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00:00 Introduction to the Productive Insights Podcast
00:11 Meet John Morrow: From Challenges to Blogging Success
01:13 John's Personal Journey and Overcoming Adversity
03:01 The Birth and Growth of Boost Blog Traffic
09:51 The Power of Blogging for Entrepreneurs
15:15 Strategies for Successful Blogging and Audience Growth
19:32 Getting Started with Your Own Blog
24:17 Final Thoughts and Next Steps
Ash Roy and Jon Morrow Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy
Welcome to the Productive Insights podcast for entrepreneurs and professionals where we discuss how to leverage your business online and how to maximize your profitability.
Today I'd like to introduce a, an incredibly inspiring person and a good friend of mine, John Morrow. In this interview, John's going to share his very inspiring personal story and how that journey led to him becoming one of the most successful bloggers in the world. After having worked as a senior editor.
At Copyblogger Media for a number of years, John went on to found his own blog, Boost Blog Traffic, which he has now turned into a very successful business. John's going to talk about why blogging is a critical business tool and how you can use it to leverage your business. John and I are going to chat about what blogging involves, how to get started with blogging, what exact tools you need, what typically holds a person back from getting started in blogging, and how you can overcome these challenges to get started with your blog today. So welcome, Jon.
Jon Morrow
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Ash Roy
You're welcome. So, Jon, would you like to just share with us a little bit of a backstory? Just tell us about who you are, how you overcame your various challenges, what challenges you've faced, and how you've arrived at the incredible place you're in at the moment.
Jon Morrow
Yeah, the short version is I'm a guy in a wheelchair, right? I mean, that's the first thing that a lot of people notice about me when they see me in person. And for years I was on Medicaid, I depended on the government for care. I'm actually unable to move anything but my face. And so I need somebody with me 24 hours a day, and my medical expenses are over $100,000 a year, and not many people can afford to pay that. Most people in my condition depend on the government. And the government has income limits on, at least here in the United States, the government, it's actually very stupid, but they limit you to these insanely small income limits, like $800 a month that you can have if you want government assistance. Because of that, I basically couldn't work. So I started blogging and doing things for free online and started writing for other big blogs. And within a year or two, I got nominated for the best personal finance blog in the world because I've been reading all about personal finance, writing about what I'd learned. I then became the most popular writer on Copyblogger, which is maybe the biggest marketing blog in the world.
Ash Roy
And you were a senior editor on copyblogger for a while too.
Jon Morrow
Yeah. So what happened is after I became the most, one of the most popular writers on the site, the founder says, well, you can be an editor. And so all of a sudden, you know, I was writing all this stuff for free. And right when Brian said that somebody offered to buy my blog, my personal finance blog, right at the same time I had to figure out what I was going to do. And it just so happened that my mother, who has been a big part of my life, got laid off from her job. This is during the recession here in the States, 10% of the workforce got laid off. So a lot of people had worked. My mother was one of them. We just decided, you know, why don't we take a chance? I'd always thought that I could build a business online. We jumped in our minivan, packed everything we could into it with us. We even had the bed strapped on top of the minivan. So where, you know, we look like, you know, the Beverly hillbillies going down the road, we drove over 3000 miles to Mexico. So I mean, for folks in other parts of the world, that'd be where there were, 5000 km from there. I moved down there, I got a condo on the beach. And the reason why I moved down there is nursing care down there in the United States. Here, a nurse with a four year degree. So an RN, a registered nurse, they make at minimum usually about $60,000 a year, right. In Mexico, an RN nurse gets paid $4 an hour.
Ash Roy
Wow.
Jon Morrow
And you could even see a doctor for $4. An office visit to a doctor is $4. They'll come to your house for about $20, reduce your cost dramatically.
Ash Roy
Now just for the listeners, I just want to explain to them that, John, you suffer from spinal muscular atrophy from birth and that's the reason you couldn't move from neck down and you traveled 5000 miles. That is just amazing.
Jon Morrow
Yeah, about 5000 km. Yeah, about 3000 miles.
Ash Roy
3000 miles, yeah.
