Free and Fearless Lidiya Kesarovska

Show Notes:









* The content management system I’ve been using from day one;







* Should you pick a niche you’re passionate about?;







* How the topics I cover have changed over the years;







* My experience with having guest contributors;







* My most profitable blog income stream;







* Why focus on impact over money;







* How to be your biggest critic as a blogger;







* Why you can’t overlook SEO;







* What to do instead of obsessing over blog design;







* Can you rely on just one blog income stream?;







* One thing I’m doing that’s slowing my blog growth;







* Why I don’t want to be a full-time course creator anymore;







* How’s affiliate marketing going for me;







* Is social media necessary for a blogging business;







* Why you should never leave your blog behind for a few weeks;







* Your business needs structure;







* What to focus on to grow your blog.









Last month marked my 11th year of blogging. I’m not self-employed since then, it all started as a hobby and I took my time figuring things out, because I knew nothing about online business when I started. But officially, I did start a blog in April 2013.







Even in March, actually. That’s when I set up the site, but I see that the first published articles are from April. The point is, I haven’t stopped writing and blogging and creating written content online ever since. And I believe that’s the single most important reason why I managed to turn it into a business.







Even though there have been ups and downs – financially, emotionally, creatively, and in every other possible way – that little business of mine makes me so happy, even more today than it did before. It allowed me to relocate to my favorite country, travel to different countries, work whenever I want, take breaks – big or small – whenever I want, impact people online, survive the pandemic, earn passive income, and so much more. So, this article is a tribute to that, to the consistency.







I hope it inspires you to keep working on whatever it is you’re creating online, or get that blog started, or focus more on growing it strategically if you’ve left it behind and creating written content. 







Too many people give up before they see results, or they switch direction without allowing their blog to unleash its full earning potential. 







Here’s what I want to cover today. I’ll share a few things that have worked well for me over the years, a few that haven’t, some lessons I learned, and things you can focus on now to grow your blog. Let’s dive in. 















What worked well in those 11 years of blogging







The first thing that comes to mind is that I picked the right content management system.







That’s WordPress, that’s what you’re using to actually distribute the content on your website, to create it, publish it. And there are many platforms,

Today we’re talking about Blogger Outreach 101 and I’ll show you how I interview the top bloggers and business owners online.







I wanted to create this guide because I’ve had the privilege to interview some of the most successful people online from different industries and share their stories on my blog.







Actually, I just checked and I’ve interviewed over 100 people over the years. This year, I’m focusing on that even more because I just love it and there are benefits to everyone involved. That’s not just free and quality content for me, but it also means we form a relationship and I can reach out to them again if I want to in the future.







Also, their name appears on my website and if they’re known in the industry, that’s a keyword phrase on its own. So I actually optimize the interview for their name sometimes or for their blog name or another keyword. But in any case, my platform can be found online thanks to that and other people learn about my blog and can reach out to me and we can just collaborate in any other form.







Many of the interviews I’ve done appear on the first positions in Google for the names of the people I’ve featured and often people have reached out to me saying that they saw I’ve interviewed this person and they just offer something else.







The types of bloggers I like to interview







An interview with a blogger is also one of the most inspirational and empowering things I can share with my audience because it shows them it’s possible for them too. It’s possible to achieve what that person has achieved.







These interviews show you what’s happening behind the scenes of a blogging business, whether it’s a small or a big one, and these are people who started from nothing.







Honestly, these are the only types of people that I like to learn from and who inspire me the most. They’re now self-employed or even self-made millionaires and yet they’re super down to earth.







They can immediately respond to an email I send them and say yes to being featured on my blog. They would actually write a two thousand word article which is all about how they got started in business, the challenges they went through, how much they earn now, how they increase their blog traffic and anything else you ask them.







But how do you find these people? How do you reach out to them? What do you do if you don’t hear from them or if you get rejected? That’s what I’ll be covering in today.















Blogger Outreach 101







This topic was actually requested by a member of Blogger Playground, the community and membership I run where I share strategic content so you can grow your blog traffic and income sooner. But I decided to share this on the blog and podcast as it’s such an interesting topic and I’ve never covered it before.







Hopefully, this guide will give you permission to start interviewing successful bloggers or business owners because it takes some courag...

Learn how I made $500 from 1 sponsored post on a blog that gets only 4K monthly page views, and what my next steps are for growing its income:







The sponsored blogging industry is very interesting.







