How Marina & Lucrezia Iapichino’s Helpful Courses Make Them 6 Figures A Year
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Lucrezia Iapichino started a blog as a creative outlet, and after a while, she started to see success. She had an idea when people began asking her how she did it.
She teamed up with her sister Marina to teach others how to build a successful blog. Then she drew on her legal background to help bloggers protect their sites legally. In the end, they ended up building up a blog, a series of trainings, and a 36,000-strong Facebook group. Today their business brings in multiple six figures per year.
Keep reading to find out:
- How they got started
- How they decided to offer legal support
- The different courses and products they sell
- Where is their revenue coming from
- Their successful business growth strategy
- How they approach cross-promotion
- Their SEO strategy
- Their thoughts on link building
- Traffic and new student statistics
- The tools they use the most
- Their biggest challenges
- What they've learned along the way
- Advice for other entrepreneurs
Meet Lucrezia Iapichino
I’m Lucrezia Iapichino, and along with my sister, Marina, we founded Blogging for New Bloggers, Legals for Business Owners, and Tiny Love Bug.
We’re originally from Italy, and I’ve worked as an international lawyer and university lecturer in different countries for over 15 years.
I’m currently based in Melbourne, Australia, with my husband, Sam, my 3-year-old daughter, Violet, and my dog, Tiny.
I started my first blog, Tiny Love Bug, at a time when I needed to take my mind off my fertility struggles. This little lifestyle blog started as a creative outlet and blossomed into a profitable business within the first six months. As the money grew more and more consistent, my sister and I went on a mission to empower other bloggers to do the same.
Only a few years later, I’m now a mum and have helped over 30,000 bloggers, podcasters, course creators, coaches, and other online entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses and protect them legally with our blogging courses and legal templates.
Together we created Blogging for New Bloggers, which includes a blog, a school, and a supportive community of over 36,000 members.
Why They Created Their Sites
When Tiny Love Bug took off, other bloggers started asking how we did it. So my sister and I began to teach other people how to start and grow their own blogs. It was also clear to me how much other bloggers wanted to simplify the legal side of blogging.
This is true, especially once the GDPR came into force and many bloggers went into panic mode. I felt that was a big pain point I needed to address for my audience.
We created Blogging for New Bloggers to help legally make the process of both blogging and blogging a little easier.
I use the combination of my legal, teaching, and blogging experience to show fellow bloggers and online entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses and protect them legally.
So my mission is not only to provide legal templates for fellow entrepreneurs but also to offer training and education in this field. I want to empower business owners to run their businesses profitably, meet all the legal requirements, and look legit and trustworthy. This way, they can easily convert their website visitors into repeat customers.
We offer a wide range of blogging courses, trainings, and done-for-you legal templates.
The most popular of them all is my Legal Bundle Value Pack™. It's a collection of classes, trainings, workbooks, step-by-step instructions, and plug-and-play templates for bloggers and other online entrepreneurs. And shows them exactly how to protect their business and create all their legal pages and policies in a matter of minutes.
Current Revenue Levels
Our business generates multiple six figures a year.
It’s hard to tell exactly how much Blogging for New Bloggers makes per month because we have different income streams across different sites.
Our revenue model includes display ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, and offering our own services and products in the form of trainings, e-books, and courses.
These are quite difficult to track as we receive payments on different platforms and on different terms. Luckily we have an accountant that does the math, or we’d be completely lost.
Besides, our income fluctuates considerably from month to month due to seasonality and different partnerships, promotional activities, and joint ventures running at different times throughout the year.
But to give you a rough idea, the income from the Legal Bundle Value Pack™ alone ranges between $5,000 and $15,000 per month.
Another big chunk of our revenue comes from promoting products, tools, and courses as affiliates.
I think what works well for us is that we only promote things that are perfect for our target audience, their budget, and the stage they’re at.
We promote products, tools, e-books, and courses that really address a pain point for our audience and provide them with an actual solution to their problem.
Not only do we make sure that what we promote is of the highest quality standard, but we also do our best to get our audience special discounts or to find and recommend the best deals and bargains around.
Successful Business Growth Strategies
My goal has always been to produce great content and offer substantial value to my audience. So, when I write a blog post, an email for my newsletter, or content for my courses, I try to address my audience’s struggles and offer actionable solutions to their problems. I’m also very generous with my freebies.
