This article is part of a 4 part series on generating more traffic and revenue with your blog. 

Part I: How to Build Blog Traffic: Smart People Use These 3 Strategies While Everyone Else Struggles

Part II: How To Turn Blog Readers into Customers Step by Step

Part III: Multiple Streams of Blog Income: Because One Just Won’t Do 

Part IV: How to Scale Your Blog Business (you are here)

So now, hopefully you’ve gone through the first three posts on how to build your blog business. We’ve covered how you can grow traffic, how to turn readers into customers and how to create multiple streams of income. For those of you that have done the first three steps, now we’ll talk about how to scale your blog business.

When you talk about scaling your blog business, you’re talking about working towards creating an established brand and business that not only effects change but generates revenue.

As you work through scaling your blog business, this will be one of the hardest but worthwhile things you’ll have to do.

Personally, I know exactly what it’s like to scale a blog business.

I’m able to actually work on my business instead of in it all the time as a result of that growth and I want the same for you. Keep reading to find out how.

My wife and I started our two person blog in our master bedroom in Waldorf, MD, just outside of Washington D.C.

Since then we’ve grown our blog to over 40 freelance writers, an office staff that supports the efforts of the blog, hundreds of thousands of readers per month, and bigger than all of that, through the blog we’ve created a movement.

Benefits of Scaling Your Blog Business

There are several benefits to scaling your blog business. Let’s look at a few I’ve outlined below.

Click to Tweet! Scaling gives you a chance to work on the business and not in the business.

As I stated earlier, this is the beauty of scaling summed up in one sentence.

It’s hard to really grow your company when you’re the only fireman putting out all the fires! Sometimes you have to escape the weeds of your daily activities in order to chart a plan of where you want your business to go.

It gives you more hands to work on more projects.

As entrepreneurs, many of us have all these great ideas and concepts we want to do and places we want to take our blog business but often times, we don’t have enough hands and boots on the ground to implement the things we want to get done.

By scaling your blog business, you’ll have more hands to work on these projects.

It gives you the opportunity to create more content and market what you create.

This is vitally important in today’s social media age. You need content in order to establish value up front with the online relationships that you’re forming. Content gives you the ability to show you are the expert or that your product/service solves the problem. Quality content allows you to get your readers closer to the sale.

Now that I’ve told you why you need to scale your blog business and some of its benefits, let’s break down three of the most efficient ways to scale so that you can begin implementing them immediately.

1. Scaling Content

The first way to scale content is by bringing on more writers.

People often ask us how they should bring on  freelance writers, how much they should get paid and what if they can’t afford writers. Then, their next question is, how can they move forward?

Que the spot light, zoom lens and yours truly as the host LOL.  If you’re looking to bring on writers, this is for you.

The first step to bringing on more writers, is to start with the people who are ALREADY a part of your blog community. When we first started reaching out for writers on BMWK, we reached out to the people that were already on our site every day.

These people were leaving comments on our posts and sharing our content via social media. They were already apart of our tribe.

Many of them had link backs to their own sites and blogs, so I’d visit their sites to see what type of blogs they had and what type of content they created. I looked at what type of topics they wrote about and if they were a good fit, I’d reach out to see if they wanted to connect.

Hence our current 40 freelance writers for BMWK.

So, first start with your own community and the people that already engage with your brand or social media channels.

Sometimes it’s not about who you’re with but who you know.

The second biggest question we get about writers are what should you pay writers or what if you can’t afford to pay writers.

When you first begin scaling your blog business, there’s always a balance of what you’re able to pay out to get the help you need and what other resources you really need to get your business to the next level.

If you can’t afford to pay anything, that’s fine.

You still may be able to get people that are willing to sow into the vision and plan that you have for your blog business because they’re already a part of your community. They’re already passionate about the topics you talk about and are passionate about seeing your blog business go to the next level.

BUT as soon as you begin to generate enough revenue, then I’d definitely begin to pay anyone that you can afford to pay  because that gives you the opportunity to hold those people accountable.

Without money, it’s hard to hold your writers accountable for their actions.

If they don’t get something in on time and you ask them about it, the first thing they’ll probably think in their mind is that they’re not getting paid anyway! LOL.

Money gives you the opportunity to keep people accountable to meet your needs and deadlines. Let’s say their job is to fulfill two articles a week. If for some reason they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, you have more leverage to question them about what they committed to do on their end.

