Are you building a successful blog?
If you’ve read a few of my posts you’ll know I love a good analogy. So when I found this photo I just couldn’t help myself. No, really I couldn’t. I just had to write something about this picture.
Ok, the graffiti is mine but who wants to look at a boring wall anyway.
When you look at a plain wall you instantly have that feeling that your up against it. You can’t get through it and you can’t go over it. All hope is lost.
But when you write on it, suddenly it becomes a road map, a place to visit daily and a place to journal what inspires you. Yes, it’s really just the same as your blog, although your wall might not be this big. Yet.
Maybe you haven’t had the time to write on it like you wanted or perhaps haven’t even started your wall. Whatever the case may be, that line at the top, is always up there and you need to reach it before you start to enjoy success.
You see when I look at this wall
I see success.
I see failure.
I see unread posts.
and I see me.
What do you see when you see this wall?
Building the Foundations
Like all good walls, it requires sturdy foundations and likely most of the foundations are in the ground so nobody will ever see them. Similarly, before you started your blog you likely did research to learn how to blog, how to start a blog and how to earn money blogging, and that’s before you’ve even laid the first brick.
No one will ever see this work, but without it, your wall is likely to crumble before it gets high enough or worse still never actually get started.
Do the research into blogging, build your foundations and start for the right reasons and for goodness sake, ask a professional if you need help.
Ask a Professional for Help
My full-time job is to help people get started with their blogs and guide them through the technical hurdles of blogging. Sure you can grab a free blog on Blogger or WordPress and blog away, but the hard truth is your probably wasting your time.
You see Google doesn’t treat the Free Bloggers the same way as the Professional Bloggers who start their own website. The Free Bloggers have to market themselves daily and get traffic through word of mouth or family and friends.
Do your family and friends really read and engage you on your free blog? Be honest with yourself.
On the other hand, Professional Bloggers have an easier time attracting the right readers because they are able to use tricks and tools to get in front of the right readers. The readers who actually get what you are saying. Yes, they enjoy Organic Traffic, which Google sends them via search results.
However, the Professional Bloggers rarely find success without asking someone or finding a mentor to learn what they know. They begin to understand that laying bricks on top of each other doesn’t make a sturdy wall because it needs the mortar or glue to hold them together.
If you’ve been blogging for over a year and still don’t see the sorts of traffic you’ve imagined then you need to ask for help. Ask someone who knows more than you. It’s the fastest way to build that wall.
Just Keep Adding Bricks
Once you’ve decided to get serious about blogging, you really just need to keep adding bricks to your wall. People will come to see the wall, some will stay and others might not return until you’ve built a little more.
When your wall is small it doesn’t attract much interest but as the wall grows it also becomes more impressive and will attract more interested onlookers in the form of organic traffic. But how many bricks are enough?
Well hopefully, you’re into blogging for the long haul so just keep building and when it’s big enough you won’t need to publish posts so often and yet you’ll still enjoy the organic traffic.
That’s a benefit of having a sturdy wall, it’s permanent and doesn’t need a lot of upkeep.
The Colour of your Bricks Matter
If you’ve ever built a house, you’ll know that you can choose the colour of the bricks for the walls. Most people indulge in this freedom and choose a colour that’s perfect for now. Then some years later, the value of their home isn’t quite as high because ‘salmon’ coloured bricks turned out to be a fad.
Similarly, build your wall with content that will stand the test of time. Build Evergreen Content.
Evergreen Content doesn’t date like news or trends and is still relevant weeks, months or even years after it’s published. And Evergreen Content can deliver traffic, leads, social shares for a prolonged period of time.
Yes, you need to write blog posts that are going to be useful in 5 years or even 10 years time so people will continue to admire your wall. When you write about current pop culture or trendy products, people won’t be searching for this stuff in the future so you might be missing out.
Carefully consider the colour of your bricks today and you’ll reap the rewards long into the future.
Don’t Give Up on Your Wall
The biggest mistake people make with blogging is they give up. They stop blogging because it didn’t meet their expectations and it became too hard. Perhaps they never wrote about what they loved in the first place.
Why do you blog?
Is it just to relax you or are you doing it with the hope that you can turn this into a career? Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy the freedoms that blogging offers?
Perhaps you started blogging so you can spend more time with the kids, travel more or even so you can stop working for ‘The Man’. Whatever your reason, giving up isn’t going to realise your dream.
If you feel like giving up, enjoy a break, take a step back and admire your wall. Is it finished yet?
Are you heading in the right direction? Are you still floundering on a free blog platform?
If that’s you then treat yourself and buy a domain to start looking like a professional blogger. And in a few days I’ll show you how easy it is to add it to your blog.
Better still switch to self-hosted blogging and enjoy all the freedoms that successful bloggers enjoy. Once you’ve switched to a self-hosted blog you’ll wonder why it took you so long.
So are you still building your wall? Leave a comment below if this resonates with you and please, please share with your friends.
