Adam Connell Interview from Blogging Wizard On Taking Your Blog to The Next Level

Welcome to yet another Bloggers interview series.

This time we’re interviewing Adam Connell from Blogging Wizard who has built a legendary blog that tells you everything from how to make money from blogging, build a money making email list and increase your overall website conversions even if you’re starting from zero.

Let’s dive into the details of Adam Connell interview to find out what he has to offer you to take your blog to the next level in 2024 and beyond.

Adam Connell Interview from Blogging Wizard

1. What are the top 3 proven blogging strategies that you recommend to a new blogger to build a profitable blog in 2024?

These aren’t strategies specifically, but there are several things all bloggers should have in place as soon as possible:

• Create a product or offer a service – If you want to make your blog profitable, you need something that you can sell. It’s quicker than earning affiliate revenue. With products you can leverage other platforms that have an audience to get off to a solid start (E.g. Udemy for courses and Amazon for ebooks). Services are a great option because you can monetize the skills you learn as a blogger – then reach out to startups, bloggers, and companies in your niche and offer your services. As well as pitching via job boards etc
• Build an email list – Create some exclusive content you can offer to readers in exchange for their email address (otherwise known as a lead magnet). You can then use this email list to promote your content, products and services.
• Contribute guest posts to other sites in your niche – You need to get your content in front of a wider audience and guest posting sites is a great way to do that.

Key takeaway: As Adam Connell suggested, one of the fastest and easiest ways to start making money even from a new blog is to create a product or offer a service (it can be anything from freelance writing to selling eBooks to offering SEO services) so you can make money from day 1 instead of waiting for the “perfect time”.

2. Who’s Adam Connell? Why should someone read Blogging Wizard?

I’m a blogger from the UK – I have a background in content marketing and SEO. In my “agency days”, I used to handle the content and SEO for a bunch of international brands, and manage a team of marketers.

I started Blogging Wizard to share what I was learning at the agency. In recent years the site has grown, so I’ve been able to hire extra writers to share their expertise as well.

Right now, we are focused on sharing proven strategies to help you accelerate your blog’s growth.

The content we publish is actionable and detailed. A good example is this 5K word guide on how to promote your blog.

Our advice has been featured on Forbes, Inc, TheNextWeb, HuffPost, SEJ, MarketingProfs, GoDaddy, and more.

And our content is seen by millions each year.

3. How to create a blog sales funnel that actually makes money?

Most blog sales funnels will make money – it’s simply a question of how much they’ll make.

The biggest problems tend to be:

• Not understanding sales funnels (or even knowing they exist)
• Having an offer that isn’t compelling
• Sales pages that aren’t optimized
• The tech behind the sales funnel isn’t setup properly

Just to give you some background, here’s a basic example of a blog sales funnel:

A good way to think about this is in “value steps”.

At the top of the funnel you start with ungated content (blog posts, for example), then you have free gated content (your lead magnet), then your initial offer which can be low priced.

Then you need something else to sell that is higher value, which will typically be more expensive. And then you can keep going.

When it comes to figuring out exactly what you’re going to offer, it’s worth starting at the end of your funnel and working your way backwards.

So, start with your “high ticket” offers first. Then figure out the rest as you move up (well, backwards) through the funnel.

Another way to think about your funnel is that your offering will get more specific, or have a more limited target customer demographic, the further people get through your funnel.

Key takeaway: Offering “highly expensive stuff first” always works. That’s how smart bloggers like Jon Morrow made millions of dollars from his blog Smart Blogger. They first launched high ticket offers such as $10000 one on one coaching services and then used their email lists to launch relatively low end offers to make more money.

4. If you were to going to start over again, how do you choose a niche?

Over the years I’ve developed a simple formula for deciding which niche to choose.

It’s this:

You need passion for the topic to keep yourself motivated and you need to be able to earn money from it if you ever want to turn it into a business (or just earn a living from it). Knowledge can be learned but without it, you’re going against the grain and it gets a lot harder.

If you look at any bloggers that earn a considerable income from their blog, you’ll likely find that their chosen niche is profitable. And they have the knowledge and passion to push themselves forward.

Key takeaway: Your passion and the knowledge you have for a particular niche plays a key role in taking your blog to the next level. Make sure the topic you select has some competition and profitability if you’re aiming to get massive profits from your blog in the long run.

5. How do you come up with blog post ideas for your blog?

I always get my best blog post ideas when I’m doing something else.

One thing I’ll do is scan through a bunch of blog posts found using Zest.is.

Zest is a stream of pre-filtered marketing content (for other niches you can use content aggregators like AllTop or Q&A sites like Quora).

I’ll consume as much information as I can without trying to think of ideas – this is inspiration for later (it’s like an input/output thing). Then I’ll go and do something repetitive that requires little thought.

Something like playing guitar, gardening, or eating a snack.

While doing one of these activities, my subconscious gets to work on content ideas.

I can’t explain why, but the ideas that I come up with this way are better than any I plan consciously – and are the most unique. And I’m typically able to flesh out the outline for a blog post very quickly after doing this – you need a notepad handy for ideas.

Alternatively, I’ll get content ideas from the survey I send out to my email subscribers, or using a content research tool like Buzzsumo, or Ahrefs.