Jon Morrow
So I mean, spinal muscular atrophy is a type of muscular dystrophy. It's very similar to ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, but it mainly affects children. So throughout my life I've gotten weaker and weaker and yeah, it was a big deal for me to do that. It was just me and my mother. She took care of me all by herself, driving for seven days.
Ash Roy
Wow.
Jon Morrow
It took us to get down there. As soon as I did, I took the job with Brian, I sold the blog and that gave us enough money for about six months that we knew we could make it. I started working for Neil Patel too, at the time, and helped him launch the kiss matrix pool.
Ash Roy
The first person on this podcast, actually, he features in the first interview.
Jon Morrow
Yeah, Neil was great. Taught me a lot of things too, both him and Brian. I mean, after helping build two of the most popular blogs in the world, I finally started to say, you know, why don't I try to do this for myself again rather than just do it for other people? So I did. I started boost blog traffic. It was the most popular blog launch in history. It had over 13,000 email subscribers just to the pre launch list before we even wrote and published the first post. Now it's, I mean, arguably the top blogging blog in the world. It's a seven figure business now. And we have, you know, thousands of students all over the world.
Ash Roy
Boostblogtraffic.com. Yes, that's an amazing achievement. And you've done all this in how long?
Jon Morrow
I mean, total, I'd say from the time I started writing for free until now, it's probably been about six years. But boost blow traffic I've been running for two years, two and a half years now.
Ash Roy
You've turned it into a seven figure business.
Jon Morrow
Yeah, a little bit less than two years. It had officially become a seven figure business.
Ash Roy
Now I've read quite a lot of the content on boost block traffic, and it is really, really fantastic. How did you learn to write such spectacular quality content?
Jon Morrow
I learned a lot of that from Brian Clark at coffee Blogger. I really have to give him credit for teaching me how to do it.
Ash Roy
I believe Chris Garrett was one of your mentors as well.
Jon Morrow
He was. So Chris was an early mentor as well? Chris taught me a lot as well. But the big thing that really helped me was writing all of those guest posts for sites like copy blogger. One of the unpublished, undiscussed benefits of writing for those big sites is they edit your writing for you before it goes live. So what I used to do is I used to print out my version that I submitted and the version that was published, and I would go through it sentence by sentence, and I would examine the changes that were made and I would ask myself why they made those changes. And sometimes I would even go back to the editor and ask them, why did you make this change? I'm not trying to challenge you on the change. I'm trying to learn. And over time, my writing got better and better. I also studied copywriting and a big part of it is. During that time when I was really growing as a blogger, I was writing 2000 words a day.
Ash Roy
Wow.
Jon Morrow
Every day, seven days a week. I mean, even Christmas morning I got up and I wrote my 2000 words before I opened presents.
Ash Roy
Commitment, man.
Jon Morrow
Yeah. So I mean, how do you get good at anything? You do a ton of it. That's really the answer.
Consistently.
You do it consistently and you really make it a priority in your life. So, yeah, it was all of those things. But really just writing every day is really the answer.
Ash Roy
Let's move into how blogging applies to our audience. So how do entrepreneurs and professionals use blogging and why should they see it as a critical business tool?
Jon Morrow
The big benefit to it is it's a way to reach new customers. So if you're trying to grow, you may not have a ton of money to spend on advertising. And on the other hand, though, you may be willing to spend a little time in order to reach people. And let's say by writing a guest post on a big blog. And the way guest posting works for anyone that's not familiar with it. A lot of these big blogs, they accept articles from other writers and in exchange for the article, you get a link back to your own site. Okay, so it's a trade. You're trading them a great article. In exchange, they give you a link down at the bottom. Okay, so on a big site, I mean, so like on copy blogger, I mean, I think around 200,000 subscribers now, maybe more. That's basically two football stadiums of people. You can get your writing in front of those people. The competition is steep to get there. I'm not implying that it's easy, but if you do that, it's a quick way to get yourself in front of a lot of people and basically spend no money.
Ash Roy
I believe you have a program where you teach people how to write, is that correct?
Jon Morrow
I do. I mean, we have guestblogging.com, it's now the top training program in the world.
Ash Roy
Blogs that only accept students from the guest blogging program, is that correct?
