I began blogging just as a way to keep a journal. But after one of my first blog posts received a comment from Chris Brogan, one of my long time idols, I knew I was on to something.
I then started a small business marketing blog, which got me many business consulting gigs. And lately, I’ve been helping startups launch and manage their own blogs.
All in all, my blogging has grown into quite a business.
If you want all this, you need to set yourself up for success. Here are the five lessons I’ve learned as I built my successful blogging business:
While your blog’s design is important, it’s not nearly as important as your writing. Think about it: A horribly designed yet well written blog will always have more readers than a gorgeously designed yet poorly written blog.
So in the initial stages of beginning your blog, concentrate on writing articles. Once you have a healthy inventory of articles, you can begin concentrating on the design.
Whenever you’re not writing, you should be reading. Read magazines, books, blogs, newspapers, newspaper ads, the backs of cereal boxes.
Not only will reading expand your knowledge, but it will improve your writing skills.
I get many questions along these lines:
“How long should my posts be?”
“How many images should I include?”
“Should I write in first or third person?”
There really is no answer. Some experts will say that a 500-word article is optimal, while others say it’s 750 words. To be honest, I’ve seen great posts as short as only three words and others as long as 5,000 words.
In blogging, there are no solid rules.
Perfection is a myth. You could spend your entire life writing one blog post and it still won’t be perfect.
So don’t try and make every one of your posts perfect. Set a limit to the number of drafts you do. For me, I limit myself to three drafts. After that, I publish.
Keep your reader in mind as you write. Most writers will create an imaginary person they envision reading their work. As they write, they think, “How will she react to this?” Doing so helps writers write much better.
Do the same with your blog. Create your own imaginary reader.
Learn more about blogging with Brandon Yanofsky’s FREE blogging course, available through B-List Marketing.
By Carol Tice
Less than a year ago, this blog had fewer than 300 subscribers. As I write this, it’s headed toward 2,500
This is the story of how I skyrocketed my blog subscribers — and how you can, too.
I tried a lot of strategies — and some of them worked. The good news is, the things that worked for me are things any blogger can do to grow their audience. You’re pretty much guaranteed you will add subscribers.
How many subscribers you add depends on how well you execute your plan — and definitely on a little bit of luck! — but your numbers will definitely go up.
Before I start, I just want to say that growing an email subscriber list should be the first goal for any blogger with dreams of earning from their blog. A lot of new bloggers are unaware of this — I know I was! But without a list, you cannot easily market and sell things to your readers.
I agree with Naomi Dunford of ittybiz — when you don’t have a list, you’ve got nothing. You can be doing a lot of awesome stuff, but at the end of the day if that stuff doesn’t build your list, it’s a waste of time.
Here are the 10 most important things I did to grow my subscriber base:
1. Make celebrity friends. A few years back, this wasn’t so important, as it was easier to get noticed in the blogosphere. Now, as Jon Morrow of Copyblogger tells in a great video on his GuestBlogging site, it’s mandatory. You can do all of the other steps below, but it’ll be slow going if you can’t get a link or mention from an influential blogger. Just like a Hollywood starlet, you can spend years touring in dinner theater and eking out a living, or you can sit at the drugstore counter on Hollywood Boulevard and get noticed by a big movie-studio producer right away.
When top bloggers notice your work, they can spread the word to everyone else and send a flock of readers over to your blog. Some will subscribe. You’ve also then made a great connection you can ask about guest-blogging opportunities on their blog, to gain even more exposure.
There are lots of ways to connect with top bloggers. The first way I did it was just by putting my blog post links on Twitter. One was spotted by Jon and he asked me to guest post on Copyblogger. A lot of good stuff rolled from there.
2. Listen to your readers and meet their needs. You may think you know why readers visit your blog and what they want to read about, but take a poll and ask them. The answers will probably surprise you. If you only have a few readers now, email them individually and get their thoughts. When you write more extremely useful posts on exactly the topics readers want, more readers will subscribe.
3. Post frequently and consistently. Initially, I posted sporadically, then progressed to once a week. I gradually upped that to twice a week, and then three times, which seems to be a good level for this blog. More posts mean more visits — it’s just that simple.
I also set my posts to all go up at the same time of day, and on the same days of the week (holidays excepted). I found readers like to be able to rely on you for a fresh post at particular times in their week. People are creatures of habit, and regular posting will make your blog habit-forming.
4. Write amazing headlines with key words. Regular readers are probably sick of hearing this from me, but most blog-post headlines aren’t drawing readers the way they could. If you improve only one thing about the posts on your blog, let it be the headlines. When I learned more about headlines and wrote stronger headlines, I got noticed by a lot more influential people.
5. Give away great free stuff. So many bloggers complain they can’t get people to subscribe, but they don’t offer any incentive to do so. Put together a short, useful free report and you’ll be amazed at how many more subscribers you get. People love free stuff! When I did my first guest-post on Copyblogger, I was so excited — I thought I would rack up hundreds of new subscribers right away. But I didn’t have a free-giveaway offer, and I really didn’t get many subscribers. So you can drive a crowd to your blog, but if you don’t make them an enticing offer, you still won’t gain many subscribers. I definitely learned this one the hard way.
