A Kajabi blog is simply a blog but built inside of the Kajabi website builder. It's that simple. Most website builders offer a CMS or a content management system that you can use to create a blog section. Some of them are more advanced, while others are more basic with Kajabi, it’s as simple as designing the page, adding your blog to your navbar, and for you to start writing. Creating great content will attract more visitors to your website, and more visitors means more customers.
How to Set Up a Kajabi Blog & Monetize It
First, you must set up your blog.
The first thing you're going to want to do is to head over to your Kajabi backend and select the website areas.
From there, you will want to design your blog page layout. This page is where the main conglomerate of all your content will be. It will allow people to sort by tags, search, and more. When creating a blog, keep in mind simpler is always better. Most people have the misconception that their website needs to be fancy. That couldn't be further from the truth. People go to blogs for one thing, and it's simple to learn. Well-written blog posts can rank high in google, and when they do, they can be a primary source of the traffic to a website. When you design, make it look good, and don't stress about it. You can always go back and clean it up but getting it laid out correctly and starting to create content is the most important thing to do.
After you have designed your blog, the second page you want to go to is the blog page area.
This is the area where you will design the blogs themselves. You will be able to control everything you want a visitor to see. This can be your information and include other areas as well, like searching for tags and making sure the style is right for blog posts you will post in the future. Once again, it's always better to keep it simple than it is to make it look good. Here, it's especially important to make everything easy to read and there is a contrast between text color and the background.
How to add it to the navigation menu
This may sound silly, but you must make sure in Kajabi you add any important pages to the header. This will allow visitors to navigate your website and will also tell google where the pages are so they can index them. When Google indexes your website, it begins to add it to its algorithm so that it can start to send you relevant traffic.
Once you have your blog visible, there are a few last steps you need to follow. Head down to the settings area of your Kajabi admin area. From there, select the blog settings. This needs to be filled out with a catch header and meta description so when google shows it out, it's more likely to get more visitors. The three areas you need to fill out are the Page Title, Page Description, and Page image. The page image will be seen when someone shares it online, and the title and description people will see on google or when it's shared on different platforms.
How to add metadata/meta description
Adding meta data is the simplest and most complex part of writing and creating a blog. Simply put its the data that shows up on google. If you go to Google and search something your search results are broken into 2 main areas. Titles and metadata. This is googling way of showing you what your website is showing up for in searches online and will give you valuable data you can then go and improve to get more visitors. Its simply adding a bit more information that supports the title and gives a teaser for what's inside the article. This has a massive impact on SEO though. If you don't have a catchy title and meta description no one will click on the page. If no one clicks on it Google can't decide where you belong on the SERPS or Search Engines Results Page.
Getting your sitemap and submitting to google
If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you will see me mention Google search console regularly. Your website sitemap is essentially a roadmap for Google. It tells them hey here are all the pages you need to look at, please look at them and index them so they begin to show up in search. Its a simple process and if you don't do this its going to take significantly longer to get found in Google. Simply go to your domain. In this case. harrisonbaron.com and after the .com or whatever ending you use add /sitemap.xml When you do this you should see a white page with a whole bunch of code on it and things you have probably never seen it before. This is the roadmap google needs. Simply go to https://search.google.com/search-console/about and select start now. You will have to sign into Google.
Then in the top left hand corner you need to add a property. It will ask you for your domain name. Add that and it will ask you to add a bit of code to your DNS records. If you're on CloudFlare you need to do it there. If you're not on CloudFlare you must access your DNS records and add it as a TXT file. Hit submit and head back to Google Search console and hit Verify.
The last stop is navigate on the left hand side to sitemaps and it will ask for the domain above. This will look just like it does above. https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml and you will submit it there.
That's it you're done! It will take a day or two to have Google Search Console and because you added you're sitemap it helps accelerate the growth of your website on Google.!
Why you need a Kajabi blog & The Benefits of having one
Most Kajabians don't realize how important their blog can be for their marketing and sales strategy. People buy from people they know, like, and trust. When we are in the process of purchasing hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of products, we like to know that person can do the work we hired them for. This is the key moment blogs can become affected. By you, as the person who has built out the Kajabi website, it's a great way for you to publish articles that demonstrate you know what you're working on. Having proof of concept and free articles for people to read that proves you're an expert is a great way to build confidence. When this happens, your visitors will begin to know who you are, like the content you produce, and help them trust you more. This also gives your marketing efforts a serious boost. Most people don't realize that when you create content, it's something that will work for you for years to come. Having a blog allows you to also add more words to your website. Most websites have a few hundred to a few thousand words on their website. This only gives google a few hundred search queries that it can match to your website. By creating blog articles for your website, you can begin to expand the number of words on your website. More words and articles the more times Google can put it higher in the search algorithm.
