As Matt has been talking about and teaching recently, I also believe partnerships/JVs/collabs are one of the best traffic sources currently. I was recently writing about this topic in response to a comment a friend made about how 'blogs are dead'. Blogging to bring in organic traffic from Google used to be the pillar I built my online business on, but it hasn't been that way for many years. I thought I'd share with IM Members my recent post about this topic. Here it is: ****** Blogs Don’t Work Anymore 😢 A friend recently said this to me… “You got out of blogging just in time. Blogs don’t work anymore.” I responded by first saying I haven’t stopped blogging — or creating content, but yes it is true that I no longer rely on my teaching business as my main source of income. She explained to me how her friend had a blog that was previously making thousands of dollars per month. This blog had sunk to almost zero traffic thanks to Google rankings dropping. This led to the person giving up on their blog business. I felt sad, but I understood. Having watched my own blog traffic drop to under 10% of what it was during my peak blogging days, I know the reality we all face. To put it simply, blogging, and using a blog as a business tool, is not what it used to be! Would I Use A Blog In 2024? The most important point to make is that Google as a source of free organic traffic is not reliable. Creating niche content and slowly building up your ranking in Google is still viable. Yet I would never start a business using a blog thinking Google SEO will bring in the traffic you need to make sales. Today you have to think about alternative traffic sources. BUT, I want to make a key distinction… A blog is still very much a useful content tool. Nothing has changed about how you sell with content. If I was going to start a new coaching, consulting or teaching business today, a blog as my website would absolutely still be central to my strategy. This, along with an email newsletter would still be the key tools I would use to reach my audience, build trust and sell.

I thought the IM group might benefit from this recent story I wrote about my first ever online course and how things progressed over a decade of selling various versions of it. This highlights some of the key lessons I learned along the way as a complete beginner to eventually selling over a million dollars worth of my course. If you sell courses or plan to, I hope this provides an insight or two. (FYI - IM Members have access to the course I write about below as part of their membership - It's called Blog Mastermind - look in your welcome email from Matt for the link to request access.) Here's the story... ****** It was almost midnight in Brisbane, Australia. This night was the culmination of three months – or really two years – of preparation. I was about to click SEND on an email to my newsletter announcing the opening of my first product. This was MY product. 100% made by Yaro. I was 27 years old. I wasn’t a teacher or a coach. I’d never studied education. I never called myself a writer or dreamed of being one. Yet, here I was about sell a course full of words written and spoken by me. I was nervous, but excited. I expected to get some kind of result. I felt confident I’d make sales. How many sales? Hard to know. I’d loved every moment preparing for my course launch and was eager to learn from action, so there was no such thing as a ‘bad outcome’ in my mind. Here’s what I’d done during the three months leading up to this moment… - Woke up every day for 40 days in a row and wrote at least 1,000 words before I did anything else that day to create my first ever free report, The Blog Profits Blueprint - The Blueprint was the key free content, along with emails and blog posts I’d written to give away during the ‘pre-launch’ phase of my course launch - Recruited about 40 affiliates, other bloggers, email marketers and content creators, who were going to promote my course launch (earning 50% commissions for any sales they refer) - Installed and tested an affiliate tracking system, which linked up to my shopping cart for taking payments (along with Paypal) and a membership system powered by WordPress for delivering my course - Hired help for graphic design, an affiliate manager, website tech support and an email manager/customer support person, all contractors