Most of the question members of Blogger Playground, our community and membership for bloggers, ask are about this as there is little to no information about it out there and yet so many bloggers are earning from this.







Also, as you might know, it’s always been my main income stream, I have a lot to say on the topic, I have a very detailed and strategic course that teaches you how to make money from sponsored content on your blog called the Blog Sponsorship Boss and I can pretty much answer any question you have about this. But today, I want to share something new that happened to me in terms of sponsorships, which is also a big milestone. Ideally, it can give you hope that you too can monetize this way regardless of how small or new your blog is.







About my other blog







I run a second site, other than Let’s Reach Success, and inside the membership, I share all about it (in the monthly income reports, but also anytime this comes up). I won’t get into it now, but in a nutshell, that site currently has 71 blog posts, almost all of them are AI-generated and highly optimized, and in the last 3 months, the traffic has been growing steadily.







I still haven’t reached 5k page views a month though, but I’m getting there.







I treat this blog as an experiment, and only in the last months did I start publishing content there consistently. The traffic growth is a result of that, as well as how well the topics I choose are doing on Pinterest. There’s a separate business account I created for that blog, and it’s doing very, very well.







The traffic is already coming from two different places, search engines and Pinterest. This is what I call the ideal blog traffic formula, as it’s one short-term traffic source, Pinterest, which can help you get visitors to a brand new blog, and one long-term one, Google, which is all about quality and optimized content that you can rank well and then update over time to rank even better.













My goals for it







One of the many business goals I have for this year, which I also share openly with members of Blogger Playground, as well as my progress or lack of it month after month, is to get that second blog to 10k page views, so I can apply for one ad network I have in mind.







Ultimately, the goal is to turn it into a source of passive income and earn monthly revenue from it. But first, I also want to see its very first earnings. Those came just a few days ago, when I saw an unexpected payment from another ad network.







I’ve tested it for a few months, but I didn’t like the user experience, so I actually removed it. Turns out, I was earning a bit since then, and as the traffic grew, that was more. Not to mention that joining a new ad network may take time till you...

Wondering if you should blog in English or not? Below, you’ll find out why I decided to do it as a non-native English speaker, what the challenges are, how to overcome them, and how to make it work for any type of content. At the end of the page, you’ll also find the audio player so you can listen to the podcast episode.







Today’s topic is inspired by the fact that I was featured in a roundup post by one of the members of our community and membership for bloggers, Blogger Playground.







Her name is Sofia and she created this beautiful post on her website called Blogging in English for non-native English Speakers. She interviewed a few people on the topic and she asked us questions such as why we decided to blog in English when we first started, what the main benefits of that are, if non-native English speakers can actually make real money blogging, if our audience ever gave us any type of feedback about it, and just to share some tips, stories, struggles, notes of encouragement for anyone who is considering starting a blog in English as a second language.







Here’s the round-up post if you want to see my answers and also those of other bloggers. But I also decided to talk about it on the blog a bit because it’s such an important topic for so many of us and yet it’s not discussed enough online.







Why I Blog in English







Blogging itself is hard. Any online business model is. But when it’s not your first language, when you feel like an imposter 90% of the time, it becomes even harder.







I believe that’s one of the main reasons that many people who are not native English speakers don’t start a blog or why many others have so much doubt and fear before that and are not confident once they start their website. So let’s talk about that.







I’ve been blogging in English since 2013, so that’s 11 years now and I never ever had any doubt whether it should be this or my native language, which is Bulgarian, if you don’t know.







First let’s talk about why that is, why I blog in English.







First of all, I didn’t feel that connected to my country and its culture. I don’t say this in a bad way, it’s just my experience with it.







For as long as I can remember I was reading in English. It was mostly on personal development, which has always been my biggest passion. This is also the main topic I was covering on the blog when I started it. Now, it’s also business and a lot more, but that’s where it all began – with my love for personal growth.







I was reading those books only in English. I was watching everything in English. Not that much was happening online back then as it is now, but still I was consuming almost all of my content in English and that’s how I wanted things to be.







Eventually my brain started working this way and I began thinking in English. Especially when it comes to self-improvement, the topic I was writing about, all I knew was sort of in English. I only knew how to express myself on that topic in that language, so there was no doubt that this is the language I was going to write in online.

