Last Updated on April 10, 2022 by Scott Charleboix

In today’s post, Building your Blogging Business, I’m reviewing the Upside Down Business Model to look at a technique that’s used by the Elite Blog Academy (EBA) that differs from the traditional way of running a business, it’s called “The Upside Down Business Model.”

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Building your Blogging Business

What makes the Traditional Business Model so hard to use is that you need to go out and it’s really hard to find your customers (the people that you want to bring to your blog) because they need to come to you.  With this model (the “Traditional” one – as opposed to the Upside Down Business Model which will discuss next) blogs have a tendency to fail for two different reasons:

1. They lack the capital resources to keep their blog going (no cash cow coming in) or
2. They haven’t been able to develop a product or the product they developed doesn’t match the needs of what people are looking for to solve their problems

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If you’d like to know more about the Elite Blog Academy (EBA) there’s a book that you can buy for less than $20.00 (not including tax) that will provide you with many benefits to monetize your blog. 

Especially if you’ve been blogging for a while and want to bring your blog to the next level.  Below I’ve highlighted some of the pros and cons of the book that personifies how to use a lot of the principals that are in the EBA course (now here’s a point that I clearly need to make, I personally haven’t taken the course, I’m making an educated guess that many of the things discussed in the book are a part of the EBA curriculum). 

Pros of How to Blog for Profit Book	Cons of How to Blog for Profit Book
Action plans at the back of every chapter.	Doesn’t provide exact step-by-step details but provides a general overview of what you need to do for your blog.
Cost is less than $20.00 for the book compared to more than $1,000 for the EBA course.	Provides examples of things you can do to monetize your blog, but the work is up to you to provide the final product.
If you’ve been contemplating starting blog but don’t know where to start this book is one of the best books that I’ve read about how to monetize your blog.	If you think that you know everything there is to know about blogging, then this book “isn’t” for you.  Nor is it for anyone who’s looking to get rich quick.
If you’ve been struggling to monetize your blog, this book is a good investment so that you can take a step back and look at your blog through a lens with a whole new perspective to see what needs to get changed.	There’s no one way to make money online so the book provides you with many different tools that you can use to meet that objective, but they are spread out throughout the book.  By the end hopefully you’ll have a clear understanding of what product you want to develop for your blog.
One of the most important elements to help your blog grow is content and harnessing the power of content marketing for your business.  That’s where this book comes in so especially useful.	You’re provided with many different blogs that have taken the EBA course and you’ll see what they got out of the course but that doesn’t necessarily help you too much.
By the time that you get done reading the book you’ll be well equipped with the principles of the E.A.T. principle that allows you to monetize your blog.	Unfortunately, the road to a successful business can take a long time (anywhere from 6 months to years).  It’s up to you to develop and create a product or service to sell on your blog.
This book puts together collectively in one place nearly everything there is that you need to know to learn professional blogging.	You have to be prepared to be into your blog for the long haul – possibly three years before you reap some benefits.

The remainder of this post discusses the 1^st principal of the Upside Down Business Model – Refine your Message.  This post is already getting quite lengthy so I’ll continue the remainder of the principals in a subsequent post and I’ll provide the links to the next posts. 

If you’ve been developing posts for a blog, these four principles will probably look very familiar to you.  If they don’t look familiar, I’d highly recommend that you embrace these four principles to make your blog profitable. 

The EBA Business Model (A.K.A. the Upside Down Business Model).

1. Determining your “ideal” target audience
2. Growing your audience with an e-mail list and developing E.A.T. 
3. Monetizing your blog (“after” the first two objective above have been satisfied).
4. Building your business

Refining your message: 

If I had to summarize this part of the book in addition to understanding and visualizing your ideal target audience it’s also about developing great and amazing content for your blog to keep bringing back your readers so you keep pulling them in to your blog over and over again. 

Pro-Tip:  A word of advice to new bloggers, be yourself.  Look at other bloggers to see “what” they’re doing.  Don’t copy exactly what they are doing, but you can definitely learn from other bloggers so that you can profit from their expertise. 