If we take a basic website, it may only have 1000-2000 words on the entire site. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. Most websites only have a couple of thousand words on them. By writing 1000-word articles for your blog and diving deep into topics, it gives your website more words to share. Creating two additional blogs on your website can double the number of queries it can send. At the time of writing this article, I currently have about 245 blogs on my website. This gives my website 245,000+ words that google can then being to send traffic to. The same principle relates to what you're doing. Over time with more articles answering questions on your website, you will begin to get more and more traffic.
How to make money with your blog
Having a blog is great but having a blog that makes you money is even better. Blogs are basically free advertising with google. It's a simple way to have people visit your website 24/7. The nice part about this is the work you put in upfront will pay off for years to come. The area you must be careful about is making sure that you write blogs that will do a couple of things.
They must
Rank on google
Sell products
Educate consumers
A blog that can do all the three above is essentially free advertising for years to come. This blog will cover how to get ranked on google. This includes the sitemap and the pure essence of writing the article. Believe it or not, a good article that is 1000+ words have a great chance of ranking. Will it be number one? Maybe. The key is to just start making blogs and get them in the algorithm. I relate blogs a lot to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones. It's about time in the market, not timing the market. Get a good blog online sooner than later, and you can always go back and make as many changes as you see fit. I am not saying you should put up short or poorly written articles, but in the beginning, especially when your starting, go with a minimum viable product and get it posted. The only people who are going to see it are people who already visit your website. Most people get less than 100 visitors per month to their website, and the few that get more usually are running ads to a landing page. It's uncommon for someone to sift around looking for information on your blog. They are much more likely to go to our best friend google and write their question or statement in there to have it do the homework for us.
Articles take time to rank. Most articles take 2-4 months to start to rank, aka be seen by google. After that, it may take up to 9 months for blogs to hit their peak performance. It can be longer, but the industry average is 35 weeks after a blog is published, usually when google will figure out where it belongs in the algorithm. There are a couple of factors to keep in mind, such as the age of your site. It should be a bit older, 6+ months, and it also depends on how many articles you have in that area. The more articles you have in a niche, the more likely Google is to show them out.
You may be wondering how all this relates to selling products. The math equation is simple. More visitors = more customers. If you can write an article about a subject that educates consumers and positions your product or service as the solution, then it's simply a no-brainer. By following this methodology having more articles will make it more likely that you get more traffic, and more traffic creates more customers.
Here is some quick math on how to break it down.
If you write an article every month and at the end of the year you end up with 12 articles. Each article should be able to generate about 1,000 visitors per month. If you can position a free e-book or checklist at the bottom of the article as the solution to the problem and you can get a 5% conversion rate on that article. You're looking at 50 new leads per article per month. That means by month 12, you should be getting around 650 new leads per month and over the course of a year 4550. If you can convert even 1% of those people, you're looking at 45 new sales. Now you can take that 45 and multiply that by the price of your course. If you sell a course for 297, that's a total of $13,3365 dollars, or if you sell a $1,000 course, that's a total of $45,000.
This math may catch you off guard, but this is a real scenario. At my agency, we have worked with dozens of clients who are killing it with their blog as well as there are many communities out there of bloggers who are making 6 figure incomes from writing articles that convert sales. The key is to write a great blog that google loves and has your lead magnet positioned as the solution to their problem. Once they're on your email list, it's up to you to convert them, it really is that simple, and there is no need to complicate anything.
Limitations of Kajabi Blog
With all good things, there are always a few negatives that come along with it. While nothing is perfect, the Kajabi blogging platform, in my opinion, is about 75% as good as a full blogging platform like WordPress or Webflow. Why is this? As great as Kajabi is it’s not meant for everything. I relate Kajabi to a Toyota Tacoma. Its built well it does about everything you want, but it’s not particularly amazing at any one thing. It’s just great at everything. The word amazing has never crossed my mind when it came to the platform. It’s like the Tacoma. It’s a great truck that gets good gas mileage, has a good size bed, Has the ability to tow a good amount of weight. All around its good. For many, that's exactly what you want. You want it to be good and reliable. That is what Kajabi is. Its good at everything it does. Because of this the Kajabi blog does slack in several areas. At my agency, we specialize in SEO, Blogging + helping people get found on google. We have also built over 150 websites and we currently managed dozens of blogs we create content for. I tell you this because we have experience on just about every website building platform out there and because we create so much content, we have quite a good understanding of what is important in a blog.
Here are some of the negative features I would love to see with the Kajabi blog.