In terms of strategies, our primary focus so far has been creating a supportive community and a real connection with our audience.
I don’t see any benefit in being anywhere and everywhere. I think a winning strategy in the long term is to assess all the options and platforms available and invest only in those that offer a high ROI and/or are in line with the direction you would like your business to take.
We always keep an eye on your analytics and statistics, monitor our performance, assess how things are going, improve on the things that are going well, ditch those that are not working, and learn from our mistakes.
Lucrezia Iapichino'S Top Marketing Strategy
Our Facebook group of over 36,000 members has played a pivotal role in building trust with our audience and growing a community. It’s also one of our primary marketing channels.
Lately, we’ve been focusing a lot on partnerships and collaborations, and we’ve joined forces with others by speaking at virtual summits, contributing to bundles, hosting workshops and masterclasses, and being a guest on other blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and Facebook groups.
We’re in a much stronger position than we were when we first started four years ago. So, it only seemed natural to move our focus to cross-promotion rather than marketing per se.
These joint ventures truly are a win-win situation for all parties involved, especially for our audience, who get the best resources for a fraction of the price.
This year, we will also be experimenting with ads to scale our business further.
Their Unique Marketing Approach
Now that people are focusing increasingly on social media and video content is all the rage, I think people can overlook the power of a blog as a marketing tool for your business.
But that’s a huge mistake. First of all, a blog is yours and doesn’t depend on someone else’s platform and algorithm.
Secondly, it can potentially drive a huge and long-lasting amount of traffic to your website, way more than social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
While every post on social media is short-lived, blog posts will bring you traffic for months to come. So, you do the work once, and then they will bring you traffic over and over for years down the track.
A blog will also increase your visibility, give you the opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your field, and increase brand awareness.
Finally, and probably most importantly, the SEO of your blog posts will allow you to target an organic audience that is truly interested in your content.
You’ll be more likely to rank in Google and show up on search engine result pages for the right keywords, so instead of having to find clients, they’ll find you through SEO.
And then, once they find you through a blog post, you can place a really clear call to action and convert that reader into your next subscriber, follower, or client.
I’d recommend adding a blog to any website, whether that was the initial intention or not. If you provide value, offer a solution to a problem with your blog posts, or answer a question, your blog will attract new clients for your business.
The Importance of SEO
SEO is an integral part of our business.
I’m a firm believer in the value of organic traffic. I think that the quality of the traffic you drive to your blog is way more important than the quantity, so you should aim to target an audience that is engaged and truly interested in your content.
And so, what’s better than someone that has looked for you and your content?
Having a target audience truly engaged with your content is more important—and more likely to convert—than thousands of page views from random visitors.
Lucrezia Iapichino's SEO Strategy
Blogging about blogging is a very competitive niche. We’re well aware that we can’t compete with giants like Problogger or SmartBlogger on the most common queries or competitive keywords.
So, our main on-page SEO strategy has been to target long-tail keywords and latent semantic indexing keywords and to target several of those in the same blog post. They don’t have massive search volumes, but they can add up pretty weekly.
We rank on the first page for several keywords. I’m noticing that Google trusts our authority more and more even for general/short tail keywords, so I’m confident our organic traffic will keep growing over time.
We have also had great results with our off-page SEO strategy and we’ve been featured in several prominent media outlets.
Their Approach to Link Building
Link building is super important!
We regularly work on both internal and external link building.
For our internal link building, we use the Link Whisper plugin between our blog posts and across all our sites, which saves us so much time and makes our life easier!
To build external links, we have done some guest posts on sites with high authority, contributed to round-up posts, and replied to queries from journalists on HARO.
However, ultimately, creating great content that others want to link to is what has worked best for us to build backlinks organically.
We appear in several round-up posts of the best courses, Facebook groups, and blogging resources, and various prominent media outlets and top blogs have approached us for features.
Achieving Current Revenue Levels
When I started my first blog in 2017, it was more a creative outlet than a business venture, but we did make money from its inception.
At first, the income was negligible. We made $128 in the first month, to be precise. But it gave us the confidence that we were onto something, had something to offer, and were on the right track.
After that, our monthly revenue steadily increased, and we had our first $1,000 month within the first 6 months.
We were making 6 figures blogging by 2019, and we’re now making multiple six figures per year.