Jon Morrow
Yeah, that's correct. I mean, copy blogger is one of those blogs. Market angel is one of those blogs. Everyday bright. There are a lot of big sites that are now only accepting our students. And the reason why is because they want to be, they want to receive articles from the best. So we train people how to be the best and then we also have editors that work with our students to help get their writing ready, which raises the quality even higher.
Ash Roy
If you go down the blogging path, you can build a lot of credibility and you can reach a very wide audience. I'm thinking of two football stadiums, and I'm thinking that's a lot of people. And you can do that pretty quickly. And the other part is that once the content is out there online, it's there forever.
Jon Morrow
It is. So, I mean, it gives you benefits forever. One of my posts, just that one article, is approaching 2 million page views.
Ash Roy
Wow.
Jon Morrow
2 million people that have read that article. That's an article I wrote for pro bloggers about how to quit your job, move to paradise, and get paid to change the world was the headline for it. Yep. So, yeah, there are massive opportunities to get exposure. And the other benefit, though, is even on your own blog, even if you take away the exposure side of things, it's a great way to communicate with your, with your existing customers, your existing subscribers. So a lot of people have heard about writing and sending out a newsletter. Well, you can really use your blog as a better type of newsletter. So instead of sending out one in the mail or one via email, you can send them a link to a blog post that's a valuable article on something. And it's a way to just remind them that you're around and to deepen the relationship so that hopefully they buy more from you in the future, too.
Ash Roy
Makes perfect sense. In my interview with James Schramko, I talk about the importance of customer retention and building a recurring income model. And the blogging system seems to fit hand in glove with that approach. You begin and continue a meaningful conversation with your customers. You develop the know like and trust relationship with them, and of course they're going to come back and buy from you as opposed to somebody else.
Jon Morrow
Yeah. I mean, so for, even for us, boost blog traffic averages about $3 per subscriber per month.
Ash Roy
Wow.
Jon Morrow
To the blog. So, I mean, that, that just sort of makes the math easy, you know? I mean, we're already, for this month, over 150 grand. And we're only halfway through the month. And, and we have 50,000 subscribers, around 50 to 53. And that number goes up by about three to 5000 a month.
Ash Roy
So we've made a very strong case for why entrepreneurs and professionals should consider blogging as a critical tool to grow their reputation or their business or both. We've also talked a little bit about, you know, what guest blogging is and what blogging is generally. Do you have any case studies or examples? It could even be boost blog traffic, where you've used blogging to increase the revenue of a business.
Jon Morrow
Okay. Yeah. So with boost blog traffic. The way that we grew it is by first building relationships with other influencers. I mean, I did that for several years before I started it, which was why it had such a big launch. Now, if you don't want to spend several years doing it, you can still launch it, but you're not going to get, you know, 13,000 subscribers from, from day one. The number one thing is choose a mass market topic is the first thing that you want to do. The blogs that do the best are in general, the ones on very large topics. If your goal is to attract a huge audience, which it's not everyone's goal, by the way, but it is ours. Second step is to establish connections with other authorities. There are various ways to do that. One way is to do interviews on podcasts like this one. Another way is to do guest posts. So there are various ways to establish those connections and get to know some of the other authorities in your space. From there, what you want to do is develop some sort of an incentive for people to get on your email list. So either a free report or video series or a piece of software or something that you can offer people as an incentive to get on your email list and then build an opt in page, which is a page specifically designed to get people to subscribe to your email list and nothing else. And then from there you want to start publishing great content.
Ash Roy
About that is learning how to write great headlines. And you have an excellent tool called Headline Hacks for that.
Jon Morrow
Yes, we do.
Ash Roy
How does the listener go to get a copy of that?
Jon Morrow
You can go to headlinehacks.com or you can go to boostblogtraffic.com. You can find it both places. And that's a free tool. It's a report that we put together with different headlines that are proven to get more traffic than others. So it's sort of a little cheat to help you get more traffic.
Ash Roy
Listeners can implement straight away if they want to start blogging, they can just use those headline hacks. And in fact, writing headlines is a great way to come up with good ideas for blog posts as well.