Key takeaway: No matter what industry you are in, you can always come up with a ton of ideas by using platforms like Zest, Quora, Medium etc. Besides, you can always use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Buzzsumo for competitor research to find out the high performing topics in your industry.

Quick tip: headline generator tools to easily come up with dozens of profitable topic ideas for your future blog posts.

6. What are the 3 WordPress tools you can’t live without?

I wouldn’t say there are any tools I can’t live without. There are always alternatives.

But there are several tools that I find very useful:

• Sucuri – this isn’t WordPress specific but it’s incredibly useful. Sucuri’s platform allows me to speed up my blog with a CDN, protect against hackers with their firewall, backup my blog, and more.
• Thrive Leads – this is the most feature packed opt-in form plugin on the market right now.
• WP Rocket – if your host has their own caching plugin, you won’t need this. But for a feature packed caching plugin, this is amazingly easy to use

7. What’s your #1 way to increase traffic to a new blog?

SEO.

It takes a while to get going, but when it does – it can send you an incredible amount of traffic.

And it all starts with publishing content on topics that people are actually searching for.

But, the reality is that you should never focus solely on a single traffic generation strategy.

You need to leverage as many ways to drive traffic as possible.

Try out a bunch of ideas, and work them into your own content promotion checklist that you can work through every time you publish a new piece of content. Make it part of your routine.

Key takeaway: There’s no other better alternative to SEO. Search engines send you the highly qualified visitors that you can use to increase not only your website traffic but also your website sales. Just make sure to focus on timeless SEO strategies instead of looking for shortcuts.

8. What are the golden rules of blogging according to you?

There aren’t any “rules” as such, just suggestions.

But a strong part of my ethos is that a blog should be focused on helping, and not creating hysteria, or negatively impacting anyone.

Really it all boils down to this: be good and do good things.

9. You’ve been blogging for a long time now. What blogging mistakes that cost you a lot?

A few of the main mistakes were:

No clear revenue strategy in a saturated niche

The first niche blog I started was in the video game niche. In many ways, it was a success (15K monthly uniques hit after a few months).

But we had no clear revenue strategy and were in a saturated niche that was difficult to make money from so we eventually shut down.

This is a case of “failing forward” – this project taught me a lot of marketing lessons the hard way. And it’s partly what helped me land a marketing job with no formal qualifications. I only wasted a small amount of money on this project, and the time I spent was worth it based on what I learned as a result.

If an offer sounds too good to be true, it might be!

I’ve been burned a few times when outsourcing projects – particularly content development work.

A few years ago I hired a content marketer. They were helping develop infographics, blog posts, and promote them. Eventually, they offered a discounted rate for a batch of work.

It was like 50% off and they explained they needed seed money for a side project.

They’d worked for me for a while and everything was going well – they were delivering work on time, so I took a chance. They did a small part of the work, then bailed.

As a result, I don’t pay anyone 100% upfront for work. Sometimes I’ll do 50/50 but rarely for big projects.

Sometimes you’ve just got to go for it

One of my biggest passions is building websites, and marketing them. As such, I love taking on new projects.

A while back I started a project with a friend I used to work with. The idea was great and I thought it could genuinely be a platform that makes a positive impact.

It was a niche that I didn’t have much experience with – my friend did.

We spent so long developing the website and over analysing everything that when we were almost ready to launch, we decided to change things.

I ended up rebuilding that website from the ground up 3 times, and we changed our direction for the site each time too.

But there was another mistake in here too. I’d spent so much time trying to make this work that the growth of my other projects were starting to suffer.

The lesson? Done is better than perfect but try not to spread yourself too thin.

Key takeaway: Come up with a foolproof monetization strategy. Analyse your competitors carefully. Find out how you can automate your blogging work so you can focus more on creating quality content, driving more traffic from search engines and generating sales.

Above all, think big and start small. Don’t afraid to take risks if you really want to build a highly profitable blog in the long run. Make mistakes and learn from them.

10. What’s the #1 link building strategy you suggest for Bloggers Passion readers?

This isn’t an obvious one but one of the best ways to get links is to forge relationships with other bloggers in your niche.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably received countless emails from people asking you to link to them.

Conversion rates for these emails are naturally quite low.

The whole “Hey, I saw you posted something on [topic], I wrote something on the same topic that you should link to.” isn’t good enough.

But, when you have an existing relationship with someone – it is.

This isn’t just about link building. It’s about helping grow each others businesses.

You may end up referring each other clients, or something more. The opportunities that this can lead to are limitless.

You’re simply making friends. And friends help each other.

Key takeaway: That’s a solid advice about link building from Adam Connell. Making friends, increasing your personal brand, networking with other bloggers in industry work like a charm. Not only it helps you easily attract links to your blog but it also helps you in taking your blog to the next level in terms of income, traffic and more.

Final Thoughts About Adam Connell Interview from Blogging Wizard

If you’re a beginner, this interview with Adam Connell is alone worth a thousand bucks. It contains all the golden nuggets about building a money making blog from scratch. Make sure to reread it again to understand how blogging really works.

Do you’ve any more questions for Adam Connell? Shoot them in the comments below and we’ll try to respond to each one of the comments.