274 | Q&A From Our Free Facebook Community!

Welcome to the Thrive Podcast. If you're a blogger, influencer, you found this show for you. I'm Brie Pear, your host and blogging coach, here to help you take your brand to the next level. At Thrive, our mission is to equip bloggers and influencers with practical tactics and strategies that can transform your brand to give you the lifestyle you want.

We offer tutorials, workshops, and a supportive community to accompany you on your journey. I created the thrive podcast to give you simple, actionable steps that you can use to drive real results in your business. I also wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain of others in the industry that you look up to.

Our guests share strategies they've used to grow revenue streams that are working for them and insider info you won't find anywhere else. Now let's get ready to thrive.

Hey, blogging babes. Welcome back to another episode. I, if you are watching this on YouTube or even a clip on our Instagram stories, you can tell. This looks a little bit different. I've got a new camera. I've got that upgrade going and I've got a little bit of a gallery wall started behind me. It's, I'm still needing a few more pieces waiting on them to come in from Etsy.

Oh my gosh. I love just like, you know, when you hit that point in your business where you're like, okay, I'm ready to like upgrade things a little bit. That's where I'm at. So it's been a lot of fun. Let's get into today's episode today. I wanted to go through and answer some questions that I got from you guys inside of our Facebook communities.

So if you're not a part of our Facebook community, I want you guys to run over there and join us. The thrive blogging community. We're having conversations over there. All the time, every single day, you could ask questions, meet other blogging and creator babes over there. And it's a whole lot of fun. So I did a post a little while back, just a Q and A post.

So ask me anything. So I am going to go through those right now here with you guys. So Tara asked, What digital product should I create and sell? My niche is vegan family, especially in Europe and Portugal, and I have, like, some ideas for this. But you know what? This, this just shows how amazing our community is.

So Kimmy responded and she had some great ideas. She's like, do you have an American or other international audience? If so, what about a guide on how to ask for vegan food options in Portuguese and the languages of the other places you talk about? or a guide for specific words in each language to look for on a menu of restaurants or in the grocery stores.

So I love, love, love that idea. Um, she also said my first idea would be to make a good freebie and then have an upsell with a guide to maybe like the best vegan restaurants. List each one. Describe the best meals. A map showing where to find them. And I read this and I was like, Kimmy, you nailed it. This is like such an amazing idea for Tara.

So, I just wanted to read that because I didn't even have to answer that one. I, you know, that's the power of this awesome community. So, if you guys have questions and things you want to brainstorm, use the group. You can literally ask anything. Okay, Brenda asked, What is your favorite WordPress theme for a blog not focused on sales that's more focused on the stories folks are sharing and the resources people want to reference?

Love that. So basically just a blog that you're not, um, selling anything, or maybe you'll have like digital products down the road. One of my top suggestions is Is impress themes. We've had them on the podcast before. Their things are absolutely stunning. The support is incredible. We'll leave a link to them below.

The other one that I really like is blue chic. We'll also leave a link to that. And I've found that both of these are really user friendly, easy to use, have great support systems, and that's what I really look for. In a theme, I look at what kind of documentation do they have? If I have questions, is there a way for me to reach out to them or to pay them to help me install it if I wanted to?

And then, of course, just making sure that everything is really user friendly, really looking at the The demo site, you can always look at a demo site for at least for impress and for blue chic, I recommend buying from someone that has a demo site that you can explore and really see how does it function?

Is it user friendly? Is it mobile friendly? You really just want to make sure it checks all of those boxes. So that's why I love recommending impress themes and blue chic. Okay. Next question. Sophie asks, is it worth signing up to Amazon affiliates for you for you have good traffic to your website? That is such a great question because you have to have a certain amount of sales to keep your Amazon affiliate account active.

So, My advice to her was that if she has a good social media following, then yes, because you can make sales from your email list or from your social media following. If you do not yet have blog traffic. And for a lot of people, that is how they're making their Amazon affiliate sales. It's from social media.

So you want to just kind of see, it depends on like how much of a following you have, how much traffic you have, and just know that by simply putting a couple of affiliate links in a blog post is not necessarily going to get you. A lot of sales, if any. It is something that is very repetitive. I mean, we all follow those people on Instagram, amazing influencers, and you can tell like the strategy is repetitiveness and consistency, and you keep showing up with multiple affiliate links, like that's the strategy that we have to have for this.

And it works. It's amazing. But you have to have a following in order to make those sales. So that's something to consider whenever you're looking at signing up for Amazon in particular. Other affiliate programs are more friendly, I will say, and they don't have like, oh, you have to make this many sales within this many days or we're going to shut down your account.

I will say if you do that and you don't hit the sale limit, you can re sign up later down the road when you're ready. It's not like a one time and you're out. You can sign up again later and give it another shot. Other affiliate programs are a bit more friendly, so if you find something that has like a specific product or a specific brand that you're really passionate about that you love, then give that a shot and see if they have an affiliate program that you can join.

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Kristen asked, what's the best way to build your authority in 2024? 2024. This is awesome. My, I'm going to read you what I wrote and then I'll expand on it. But I told her consistency, show up consistently for your audience and provide value. That is truly how we build authority is we have to be there for our audience.

They have to know that we're not going anywhere. They have to know that we're going to keep providing them with resources, education. fun content, inspiring content, whatever your thing may be, they need to know that you're just always going to be around. The other thing that can really help is by really solidifying your niche and who your target audience is.

So what are you talking about? What are you wanting to be known for? That's why When people talk about niching down, that's one of the things that you want to build that authority. So if I were to expand what I talk about here, um, and move outside of blogging and social media, Yes, I touch sometimes on like Pinterest or SEO and all that, which it's all related to blocking and social media, right?