Other ways to scale content are to make it easier to create content that you already have.

When most people think about content, they think of long, fully detailed articles that take a long time to create if you’re not a prolific writer.

So I wanted to share two other types of content that we often run that are quick to create and bring in lots traffic.

The first one is what we call a N.O.D. or News of the Day article.

N.O.D. articles are snackable current event content that we know our audience will engage with.

These are things that we may see in the news or social media that we can repackage and leave some commentary on, link back to another article, pull in a video with commentary and then share to our social media channels.

Another easy type of content that you can create are centered around Trending Stories.

This means looking at what stories are trending on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Google, that already have a buzz.

If you create content around topics that are already buzzing, you can leverage that to see a traffic lift as long as you get the content out quick enough to your audience before they discover it on their own.

2. Scaling Staff

Besides your writers, you also want to scale your staff.

People often ask me what are the top positions they should look at when looking to scale their blog business.

Que the spotlight again. If you’re looking to hire people, this is for you.

The first position I’d advise you to hire into your blog business is an editorial person.

This editorial person can be a copy editor, someone that catches your grammatical mistakes and miscues before they post live for the world to see.

They’d make sure everything meets your journalistic standards and everything that you want posted on your blog is on target with your brand messaging and voice.

In addition to editing copy, this can also be the person to schedule the content that you receive from other writers as well.

The second position I’d recommend when scaling staff is a Social Media Manager.

We’ve often seen that that the top duties that take the most time with our blog, are managing the content that comes in and then marketing that content through social media.

So you should look into bringing on a social media manager that can actually create and implement social media strategies on the different platforms that you want to reach through your blog.

You can choose those platforms by looking at the demographics i.e. age, gender, interests of the people that come to your site and then you’ll discover what platforms these people are using on social media so you can create a strategy to reach them. A Social Media Manager can create content and strategies to reach those audiences.

The third position I’d recommend for scaling staff would be a graphics person.

A graphics person doesn’t have to be someone that sits in your office everyday. This can be a freelance person, someone you’ve worked with from Fiverr, or a someone that you’ve found on Upwork.com.

That graphics person can give your site sizzle by creating featured images, branding and even memes that can be shared on social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. This will help give the site an overall polished look and take your branding to the next level.

3. Scaling Revenue

Last but not least, the most important thing you want to scale when scaling your blog business is to scale revenue.

Things are looking great. You’re bringing on more writers and staff and you’re growing the business to the next level but you need the revenue dollars to actually support these new additions.

You need more money to not only support what you’re currently doing but to take what you’re doing to the next level.

When we talk about scaling revenue, I want to make sure that you’re using my A.C.C. approach from earlier in the blog series.

If you remember from my previous blog post, on how to turn readers into customers, you must ATTRACT people to our blog. Then you need to CAPTURE their information and then you CONVERT those readers into customers.

You want to look at what products and services you’re offering and what products you can offer in the future based on the challenges and needs of the people that are coming to your site.

You can do this by checking out blog post number three where we talked about multiple streams of blog income. What streams can you develop around your site to increase revenue and take it to new heights?

If you only have one stream, I can guarantee you that at some point, that stream will dry up.

So you must have multiple streams in order to fortify your business for whatever may be ahead.

Public speaking, advertisements, products, affiliate sales and freelance services are all ways you can create multiple streams for your blog.

You may be asking how do I get enough people to see the products and services I offer? If so, check out our first post on how to build blog traffic.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, scaling your blog business will be one of the hardest things you’ll do but it’s definitely worth it.

It’s hard to let go of your baby when you’ve been the only one up late writing articles, creating plug-ins on the site, the technical person, the graphics person AND the social media person.

BUT it’s something that has to be done.

I want you to work towards firing yourself from as many jobs on your blog as you can because as I mentioned earlier, you have to stop being just the technician and start being the real entrepreneur that you are destined to be.

It starts with beginning to scale your blog business.

These are the best ways to begin scaling your blog. They are the methods we used to scale our blog and I shared them in hopes that they would spark ideas for you and your business. If they did, drop a note in the comment section letting me know.

Now on a sheet of paper, write down ALL the jobs that you can fire yourself from in your blog business and begin generating plans to assign them to others that want to see your business grow.

Also make sure you join our FREE Facebook group called Traffic, Sales & Profit with Lamar Tyler.

See you soon!

-Lamar