I’m not going to be providing you with every nuance of what you need to do to improve your blog so that begins to get started to becoming monetized, that’s why I highly suggest that you buy the book, and you can find out within the book (How to Blog for Profit by Ruth Soukup) what needs to be done.  I’m willing to bet that once you have this wonderful book in your hands that you too will find yourself wanting to grab the nearest pen so that you can start making notes to yourself and begin formulating your plan. 

Developing your plan is very easy because Ruth has put the action steps that you need to do right at the end of every chapter.

One of the principal things that I learned from many books that discuss how to monetize your blog is that you need to treat your blog like it’s a business.  That’s one of the most important mindsets that you can develop to help you move forward if you want to monetize your blog. 

Once you’ve started getting regular subscribers because you’ve established their trust you’re ready to start moving onto the monetization phase.  This is where the magic happens as you start to brainstorm about the possibilities of products that you can provide to your customers for the items that they’re seeking answers to find. 

I’m pretty sure that this blog post will get your attention.  If the blog post doesn’t get your attention, the image definitely should from a post called How To Write a Viral Blog Posts, Making a Killer Blogging Content.  Use this blog post as your inspiration to write killer blogging content!  Because there is one thing that nearly every blogger wants:  “Going viral is what every blogger wants.”  

This image is an example of the WOW! factor to make you say Awesome.  These are the kinds of images that I love to find because I know that it’ll get shared. 

My Dad loved baseball and thinking of baseball reminds me of one of my favorite baseball movies, The Field of Dreams and the saying from that movie, If you Build it, they will Come.  Blogging in general is pretty much like the saying If you Build it, they will Come.  But in order to have them come requires a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy that you’re using to bring you organic traffic. 

What do “if you build it they will come” and SEO have in common? In a post called Is “If you build it, they will come” an effective marketing strategy? Just like it can be applied to an effective marketing strategy, the star of the movie (Field of Dreams) Ray Kinsella played by Kevin Costner understood exactly what it (the iconic phrase) meant. And this iconic saying (if you build it, they will come) can be expressly tied to SEO, Pinterest, my new SEO Hurdle for Bloggers Course, and All in One Blogging course that all have the same principles. 

FOCUS

Ruth has developed an acronym she calls FOCUS which is 5 Simple steps to creating amazing content.

FOCUS Stands for:

1. F irst Impression
2. O pening
3. C entral Idea
4. U seful Logic and Illustrations and
5. S trong Conclusion

For how to use FOCUS I refer you to her post.  But suffice it to say this how you can resonate establishing E.A.T. with your audience and how you can provide a steps to providing your users with information that they’re seeking to find answers. 

First impression

You don’t have much time to establish a first impression with your audience. Within a short amount of time when people land on your site, they’re quickly going to formulate whether or not they’re going to stick around (or not). If you have a big bounce rate, that’s a strong indicator that you need to make some changes. 

When people arrive on your landing page (which is “usually” your homepage) they should be able to quickly formulate what your blog is all about, what services you have to offer, what’s your mission statement, there’s a lot to take in during those first few moments that your visitors arrive and your business depends on them planning to stick around and coming back for subsequent visits. 

Another way to improve first impressions is to look at the design of your website to ensure that you’re providing a good user experience.  Here’s a post that you can look at to provide 8 Elements to create a great User Experience. 

Creating a good site structure and a good design for your homepage is not something that happens overnight. 

Pro-Tip:  It takes time and a good habit that you should develop as a Content Creator is to take a step back from your blog and look at it with a fresh new set of eyes as if you’re looking at it for the very first time.  This allows you to take a critical look at the overall design and then you can make a plan to decide on what needs to get changed in your next revision.  The more organized that you have your site the better because you’ll be rewarded by the Google gods with better rankings and a higher Domain Authority (DA) score. 

Here’s a post that I wrote that you’ll find very helpful if you want to improve your website’s site structure >>  Build your site architecture for optimal SEO.  A reason that I want to point out that you need to have a good site architecture for your website is that if you have a poor site structure, it’s very unlikely that you’ll get sitelinks.  Sitelinks are the rewards that Google provides to you for having good structure. 

It makes easier for people to quickly see some of your key things on your website “before” they’ve even visited your website. 

You might be asking yourself, what’s an example of a sitelink?