6. Ask for the subscription. Back when I had about 250 subscribers, I did a consulting call with Jon Morrow. I complained about my low subscriber rate, and he said, “Well — do you ask readers to subscribe?” I countered that I had a signup box.
“No,” he said. “Ask them. On the bottom of your posts write, ‘If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing,’ and give a link to sign up.” Sure enough, making that “ask” got a steady trickle of signups going, right away.
7. Make it easy to subscribe by email. I’ve looked at more than 100 startup blogs, and a common problem new bloggers have is not making it easy to subscribe by email. Often, there’s only an RSS signup, or the email signup is buried inside the RSS signup sheet.
I used to have a similar problem — I had a small text-link you clicked to subscribe, which took you another place where you filled out the subscription form. In other words, it was a 2-step process. When I fixed that and made it a one-step process, subscriptions rose. Lesson: You can never underestimate how lazy people are when they’re reading websites. Every step they have to take gives them a chance to lose interest and wander away without subscribing.
8. Remove the clutter. Last summer, I got approached by Derek Halpern of DIYThemes and Social Triggers to do a guest post for DIY. He told me my site was too cluttered and I should delete many sidebar widgets. When I did, I got more subscribers. It’s because my site became less confusing and it’s more obvious to readers what I want them to do — subscribe.
10. Market the #%(@*! out of your blog. When you write a blog post, you have created a marketing tool. Next, you have to get out there and use that tool to help people discover your blog. Retweet your content, post links on Facebook, LinkedIn, or wherever else your crowd hangs out. Comment on other blogs. Invite readers and experts to come guest-post on your blog — it’ll make them into big fans and promoters of your blog.
By Carol Tice
Most bloggers have heard the expression that when it comes to websites and blogging, “content is king.”
For a while, it was true.
Sites stuffed their pages with junk content — much of it almost unreadable, robot-generated SEO garbage — and were rewarded with better rankings in Google searches, and more traffic and sales.
Lots of bloggers went nuts, throwing up any old error-filled, half-baked, two-paragraph post, just to have a post every day of the week. Having boatloads of content was important!
This ushered in the era about 2-3 years back when it seemed like every job ad you saw was to write three posts a day for $5 each, accompanied by threats of employing Copyscape for plagiarism checking. A lot of content was really about content-stuffing, not creating anything useful for readers.
Or as I liked to say, “You want someone to write posts for robots to read. I only write pieces for people to read.”
People warned me that this was the new reality, and in the future it would be all cheap junk and low rates. But I never believed it. I knew the pendulum would swing back.
It’s already happening. Many sites I know have raised their rates and changed their standards because they’ve tried the low-rent approach and it didn’t work.
Eventually, so many sites did the junk-content thing, website readers got hip to it and stopped visiting these sites. The sites quickly lost their credibility. Rankings for junk-post sites went down.
The days when blogs could be sloppy, half-thought-out pieces written in 10 minutes and still succeed are over.
Which brings us to the new era. Know what the watchword is now?
That’s right — it’s not about quantity any more. It’s all about quality.
Over time, readers ignored the junk-stuffed sites and became enthusiastic, loyal fans of sites with terrific content. I know some of the ones I read may only post once a week. Those sites still became the real money-makers.
That’s because what they post is amazing, enlightening, terrifically useful information.
As my Webinar partner Judy Dunn said earlier this week, bloggers who want to succeed today should write like they already have 1,000 subscribers. Or take the attitude I always did — that each blog post I wrote was as important to me as a $1-a-word article I would write for a national magazine or major corporation.
I always thought of the time spent on posts as an investment in my future earnings.That turned out to be a good approach.
There’s two ways to play it in freelance writing today — you can pitch companies and publications and get assignments like always. Or you can create your own blog, which in essence is like your own rolling magazine, and use it as a tool for earning. If you build a successful blog, you can use it to get gigs, sell ebooks, get consulting work, or sell products for others. This is the unique, new opportunity of the 21st Century for writers.
But it’s not easy, or we’d all already be millionaires.
It’s about really thinking about what readers want to know, and delivering it every single time. Share generously from your own experiences, while offering concrete tips on what others can learn from them.
It’s also about writing irresistible headlines that draw readers to come visit.
The days when just great content alone could make the blog-success magic happen are also gone.
The new era of blogging is also about great design and usability — making your site look inviting and uncluttered, and easy for readers to navigate and find what they want. It’s about committing to constantly learning more about this emerging, evolving art of blogging, and making your blog better and better. If you have no natural aptitude for design (which I certainly don’t!), you still can’t ignore this critical element.
In other words, your great blog posts are like pretty pictures. Put them in a hideous frame, and people won’t want to look. You have to bring it all together — the great content and smart design — to have all the ingredients for blogging success.
