For some people, blogging is just a hobby. But, for others… it’s much more than that. It’s a means to be free and earn an income doing what you love. In the past year of my blogging career, I have learned a lot of important lessons that could have saved me a ton of time if I knew earlier. So, whether you’re a new blogger or just thinking about it… here are the 5 lessons I would like share with you today to save a few months of your time…
1. Nothing Happens Overnight
A popular blog typically gets an average of 100,000 visitors per month. Unfortunately, such amounts of traffic don’t come overnight. Okay, maybe you already knew that. But let’s start with 10,000 visitors a month. How do you achieve that? Google! If you ever want a chance in succeeding, you need to rank on the first page of Google. Over 50% of most traffic comes from Google for most blogs. A good start for a beginner is to write a skyscraper post. That also means you need to learn white hat SEO. (Please don’t approach black hat SEO or you’ll risk getting penalized). The next highest source of traffic for most bloggers comes from your email list. That means you need to work hard to converting your visitors into subscribers. So create a free report or email course and offer it to visitors in exchange for their email. There’s nothing more useless than a blog that get’s traffic but fails to convert them into subscribers. I was so afraid of putting opt-in forms on my blog because that would look spammy and annoy visitors. But, guess what? Once I put them, my email list started growing. Complainers will always complain. When it comes to blogging you need to follow the data. And the data says opt-in forms are essential for growing a list. Another good source of traffic will come from guest posts and backlinks (links to your blog from other articles/websites). In fact, your first few trickles of traffic will usually start to come from guest posts. So to end this, I recommend beginners to start off with a skyscraper post and heavy guest posting on popular blogs.
2. You Won’t Make Money if You Don’t Help People
If you’re just trying to make a quick buck… it won’t work. If you’re trying to build your expertise and influence… it won’t work. If you’re trying to build a popular blog… it won’t work. Why? Because frankly nobody cares about your goals. People only care about themselves. Let’s be honest… we’re all somewhat selfish. Everything we do is about us. I mean, you want to build a popular blog… why should anyone else care? The grocery store down the road wants to sell more groceries… do you think anyone cares? Of course not. People want good groceries, they don’t care about the stores goal. But, here’s the good news… You don’t need them to. What a relief right? So what should you do? Your job as a blogger is to help people with information. You’re an educator. A teacher. If you can make people smarter, they’ll want more. If you can solve their problems and teach them how to do stuff, they won’t be able to live without you. So if you want any chance in succeeding as a blogger, then you better start helping people.
3. You Can’t Do It Alone. You Need Influencers.
Networking with Influencers is essential when it comes to growing a blog. It’s not a luxury or nice to have… No, it is required if you ever want to stand a chance against the competition. That doesn’t mean you can’t grow a blog without influencers… it just means it’ll take much longer than needed. So unless you can wait for another few years, I recommend you start building relationships with some influencers. It’s not hard or intimidating. Just look for a relatively popular blogger in the same niche as you and start helping them… you know… like you’d do with a friend. If I did it. You definitely can!
4. No Ideas Are Completely Original
We all learn from one another. Ideas circulate. Every single new idea you see is just a set of old ideas combined together. So don’t be afraid of repeating what others say. But, that doesn’t mean you should be a parrot. I’ve taken several courses on writing, copywriting, blogging and a lot of the advice sounds similar. Yet, just because you and another 1,000 people heard something, doesn’t mean everybody has. There will always be beginners. It’s much easier to target beginners and if you search in Google, you’ll realize a lot of the search terms are for beginners. Try Googling it. “[Your Niche] for beginners” Let me give you a real life example: “SEO for beginners” according to the Google keyword planner gets 1,300 monthly searches. Which is a pretty good search volume. Typically, if you’re trying to write a skyscraper post you should target a keyword that get’s 1,000-10,000 monthly searches and low competition.
5. Giving Up Is Easy If You’re Not Passionate
Building a blog isn’t an easy job. It takes months of hard work. Blogging isn’t the same it was 10 years ago. Your content needs to be more in-depth and unique. That means instead of smacking out blog posts every 2 hours, it will usually take over 6 hours to write a post. Sometimes you’ll spend hours and days on a guest post and then have it rejected by the blog. The amount of frustration you’ll feel after that makes you want to give up. Then once you do get your guest post published, you’ll get little email subscribers. Which will make you question if guest posting was even worth your time. And when you publish a skyscraper post a lot of people will ignore you when you ask for links. You’ll need to send hundreds or even thousands of emails to other bloggers in hopes that they’ll link or atleast share your post. I’m not saying this to scare you, I’m saying this to let you know what you’re up against. Growing a blog to 100k visitors a month is a tedious job. It is for the elite few who will do whatever it takes. And for you to read this far means you’re one of them. So, are you ready to take on the storm? Featured photo credit: claes krantz/Flickr via flickr.com
