[Interview] Jeff Bullas Shares Insights On Blogging As a Career and As Passion

Jeff Bullas, a famous international digital media blogger, author, strategist and speaker talks to us about his career in blogging and the various things he learnt along the way. He will be speaking at the upcoming social media week "The 8 Steps to Becoming a World Class Blogger for Business and Revenue". 

Tell us about your early days of blogging and your starting up journey. What led you to start writing about social media and digital?

I discovered Facebook in 2008 and was amazed by two things. Its capability to connect us to friends and colleagues in real time globally and people’s obsession with it.

It was the magical mix of humanity and technology!

So I started thinking about the marketing possibilities and I started!

How should individuals choose what to write on?

Individuals should write on what is the intersection of their passions and skills. I will tell you more about that in the Master Class in 2 weeks time!

Your book on “Blogging the Smart Way” talks about how to create and market a blog on social media, can you give us some insights on how to?

Three things

- Create the best content you can on a consistent basis

- Build the largest distribution on social and email

- Use the best possible resources allowing and persisting this!

How do bloggers discipline themselves, it seems as if blogging is the easiest thing to do, but there is a lot of background work and effort that goes in right?

Blogging about your passion provides the fuel to persist and keep going. The skills will arrive as you create and learn. I have also found it important to set aside a time every working day. For me that is, early in the morning before the distractions emerge.

What is the right way to build the blog?

It should be self hosted with your own domain name. I still think the right foundation for bloggers is WordPress.

How do you scale up a blog? Do you now have writers to write for you? Or a team managing it?

I have guest writers which free up my time for other important tasks and I also have a virtual assistant. On another level I also have a number of “Joint ventures” that helps as well.

How do you market your blog? What all was needed to be done to have the reader base that you now have?

Marketing for my blog happens on 3 levels.

1. Social media
2. Email
3. Optimizing for Search engines

Just one quick note, all my traffic is earned and not paid!

How do you identify the right target audience to market?

Observe the audiences of the major influencers, bloggers and websites that are your competition and view and read their comments and interactions on social and the blog.

Give us some insights into creating and distributing content.

Once you have identified your topics in your areas of passion you then need to put yourself in their shoes and ask these questions constantly. What are their problems, challenges and aspirations? Then produce the content that meets the answers to those questions.

Then watch the reaction to your content and keep experimenting and market relentlessly.

Once you have created and hit publish then distribute it to your social networks and email lists.

Is blogging a direct source of revenue? Or it’s the brand that the blog helps you build that can be monetized?

It’s both. I split it into passive and active. Passive is income via affiliates and ebooks and active is the monetization such as consulting and speaking.

This is your first time as a speaker in SMW? Can you tell us about your association with SMW?

This is my first year so it’s been a short association at this stage. I look forward to it.

What are you looking at sharing at this year’s SMW?

I will share my journey and the lessons I have learnt along the way.

What guidance would you give to all bloggers around the world?

Start, learn and persist!

Tell us 3 mistakes you made during your blogging journey that bloggers can learn from?

Here are the 3 key mistakes you should avoid that I made.

1. Not building your blog on a self hosted platform
2. Not building your email list from day one
3. Not optimizing my blog for search engines when starting