Introduction

Welcome to the ProBlogger Podcast episode 1 and day of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. We’ll be talking today about creating an elevator pitch for your blog. But first, a short word from our sponsor, 99 designs, the best place for new businesses to build their brands. 99designs is the entrepreneur’s number one choice for quality graphic design. To get your logo, business card or any blog creative you might need, visit 99designs.com/problogger and get a $99 upgrade of services for free.

The idea of an elevator pitch is probably something that you’ve heard about before. I heard about it back in 1990 when I enrolled in my first university degree. I was studying marketing at the time and I remember quite clearly, my lecturer, getting us to come out with an elevator pitch for a hypothetical business that we were a part of. 

I’ve never heard the term and he really explained it quite simply. Imagine you’re getting on an elevator, you meet someone on that elevator that you’ve never met before. You’ve got the time that it takes to travel between the ground floor and the 30th floor to introduce yourself and communicate in a way that intrigues that other person to know more about your business. You need to be able to communicate quite succinctly to them what it is that you do in a way that makes them want to interact with you again. You’ve got the period that it takes to go from one floor to another really to communicate that.

This is an incredibly useful thing to do. It’s a great exercise for people from all kinds of businesses, but particularly as bloggers. It’s something that is really important and probably the most useful part of this is that it will give you clarity about what it is that you’re doing with your blog. Having clarity about what it is that you want to achieve with your blog is going to have an incredible impact on your blogging. 

It’s going to impact your writing, it’s going to impact your design, it’s going to impact as you think about how to grow your audience, as you think about how to build community with your audience. All of these things will be impacted. In fact, as I think about it, the 31 days of this challenge, every one of them will come back in some way to this elevator pitch. It’s a really great exercise to do.

You’re going to find that you’ll use this in all kinds of places. Your elevator pitch may become the tagline for your blog, it might appear at the top of every page on your blog to quickly communicate to new people landing on your blog, what it is that your blog’s about. It’s probably going to appear in some way on the about page of your blog. It’s probably going to be something that you say to people in real life as you meet them at conferences or networking events. 

It’s in some form, may appear on your business card, it may appear as you start to interact with potential advertisers to your blog, in your media kit. As you begin to meet other bloggers who might become collaborators or partners in different aspects of your blogging, perhaps potential affiliates for the products that you create. As you begin to interact with other bloggers who may send you traffic as you grow your readers, as you develop social media profiles.

All of these places in some way or another, you can use your elevator pitch or at least a version of that. Perhaps the most useful place of all is in the conversations that you have with your friends. I know in the early days of my blogging, a lot of my friends didn’t know what I did, so to be able to give them my elevator pitch to say, “This is what my blog’s about. This is what I’m doing,” actually helps a lot in those sorts of conversations. In fact, I do remember once or twice using my elevator pitch on my wife. Perhaps that’s a story for another day.

Elevator pitches are really useful things to develop for your blog. I hope that you’ll find today’s exercise really important. There’s a variety of tips that I would give you as you go about this type of exercise today. The first one is to think really clearly about the problem or the need that you’re addressing with your blog. I’m a big believer that blogs need to solve problems, they need to fulfill needs, they need to be useful to people in some way. If you can identify a problem that your blog solves, then you are a long way along the track of actually creating something that’s useful to people. You need to incorporate that in your elevator pitch.

Tip number two, think about your audience. Who are you trying to reach? That can appear in your elevator pitch. 

Number three, you want to think really carefully about how you are going to communicate what it is that you’re on about in a clear and concise way. Clarity is the tip that I give you, number three. 

Number four, keep it short. Remember, you’ve only got from one floor to another floor or perhaps four or five floors in an elevator to communicate. If you can’t communicate in just a sentence, maybe two sentences at the most, what it is that your blog is about, then you probably need to bring it down a little more and get a little bit more clarity about what it is that you’re doing.

Think about how you can make your elevator stand out. How can you make it a little bit intriguing? Tip number five is to stand out.

Tip number six is to make it a little bit intriguing. Leave people hanging a little bit so they want to know more about who you are. 

Number seven, be energetic, be confident about what it is that you’re doing, the problem that you are solving, be bold in that, but don’t be hyped. There’s nothing worse in my mind than making promises that you can’t fulfill. If you have an elevator pitch that promises to bring about world peace, you probably need to bring it back a little bit.

Consider using a question in your elevator pitch. Even rhetorical ones can help you to hook people in some way. 

The last tip I’ll give you, the ninth tip is to be ready to follow-up on your elevator pitch, to expand upon it. This is the whole point of an elevator pitch, is to actually get people to ask you a question or to want to know more. You need to be prepared to back up the statements that you make in your elevator pitch with more information. 

Your exercise today is to develop an elevator pitch for your blog. To get started, I suggest three things in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, firstly, think about who it is you’re trying to reach. Secondly, what is their need or problem? Thirdly, what is the solution that you offer? The fourth thing I get you to consider as you think about your elevator pitch and I haven’t included this in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook is to think about the change that you’re trying to bring. Think about your reader and how you’d like them to be as a result of reading your blog. When they first come to you, they’re in one state, when they leave your blog, how will they be? That’s another way to think about how it is that you can develop this elevator pitch.

Your challenge today is to create an elevator pitch for your blog. Spend a little bit of time in it, you don’t need to spend a whole heap, but just a bit of time and once you’ve got your elevator pitch, I would love to see what you’ve come up with. I’d really encourage you to go to problogger.com/podcast/1. That’s where today’s show notes are and there is also the opportunity there to leave a comment and to share the elevator pitch that you come up with today. 

That’s partly for me, but it’s also for the community and I’d encourage you to take a look at what other people have added in there. Through sharing our elevator pitches, we may be able to refine the ones that we’ve come up with and hopefully, we all get a little bit smarter as a result of it. I hope you enjoyed today’s challenge and I look forward to seeing what you come up with and talking to you tomorrow on day 2 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

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