Whereas if I were to all of a sudden start talking about digital art and illustration and procreate and all of these things that I'm interested in, it would come out of left field and it would not make sense for my target audience and that would. almost deter from me building authority because I'm trying to build authority on being a blogging and social media expert.

And if all of a sudden I started talking about illustrations, it is going to take away from that authority that I have been building. So that is why it's really important to just figure out what am I wanting to be known for? And then also figure out with that, who is my target audience? And really building out like an avatar for that.

And this is something that I just added inside of the profitable blogger society, added a full training on how to do this. And just from like a quick level, it's really just thinking of like creating this persona. of who your target audience is. Um, how old are they? What is their gender? What do they like?

What are their hobbies? What are some pain points that they have? What are some problems? What are some, what's their career? What do they love to do? Really building that out so that way you can visualize this person whenever you're creating the content and really make sure that you are doing everything to speak to that person within that niche.

And then you show up consistently and that is how we build authority. That was such a good question. Thank you, Kristen. Okay. Let's see. I've got a couple more here that I want to address. So the last one, not the last one, second to last is from Sarah. She says, where to start to monetize? I have a decent social media following on Instagram and have made a bit with affiliate links and UGC, but not much.

What's a logical next step? I love the idea of a blog, but get overwhelmed trying to decide among all the platforms out there. Awesome. Love this Sarah. So you are in a perfect place to start growing and start scaling. So my advice would first to be like, let's look at what is doing well and let's double down on that a bit more.

So you said that you have a decent social media following on Instagram and I've made some with affiliate links and UGC, but not much. So what I would look at is how consistent are you being with sharing those affiliate links? Are you sharing affiliate links every single day? Do you have a good strategy for knowing what your audience likes and what they're looking for and being able to provide that to them?

That's what I would look at first and really trying to increase your affiliate income through Instagram. The next thing I would look at is if you're wanting to do more UGC content is how often are you applying for things? How often are you pitching yourself? And what can we do there to make sure that tries to become a little bit more consistent?

The next natural thing that. I would think of within that would be to do sponsored content on your Instagram. So working with brands in another capacity outside of UGC and actually creating content that is for your channel that is sponsored by brands. So that would be the next thing that I would do. So I would really kind of hone in on those three things for income and try to scale that way simultaneously while you're doing that.

I do think it is a good idea to have either an email list or traffic going to your website. Ideally, both, but since you're feeling like, Oh, it's going to be a little bit overwhelming or I'm like, you're struggling to choose all the things. The first thing I would start with is growing an email list. I would go ahead and get that set up.

Flodesk makes it super, super easy. They've got gorgeous landing pages. Gorgeous forms, they even can create a beautiful link in your bio on Instagram and make it really seamless for somebody to start getting on your email list and also be able to share links to your Amazon storefront or whatever else you may want.

So that's what I would start with is building that growing your email list, creating a freebie, some type of free opt in for your audience that really makes sense to them and start to grow your list. Then from there, girl. I think you're ready to start a blog. So get your blog started. And, you know, we have the, how to start a blog guide on our website.

And we'll also link that in the show notes for you. And also like hop into the Facebook group and ask any questions that you have about like, which platform should I jump on? How do I get it set up? Anything like that at all. We're always here to help. And the community is so, so amazing. And to wrap up our questions, this goes along perfectly with that.

So Kayla asks, what do you use for web hosting and what storage plan? It seems like even if I upgrade to the largest storage option, you would always be running out of space since I really don't have that much on my website right now at all. And it's at capacity. So what we love is site ground. That's what we're currently using for hosting.

Um, and I think we have the middle package right now. But if you're just getting started, you can start out with the basic. My one tip for you there is as you're starting with hosting, Spend as much as you can up front. So buy the longest amount of time. So it's 2. 99 a month. And that is the lowest price you're ever going to see for a brand new account.

I cannot get that pricing anymore myself. So make sure that you just purchase it for as many years as you're able to afford. Um, and you're going to save more money that way. So that's what I choose for hosting currently for my channel. For us over here, we've been using SiteGround for about five years now.

And it's worked really, really well. Running out of space, you could potentially have, um, some extra backups that keep getting automatically stored for some reason. So that's something I would look into whatever hosts you have. At least with SiteGround, they have a chat where we're able to, you know, talk to them about that.

And they've always been really helpful for us and looking at like what could be going on. And there's also like good documentation where you can kind of dig in a little bit and see what's happening with storage. We use a plugin that connects to Dropbox and does storage that way, so that way it backs up our site.

To Dropbox. That's what I mean is like the backups could be storing directly on your site, which can create unnecessary files. So that's something you might want to look at and also talk to them and see like, you know, where is my storage going? Um, what is filling it all up? And they should have some great advice for you there.

Okay, so that's all the questions that I have right now from our group. I love doing these Q& A's with you guys. So I'm actually probably going to stop this recording and go to another one in the group and post another Q& A so that way I can keep helping you guys out over there. So make sure you go head over and join the Thrive Blogging Community on Facebook.

It's a lot of fun. It's kind of like home base for us. It's something that we find. first started growing for our community and yeah, I love being able to connect with you guys over there. All right. We'll see you back here soon for a new episode.

Thank you for listening to the Thrive Podcast. For resources mentioned in today's episode, head to thrivetogether. blog. And if you're a blogger or influencer looking for a community that is ready to cheer you on and be a resource to help you grow, be sure to join the thrive blogging community on Facebook.

If you love this episode, I would be so honored if you subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast app and give our guests some love over on social media until next time. Keep thriving.