Building a Blogging Machine: 5 Tools and 7 Days to Systemized Profit

7 Day Blog Plan

Day 1: The Foundation

Choosing Your Niche and Setting Goals

• Identify your niche: Focus on a topic you're passionate about and has a viable audience. Find a gap in your chosen niche, and a very specifc target audience.

• Set clear goals: Define what success looks like for your blog (e.g. traffic numbers, income targets).

Setting Up Notion for CMS

• Create a Notion account: If you don't already have an account, sign up for Notion. A free account will work fine. This Notion account will become the backbone of your blog.

• Organize your workspace: Get used to the structure of Notion’s simple workspaces, pages and blocks. Create a workspace for generating content ideas. We’ll set up your new blog workspace tomorrow.

• Templates: Check out and get familiar with Notion templates like this Task Manager from Path Pages. This will help streamline your workflows later on.

Research and Content Planning

• Keyword research: You already have your idea and niche. Now time to identify some high-traffic, low difficulty keywords related to your niche using tools like Google Keyword Planner Semrush, or Ahrefs.

• Content calendar: In the workspaces you created above you can now add some ideas for your first blog posts, using the above keywords. Topics and title ideas are all you need right now. Plan your first week's content using Notion's calendar view.

Day 2: Notion to Blog Setup

Setting Up Feather

• Feather account: Sign up for Feather and link it to your Notion workspace. It’s 4 simple steps which you are guided through. Detailed instructions here

• Design Customization: Personalize your Feather theme with your chosen color schemes and fonts.

• First Blog: Based on you content calendar you can now create individual blog post pages in your new ‘content’ database in Notion, this is where you will write your content. Feather will publish them for you from here.

Optimizing for SEO

• SEO basics: Learn the basic concepts of on-page SEO, including meta tags, keywords, and Alt text. With Feather these can all be inserted in Notion.

• FREE SEO Course: HubSpot offer a Free SEO course which will get you up to speed.

• Feather's SEO tools: Get familiar Feather’s built-in SEO features to optimize your posts. It’s as simple as inserting your chosen tags and titles into the top section of your blog post pages.

Day 3: Content Creation

Writing Your First Posts

• Draft posts: Start writing your first blog posts. Aim for 3-5 posts to have a solid base. You can write them directly in Notion.

• Notion Features: Use all the great productivity and design features such as columns, embeds, images and videos. They will all be automatically optimised in your professional blog by Feather.

• AI Tools: There are many great AI tools that can assist your writing. One we love is Hemingway which can refine your writing, ensuring it's clear and engaging. Notion also has it’s own AI tools which you can trial for free.

Day 4: Branding Your Posts

Using Canva for Design

• Create graphics: Use Canva to design eye-catching graphics for your blog posts, social media, and website.

• Branding: Design a logo and choose a consistent scheme and typography for your blog. Canva has many pre built ‘elements’ which you can use to create a congruent style for your blogs.

• Keep it Exciting: Break up large chunks of text with images, video and charts. Whatever suits your style. Try to keep it consistent to built an identity that loyal readers will immediately recognise.

Day 5: Automation and Analytics

Setting Up Analytics

• Feather analytics: Check out Feather’s analytics tab where everything is done for you. You can automatically gain insights into your audience and content performance.

• Understanding the data: Spend some time understanding the different metrics and reports available in Google Analytics.

Automating Your Workflow

• Automate tasks: Use tools like Zapier to automate repetitive tasks, such as social media posting and email marketing.

• Zapier and Notion: Notion and Zapier work together beautifully. Check out some of the great ways you can automate. Notion and Zapier Integrations

• Content repurposing: Turn your blog posts into social media updates to ensure maximum content delivery. You’ve put in the hard work writing blog posts, that can now become 10 smaller posts.

Day 6: Launch and Promote

Schedule Your Blog Posts

• Publish your initial content: Ensure everything is polished and ready to go in Notion. then simply check the ‘Ready to Publish’ box in Notion. Feather will now know that post is ready. You’ll see your blog come to life at your chosen URL. Congrats!

• Scheduling via Feather: You can now schedule dates and times for publishing your other blog posts to ensure regular content. Consistency is key with all content creation.

• Official launch: When you have a few posts published it’s time to announce your blog launch on social media and other platforms. SEO is powerful but takes time for the flywheel to build up momentum, help the process along by reaching out to your audience directly.

Promoting Your Blog

• Share your blog: Promote your blog on social media, join relevant communities, and reach out to influencers in your niche. You are providing great value. Help people by telling them about it.

• Email marketing: Build an email list from the start and keep your audience engaged with regular updates and exclusive content. Email lists and newsletters can be set up in your Feather dashboard easily.

• Feather URL’s: Feather provides you with a custom URL for each of your blog posts. Share these URLs on social media and other platforms to drive traffic to your blog.

Day 7: Review and Adjust

Analyzing Performance

• Review analytics: Things take time but get into the habit of regularly checking the performance of your posts and overall blog traffic. Feather’s built in analytics tools make this simple.

• Adjust strategies: Make necessary adjustments based on what’s working and what’s not. If one of your posts gets a lot of traffic, create variations on that topic. Your audience must resonate with it!

Planning and Monetization

• Future content: Plan your content for the upcoming weeks. Notion is great for this! Create a schedule to batch similar tasks together. It’s all about getting efficient.

• Your monetization plan: Blogs are great for directing people to an offer. If you don’t have one yet, monetization of a blog can be done via affiliate links or advertising.

• Capturing extra value: Use email captures which can be set up in your Feather dashboard to start building a list. This gives you a surefire way to contact your fans, provide them with more value, and present them with any offers you have.

The 5 Essential Tools

1. Notion for CMS

1. Workspaces: Notion uses workspaces, pages and blocks. Think of a workspace as a whole project, pages as the different aspects of the project and blocks as the content. For your blog Feather sets these all up for you.

2. Using templates: Utilize templates to get started quickly. There are lot’s of great Notion template creators that you can try out. Use these for things like task management to go alongside your blog.

3. Organizing content: Keeping your content organized with easy-to-use databases and views.

2. Feather for Publishing, Analytics, and SEO

1. Link to Notion: Connect Feather to your Notion workspace.

2. Set up your blog: Choose a theme and customize it to match your brand.

3. Optimize posts: Use Feather’s SEO tools to enhance your content’s visibility.

4. Schedule: Publish professional blog posts on a custom URL directly from with Notion.

5. Examples: Check out these top blogs built using Notion and Feather. Revid.ai, TweetHunter, and Taplio.

3. Canva for Design

1. Create an account: Sign up for Canva and explore the templates.

2. Design graphics: Create graphics for your blog posts, social media, and branding.

3. Consistent branding: Maintain a consistent look with your chosen color schemes and fonts.

4. Hemingway for Writing

1. Paste your text: Copy your blog post into Hemingway.

2. Refine your writing: Follow Hemingway’s suggestions to improve clarity and readability.

3. Final touches: Polish your content before publishing.

5. Zapier for Automations

1. Explore pre-built automations: Review the available automations for Notion here and choose those which will streamline your blogging workflow.

2. Create your own: If pre-built automations don't cover your needs, you can create your own Zaps to automate tasks that are specific to your workflow.

3. Monitor and Iterate: Keep an eye on how your automations are performing and make necessary adjustments to optimize.

Recap

The Time is Now

Love for Feather ❤️