Here’s an actual example of a sitelink from my website, PinArtwork SEO.  The sitelinks in this example are: Blogs Artwork and Blogging 101 

Opening

Your opening is the title of your blog or a Pinterest pin that’s drawing attention to your blog.  Or it could be your use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  I strongly recommend using Rank Math SEO as your SEO plug-in because it’s emphasis is on building up your keywords.  And you can’t get good ranking positions unless you’re utilizing good SEO principles. 

Central Idea

Always make your post about them, not yourself.  Talk to your visitors and include them in your blogging posts.  Don’t stray away from the topic.  The title that you use, the images that you use, and the headings that you use should all pertain to the title of your blog so that you’ve established continuity. 

Useful Logic and Illustrations

As a norm I’d like to make at least two images for every post.  Eventually, over the course of time I try to have at least 10 pins for every post that I publish.  That way when I’m reviewing posts I can look at my folders to see if I need to add another pin or review older posts to see if I can add another pin and give it some new life. 

Strong Conclusion

I always end my blog posts with simply using the word Conclusion and mark it as a heading.   That’s an opportunity for you to summarize your post (optional) or provide a Call to Action (what action do you want your visitors to make before they leave). 

Grow your audience and create a relationship

If you’ve been following SEO Expert Neil Patel, he recommends that bloggers should be content creators and Ruth reinforces that concept to encourage you to decide to begin starting a content marketing business. 

I have to share this one thing with you from the book and I promise to be brief:  “The place to start, if you want to (eventually) blog for profit, is with great, amazing, compelling, bring-me-back-for-more-content.  In other words, your blog or podcast or YouTube channel has to be awesome.  You have to be awesome.  And that sounds harder than it is, because chances are, you are already awesome in that way.    So find your awesome and create your business around that.”  How to Blog for Profit. 

For more information regarding Content Marketing, I’d suggest visiting The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2021. 

One of the best ways to ensure that you’re continually providing great content on your blog is to have an editorial calendar.  For this I suggest that you read the blog post that I wrote called How to create a consistent blogging schedule?  In this post I explained how to create a consistent blogging schedule and why it’s important. 

An important element that your editorial content should contain is to ensure that you’ve planned for seasonal events so that you can drive traffic to your blog.  For example, I know that one of my biggest recurring posts are my fall posts that bring in loads of traffic during the fall season. 

Pro-Tip:  If you want to have an editorial content that’s already prepared for you so that you don’t have to put in the work, I’d like to suggest that you subscribe to get the Free Pinterest Keyword Planning Guide (20+ Pages) from SimplePinMedia (located at the bottom of the post).

Monetizing your blog

If there’s one thing that you can do to help monetize your blog it’s this one simple suggestion:  Set Aside time for Brainstorming.  To help you get started here’s a couple of articles about Brainstorming called How to Brainstorm New Business Ideas in 6 Steps and How to Brainstorm Product Ideas. 

Pro-Tip:  A freebie that I highly recommend that you add to your blogging library, especially for new bloggers is available at https://www.productiveblogging.com/profitable-blogging-roadmap/ called the Profitable Blogging Roadmap.  It’s a step-by-step guide to making a full-time income from your blog.

In the next post, I’m going to devote a lot of attention to growing your blog with one of my favorite social media platforms Pinterest.    Pinterest isn’t quite the draw that it used to be because it’s changed so much because they no longer encourage publishing duplicate pins, and the level of participation has sharply declined. 

Because people were using Pinterest the way that they wanted to use and weren’t cognizant that social media platforms can change so you need to be adaptable with your blog and not rely solely on one type of social media for your blog. 

If you can develop great pins that beg to be shared, you’re more likely have an audience that will continue coming to your blog.  A way to capitalize on this is by learning how to use Canva to design Pinterest pins. 

Much like the use of SEO for your blog’s post Pinterest has a unique blend of SEO that you need to learn how to use on your Pinterest pins by using the right combination of words in several places like the image, the description, the URL, etc. 

My free course All-In-One Blogging covers this more in great detail. 

Conclusion

There’s quite a bit of information within this post, for the best return on your buck, I hope that by the time that you get down to the bottom of the post that I’ve convinced you that getting the book How to Blog for Profit will be a very good investment for you to monetize your blog.