Faster load speed
Ability to minimize pictures
Add metadata to images
Have a full CMS or content management system
Be able to export blogs
Be able to select and perform mass import and export of blogs
Adjust fonts better and in a more uniform way
Now for some, this may sound unimportant, and to others, this may shock you. Think of it like this and keep the example above with income. If your article could rank on Google but only performs at 80% of what it could, how much less money and visitors would you have. At the end of 12 months, you would have about 520 leads and out of those converting them would result in a total of 3640 visitors. At a 1% conversion rate, your now down to a total of 36 purchasers than the original 45.
Now for many people, this is still free money and content that will work for you 24/7. for others like myself and my agency, it's important to maximize every aspect of blogs and websites to drive the highest level of conversions possible. Don't get me wrong, when my blog was on Kajabi, my growth was incredible, and I was thrilled about it. See the picture below. After switching website hosts to Webflow I have already seen a drastic increase in traffic and impressions on my blog. I don't recommend this for most people if you are going to be writing a couple articles per month. At one point I was doing an article per day and actively growing my traffic.
How to find topics to write about
Finding the right topics can be difficult. When you're first starting to blog, searching for the right keywords isn't that important. For those who know SEO, I know you're jaw just dropped. Typically, when you're writing an article, you want to focus on low competition high search volume keywords. When you're first starting to blog, I typically don't recommend this. I say that because when you're writing about a specific topic or topics that are in your wheelhouse, but you aren't necessarily an expert at its very challenging. You may be an expert in a certain topic, but when you must write 1,000-2,000 words about an article, there is simply no way you could write a great article when it's your first blog. Blogging is like riding a bike. It takes a while to figure out, and after some time, you can get good at it. In the beginning, think of what people are asking you on a regular basis that you're very comfortable answering. Then write articles about those topics. Most of the time people can come up with around 100 topics people ask. Answer them in an order you're comfortable with. Often, people are going to be asking the same question repeatedly. That is a clear indicator for you to buckle down and start writing about those topics. Google the question, read the top articles people have written and write something better. You will be surprised at the results you will get. Keep in mind writing isn't a sprint. It’s a marathon and this is something you are committing to for years to come. Is this article going to rank #1 on google the day its published? Nope but it will in several months from now, and if I keep it up to date, it will continue to stay on the top of google for years to come.
How to get traffic to your blog
Don't stress about this. People freak out that they aren't getting traffic. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I preach blogging and SEO because it’s the fuel to a fire. Having a website is great. Running ads to a landing page is great. I preach long term sustainable business growth. All it takes is for Facebook to change their ad's platform or ban your account for business to drop to 0. Don't believe me? I see it all the time where someone gets their ad account blocked for no reason and their six-figure business flatlines overnight. Think about how scary that is. You when from a great living to 0 dollars and there is nothing you can do about it. Sadly, this happens to people often. This also happens with google and many other places to buy ad space. The saddest part is it’s for no reason at all. How can you avoid this? Blogging.
How do you get traffic to your blog, though, you might be wondering? Simple. Post your content. It’s not any harder than that. From when you post your article till about 35 weeks later is when it will hit its peak. Let Google do its job, and it will send you traffic. Write great tiles and structure them correctly and in no time, you will have a flourishing website with free traffic coming nonstop. There is no need to overcomplicate it. It's really that simple. Post it and let google do its thing. The expression 9 women don't make a baby in one month couldn't be truer. You can't accelerate the process. Strap in and enjoy the ride because it's going to be a great one!
How does Kajabi Blog compare to WordPress
The age-old question that everyone loves to ask is the comparison between the two. There is no doubt in my mind that out of all the website builders online WordPress is the most popular. Because of that, Google has been very keen on picking everything up, and it allows for the most flexibility when it comes to your website. If you took everything in SEO and put it on a graph adding up to 100 WordPress is at 100. There is no platform available today that allows as much functionality. So how does Kajabi compare. In my experience on the platform, I would say it offers about 75% of the functionality. Some of the things it's missing are the ability to increase page speed, add metadata to images, lazy loading, and other features that can help you get the most insane results out there. Don't be alarmed. Even at about 75% of the capability of WordPress, it still packs a punch. I ran the most expensive experiment i could and bought Kajabi for 2 years and tested how well it worked. See my results below.
I moved my Blog off of Kajabi on July 5th 2021 almost all the way to the right on the chart. You can clearly see the growth potential Kajabi does offer.
With that being said, the results are quite good. I created way more content than most people could imagine, but overall, I was pleasantly surprised with the results. I was able to get a great amount of traffic to my website over that time. For those of you wondering the blog your reading is no longer on Kajabi and its on Webflow. A different platform I am going to be testing to see the results. For everyone using Kajabi, you can rest easy at night knowing that you will have no problem climbing to the top of Google. While I was on the Kajabi platform I had numerous blogs hit the #1 spot and dozens of articles sitting on the top 10 on Google. It can be done with great writing and working your way through it.
