Do you want to learn how to blog smarter? Make more money with less work? Then Pareto principle marketing is for you. First I want to introduce you to the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few.
It basically means that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of efforts.
Applying the Pareto’s principle to marketing
I’m sure you’re familiar with the below examples:
- 80% of profits come from 20% of customers
- 80% of product sales from 20% of products
- 80% of sales from 20% of advertising
- 80% of customer complaints from 20% of customers
- 80% of sales from 20% of affiliates
- 80% of backlinks come from 20 percent of your outreach
- etc.
Pumpkin Hacking
This next term comes from the contest to grow a giant pumpkin.
There are annual competitions where pumpkin growing experts compete. The world record currently belonging to one farmer’s 2,009 pound pumpkin.
Here’s what the process looks like for a farmer who works to grow one of these massive fruits (yes, if you’re wondering, I looked it up):
- Step 1 – Plant multiple seeds
- Step 2 – Water frequently
- Step 3 – Identify the larger pumpkins on each vine, and remove the smaller, less-promising ones
- Step 4 – Towards the end of the season, focus all of your attention on the single biggest pumpkin, remove all others at this point.
- Step 5 – Watch it grow faster and faster.
The lesson here is an extremely useful one in business, in terms of earnings and time management…
80/20 Example: My Blog Earnings
Now I am going to be very honest with you. In my case the ratio is a lot worse than 20 percent.
I have signed up for around 50 affiliate programs. Only 6 of these ever paid me a commission and there are only 2 that actually move the needle (the screenshot above is one).
I have published 98 blog posts and only 15 of these generate traffic and 3 of those generate the above income, which has been roughly $700 per month for the past 6 months.
Here is my history of earnings for one of the affiliate programs.
Not bad from 3 blog posts…
But I also wasted quite a lot of time.
How To Apply Pareto Principle Marketing To Your Blog
1. Cut actions that generate zero results
The first thing you need to do is realize that at least 80 percent of your actions lead to no result.
If you can identify which 80 percent that is, you can simply pumpkin hack (drop) those actions with no consequences.
This way you have 80 percent of your time freed up to do something more useful, hence the 80/20 rule also applies to time management.
Are you getting sales from affiliate marketing, but nothing happens when you send out an email or post on Facebook?
Well, for now you’d better concentrate on affiliate marketing and keep the other two at a minimum.
2. Streamline Your SEO
Are you normally trying to rank for keywords that have high search volume?
You may be surprised at this graph…
93 percent of all keyword phrases get searched for less than 20 times. The survey that says that was based on 1.4 billion keywords.
Therefore you should pay more attention to long-tail keywords. Which is exactly what I did to earn all those commissions.
3. Build links instead of writing content that no one looks at
Link building for many bloggers mean begging for links and therefore they don’t do it.
However the fact is that boosting your posts with a handful of links will do more good than writing content that gets zero clicks.
Brian Dean of Backlinko wrote in one of his emails that he generated over 200,000 monthly views from just 48 blog posts.
What To Do Next
It may be difficult to follow the above advice if you have no clue how to do do it.
Therefore I just created a course called “The Blog Post Money Formula”.
It’s a simple course that you can complete literally in an hour. In 6 lessons I break down the exact procedure I use to
- find long tail keywords
- determine their keyword difficulty
- create the right content structure
- build a few links without begging
All you need is the right affiliate program, which unfortunately I can’t help with.
Most people would charge money for such as course.
Since I make money from affiliate marketing and I am not after your money, I am going to give it to you for free.
You just need to take 3 steps.
1. Share this post on the social media of your choice
2. Link to any of my content from your blog from an existing article
3. Create an account by signing up for one of my free demo courses.
4. Reply to the welcome email or send me a message through my contact form and include the page and the text where you placed the link.
5. I will manually give you access to the course.
Good luck!
