust the outline as needed, provides any feedback there. And once they get the green light, that card is moved over to the next Trello column. The author writes the article using some of the procedures that we have on our spreadsheet.

16:20And then they move that back over to the editor. The editor goes through reviews for grammar, for formatting, for internal linking, for external linking, for images, doing all of those things. we do actually then move that card over to a graphic designer who will add any original graphics or certainly at least a featured images to have on that article. And then once the graphic designer is done, the editor does the final edits. The managing editor pops in for a minute, just makes sure everything looks good. they hit publish and then the final step for any seo nerds out there is uh that they use a tool called link whisper to build internal links to that brand new article that's kind of the final step that we have in our process is they build a new internal link to that article and the reason they do that is because you don't want an orphan post living out on your website that doesn't have any internal links.

17:27This is kind of like the SEO juice that Google uses to follow different articles on your site. And so we use Link Whisper, which is a tool that I created to build those internal links to make sure that Google finds that content. So there's about a seven or eight step process that they go through on this Trello board. And once that is all completed, the author then goes back over to this main spreadsheet that we have and puts the date that they finished the article, how many words the article was, the length, and basically marks that as complete. They go back, they start a new, they pick a new keyword, and they start the process all over again.

18:07So I have a spreadsheet that has four or five tabs on it, and then this Trello board with seven or eight sort of steps on it. That's the overall kind of in the weeds procedure that has just worked really, really well to help scale the blog like we did. Fire Nation, I hope you are taking copious notes there because that is one heck of a process. Now, I will say there's a big difference between working hard and working long. I mean, we talked about like the 18-hour grind. That's working long, but you can work really hard in a very focused set amount of time, like two hours, four hours, six hours, like whatever that might look like for you.

18:48So I will say that working hard is important but we want to know that it's worthwhile. So what are the results that we can achieve when we work focused, when we work hard? Just in general, I find that I do produce a lot better work when I turn off all distractions. And a lot of people will do this, but I am a big fan of sort of putting a timer on for like an hour and truly focusing, turning off my phone, turning off social media, and just sitting down. And whether that is writing a blog post or recording a YouTube video or recording a podcast or strategizing, I find that I will get a lot more done in one hour than if I were to try and multitask, right?

19:40Check in my email, check social media. Oh, and then I'm also going to try and write a little bit of a blog post. you're going to waste a lot of time switching tasks. And as a lot of people have probably read, right? There's just, there's a lot of waste when you switch from one task to the other. So being able to focus your brain all on one thing, you'll accomplish a lot more. Now that is sort of the micro level, right? But the macro level of what I was able to accomplish with niche pursuits and the actual results that I was able to achieve because I was focusing my time on more setting up a process and more setting up a procedure and allowing my writers and my editors and other people that I hired to actually produce the work.

20:27We, of course, like I said, accomplished so much more. So I took my blog from having traffic from Google of about two to three thousand visitors a day with a couple of years ago, right? That's basically all that Niche Pursuits was getting, you know, maybe 100 ,000 visitors a month, which is okay. But with this process, scaling this content, writing 1 ,000 blog posts in a year, I have 10x my traffic. And so I'm now getting instead of 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 visitors a day, 20 ,000 to 30 ,000 visitors a day. I have had a month that popped over that 1 million visitor a month mark. But for the most part, it's just a little bit just shy of maybe a million visitors a month.

21:19And so being able to see the focus, removing myself as the bottleneck, and then being able to scale the business that much has been huge. And now, of course, that is just the traffic side of the equation. Anytime you 10 extra traffic. We've also been able to scale the number of email subscribers, um, that are coming into the new email subscribers coming to the email list, uh, that funnels into so many other areas, right? My podcast, uh, my YouTube channel and other things that now have more attention because I've been able to scale the, the written content on my blog. Other areas are getting a lot more attention as well.

22:03And then, of course, is the bottom line. Revenue has grown as well because of this. Not only affiliate revenue, but to other areas has grown quite a bit. I have a software tool that I mentioned, LinkWhisper, over at LinkWhisper.com. The revenue to that has grown a lot because I've been able to sort of touch a lot more customers. And then the other thing that I did recently, just about 12 months ago, I added display ads to nichepursuits.com because of the traffic was growing so much. It just made sense to put some display ads on certain pages in order to grow the revenue to those pages. And so I've shared this in other places, but I essentially went from zero revenue with display ads to, um, 25 to$30 ,000 a month in revenue with display ads alone.

23:03Right. And of course there's other revenue sources for niche pursuits, but that's just kind of been one of those things because I scaled the traffic. I've got all this traffic. Well, let's just put some ads on the pages and that's resulted in an additional, you know, 25 ,000 a month. So kind of cool to see the results. Fire Nation, I hope you're taking notes on this because Spencer has been doing this for a long time, very successfully. So if you were a little skeptical about how to scale your blog to 1000 articles a year, all while working less, I bet that skepticism has disappeared. Spencer, in one sentence, what is the one key takeaway you want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation today?

23:44The importance of focus and the ability to remove yourself if you want to scale. That's just so critical to be able to grow your business and to grow it effectively. If Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more, what is your call to action for our listeners today? Well, if they just want to follow along generally, of course, they can go over to nichepursuits.com. I do share a lot more on Twitter. So it's at niche pursuits on Twitter. And if they enjoy video, they can go over to the YouTube channel where I'm putting a lot more effort into that as well. And they can follow the niche pursuits YouTube channel.

24:22Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with SH and JLD today. So keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Spencer in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Spencer, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Spencer for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus.

24:58That is why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things and in 100 days and we're talking step-by-step, visit themasteryjournal.com. I will catch you there or on the flip side. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business. Oh, and it's the UK's Fast-Growing Business Podcast. A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist.

25:35Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.