Jon Morrow
Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. So, I mean, when I was a copy blogger, one of the first things Brian had me do when I became an editor was he told me he wanted me to write 100 headlines a day. I was a little shocked, but I took him seriously. So after a month, I came back with 3000 headlines and he said, oh my God, I didn't expect you to actually do it, but I did. And I learned so much from it that I did that for a year. And scientific studies have shown that headlines are actually the biggest factor in determining how much traffic you get. It's more important than the rest of the article combined, right? So everything else you say, it's kind of sad in a way, but everything else you say isn't as important as that headline.
Ash Roy
You don't have to write a good blog post. I mean, the headline's got to be great and people won't read your post if you don't write a great headline. But you still have to write good content to fulfill the promise that the headline makes.
Jon Morrow
Yes. So it's kind of like a prerequisite rather than, rather than it being cause in effect it's sort of a prerequisite for it to happen. But if you don't have a good headline though, it doesn't matter how good.
Ash Roy
The blog post is a great segue into the next section, which is overcoming challenges and objections with getting started with blogging. One of the things that our listeners could do if they wanted to get started with blogging straight away is start writing headlines. Are there any other things that you can recommend to somebody who wants to get started and just keep keeps putting it off or keeps thinking I'll do it one day, but never gets around to it?
Jon Morrow
I think the very first thing you need to do is study the other blogs in your space and what I'd recommend there are a couple of different tools I recommend. Number one, go to alltop.com and that's like a directory of all the biggest blogs in the world and it's broken down by category and you can go to that site and find the biggest blogs in your space. From there, plug some of those sites into tools like social crawlytics or open site Explorer. And what those tools do is they'll tell you the different articles on that site that have gotten the most shares and the most links.
Ash Roy
So I'll just spell out those sites. All top is a double ltop.com social crawlytics is social crawl as in crawlytics.com and OpensightExplorer.com.
Jon Morrow
Yes, and open site Explorer is a paid tool. It is significantly more powerful than the others, but they do have a free 30 day trial so you can go sign up for that trial. And I think one time I even signed up and then canceled immediately. We pay for it now. So I'm a paid subscriber, but back when I was a beginner or a few years ago I just subscribed and then cancelled and then got the one.
Ash Roy
Free month and that's all you really need to get started. You're getting access to an excellent software as a service product for free. And then of course, when you start making some income from your blog, you can always subscribe to it on an ongoing basis.
Jon Morrow
Yes, it's an excellent tool, definitely worth paying for if you can afford it. But the idea there is, rather than just running blindly into writing content, find out what other content is already being shared and linked to in your space and you'll start to see patterns. You'll start to learn, and then that will tell you what kind of content you need to be publishing yourself.
Ash Roy
Cool. Well, I'll be putting notes, show notes on my blog post relating to this podcast. And so for the listeners, they can go to productiveinsights.com johnmorrow, spelled Jon mo rr o w, to get all the links, including the link to John's website, which is boostblogtraffic.com. Okay, last question. What actions can people take right now to start their own blog? We've talked about going to alltop.com and checking out the other blogs in their environment. Social crawllytics, open site explorer, writing headlines. What else does a person need? I believe they need a hosting service and they need to just get a domain name and they're up and ready to go.
Jon Morrow
Just a regular cheap host is fine when you're starting out. We recommend right now our number one pick is site ground. That's the company we recommend. I think it's something like 50 or $60 a year for hosting. So it's, it's really cheap. I mean, that's the yearly price, not the monthly price or anything. And a domain name, you know, and just the free WordPress software that you can install through your web hosting, that's really enough to get started.
Ash Roy
Okay, so they buy the domain name from something like namecheap.com. They can get the hosting done, which is basically where the site lives on siteground.com. And if they want to learn how to write spectacular blog posts, they just head over to guestblogging.com and you'll set them up.
Jon Morrow
Exactly.
Ash Roy
You're an incredibly inspiring person to have achieved all the things that you have achieved with the obstacles that you've overcome. I have known you for over a year now, and every time I speak to you, I find it leaves me feeling more inspired than last time. So thank you very much for your time, and I really look forward to talking to you on this podcast again sometime.
Jon Morrow
Sounds great. Thanks, Ash.