Today’s topic is not one of the usual things I cover. It’s quite controversial and we cover two big topics that are seemingly not connected at all, but I just wanted to make a connection between them. That’s artificial intelligence and spirituality.







This discussion was inspired by one member of Blogger Playground, our membership for bloggers, who didn’t trust AI and didn’t use it for content creation yet, but heard my perspective and is considering it. She also saw my results and is more optimistic about it now.







Also, it’s inspired by emails I exchanged with another member who is into spirituality, like me, and it’s interesting how the conversation goes when these two big topics are combined: spirituality and AI-generated content.







There are many different opinions, there’s probably no right or wrong here, so I invite you to keep an open mind when you hear what I have to say. If that’s not your cup of tea, feel free to skip this post, of course.







First, I want to share the more logical and strategic part of what I have to say. In the second part, I’ll dive into the energetics and spirituality and the role AI plays and might play in it in the future.







Then, I’m going to end the post with what one of the biggest experts in the digital marketing industry is saying about AI-generated content, and how he is using AI to run one of the best marketing agencies out there. Let’s begin.















How I went from avoiding AI to using it







First, if you haven’t heard already, I do create AI content for my blogs and I do get results from it.







Here I share how I ranked an AI written article on the first page of Google in around four days. In this post, I actually talk about two pieces of content that ranked pretty quickly and were maybe not number one in the search results yet, but they were on the first page.







I also got many visitors to the site solely thanks to that, which shows that search engines actually rank them. So if you haven’t given tools like ChatGPT a chance when it comes to creating new content, but are willing to consider that, this post is for you.







I was also against it and I only started using it last year.







I’m not tech savvy. I usually avoid any new tools that I don’t need in my business and I try to stay away from trends. And that definitely looked like one. Everyone was using it for all kinds of stuff and it just seemed too good to be true.







It seemed too easy and it could give way too big results with too little effort. It just didn’t make sense. It was unfamiliar to me, so I decided to stay away from it. But then I heard many other expert bloggers talk about it.







They tried it and they saw success with it. I took trainings, I learned more about it and I played with ChatGPT a bit to understand how it works. It turned out to be simpler than I could have imagined.







What I Do with ChatGPT







I just give prompts to the tool, which is just the instructions in the form of text. It could be one or a few sentences. I can tell it to create a draft for an article or suggest title ideas or add an introduction or conclusion to a specific article.

Interested in the membership business model and wondering what it’s all about? Here’s my experience with starting a membership site and the lessons I’ve learned in the first months of running it.







One thing that hasn’t changed for me and which I never want to change is my love for my craft. This work, this business, this passion, mission – whatever you want to call it – it’s what I’m here to do.







The ups and downs are teaching me exactly what I need in order to evolve. But the one piece of advice I can give to those who want to be or stay in business is to not give up on it. It’s as simple as that.







If you’re truly committed to a goal, it doesn’t matter how long it takes or which one of the many business ideas you try actually works. It’s all about how bad you want it. 







Many people say they want to be in business, many attempt to start one. Not many actually start one though, and even fewer stay in it.







You have to put it above other priorities sometimes. You have to change direction when necessary. You have to learn to be okay with discomfort.







You have to do some healing and personal growth. 







If you don’t enjoy the journey, this will probably not work. But if you love every part of it, things become simpler and life gets better.







Because regardless of how much or little your online income is and what else is going on in your life and how you feel about it, you wake up daily knowing you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. 







And if you found a way to impact others positively through your work, congrats, you’re answering your soul’s calling. Let me know what you think about it and if it’s a topic you’ve reflected on.







What’s New inside Blogger Playground







If you want some support and motivation along the way and to be surrounded by people who get it and are going through it, then that’s what Blogger Playground is all about. 













It’s our membership for bloggers, and aside from the strategic content I’m sharing week after week, people are actually opening up. They often prefer to email me instead of writing inside the membership, but that’s totally okay.







I’m so happy that I created this safe and intimate space for them to share their fears and doubts as entrepreneurs and to be able to ask for help and guidance. And that sometimes the other members are the ones coming up with answers to their questions before I even log in and they share resources. 







Last week I came up with a fun way to collaborate with them. We shared each other’s newsletters and joined them and can now also give feedback on how the emails look and anything else.







I joined the newsletters of 3 or 4 members so far and will be getting their emails and keep up to date with what is going on in their blogging business. Others in the membership are about to start their email list soon and they said they will share it in that same topic inside the community.