We are currently working on scaling our business to 7 figures.
Traffic Levels
Although we don’t rely on huge amounts of traffic, we have 700+ new students monthly on our Blogging for New Bloggers school, which is hosted on Teachable. This is in addition to the students joining us on other platforms.
We only average between 15k and 20k pageviews monthly on our Blogging for New Bloggers website.
As of March 2022, we only have 20 blog posts published there, so the traffic potential is limited, but our strength lies in converting our visitors and followers into loyal customers.
The content in our courses and templates is incredibly valuable.
As a result, our upgrade conversion, customer retention, and repeat purchase rates are outstandingly high.
Lucrezia Iapichino's Top Three Tools
I’m an introvert, and our business model is passive income. I love how automation, processes, systems, tools, and funnels save us time and do the heavy lifting for us.
So, we have invested in several great tools and plugins such as Canva Pro, ConvertKit, Teachable, LinkWhisper, Keysearch, and SocialBee, just to name a few!
Her Biggest Challenge
Moving from the solopreneur stage to having a growing team came with various challenges.
I’m a control freak and a perfectionist by nature, so outsourcing and delegating was particularly difficult for me.
Letting go of perfectionism required a lot of internal work.
But once I started living by the “done is better than perfect” mindset, everything became so much easier for us and our business gained momentum.
Striving for perfection can be an endless and fruitless pursuit. It can lead to procrastination since you'll always find something that you could change or improve.
On the other hand, accepting that something is good enough and moving on can lead to greater efficiency and productivity. It's the first step to taking action and making progress.
Her Most Noteworthy Accomplishment
I love how Blogging for New Bloggers has allowed me to:
- Work whenever and wherever I like and spend as much time with my family and friends as I want
- Utilize my skills and experience to build a little legacy for my daughter. One day, she may want to continue growing the business or may want to sell it and re-invest it in what she likes
- Help over 30,000 fellow entrepreneurs create the same thing for themselves
These are my “whys” and my inspiration, and I feel so grateful that I get to do this every day.
What Lucrezia Iapichino Wishes She Knew Back Then
I wish I had known that you need to start creating internal documents and SOPs (standard operating procedures) from inception.
It was a real headache when we were ready to scale our business. We had to create the SOPs all at once to onboard new team members.
We should have created them as we developed each task and system. The whole process would have been painless and would have taken almost no time.
So, if I could go back, I would document and keep records of
- All the logins to operate your business, such as apps, tools, emails, dashboards, plugins, and software
- Affiliate links
- Products, courses, blog posts, freebies, etc.
- All recurring tasks in your business where you outline how they need to be completed step-by-step, preferably including a video showing the process, as everyone learns differently
Lucrezia Iapichino's Main Mistake
One mistake we made early on was with our first site, Tinylovebug. We cover a wide range of topics. On the one hand, this is great because you have the potential to reach a wider audience. But we learned it’s much better to niche down. The best strategy is to focus on just one topic to serve your audience with the most value possible.
For example, we offer everything from keto recipes, gift guides, blogging tips, and more. So offering an opt-in freebie to grow that email list is particularly challenging! How do you offer something of value to such a potentially different audience?
The same can be said for content. Someone might land on our site looking for gift ideas for their husband and find tips on how to grow blog traffic. It’s difficult to work on your SEO when you have several unrelated topics on your website.
The site is successful and makes us consistent income. However, it isn’t very easy when it comes to marketing and managing it to best suit potential readers.
Her Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
No matter what kind of blog you operate and whether or not you’re already making money blogging, you need to stay on top of the “legal stuff.”
It’s much better to protect your site legally from the start than to solve legal disputes once they happen. Lawsuits are always time-consuming, stressful, and costly and distract you from growing your business.
Besides, protecting your business legally comes with several benefits:
- You will look legit, established, and trustworthy
- Your blog will meet all legal requirements
- Your potential leads will feel respected and appreciated
- You will be able to build trust with your audience and convert them into repeat customers
- You'll be taken seriously by clients and potential affiliates, partnerships, and joint ventures
- You will rank well on search engines
- You will be able to set boundaries and clear expectations with your clients
When you run every aspect of your business legally, you will get the peace of mind of being legally protected. You'll also look legit and professional, and it will save you money and open up more opportunities to earn even more.
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