If a lack of blog readers is keeping you up at night until 3:00 am, you are not alone.
Starting a blog was always a bit of a requirement for me as digital marketing agency owner. I kind of assumed I had to do it and when we finally started a blog many years back, it came naturally, sort of.
Hey, we are “SEO’s” right? This should be easy.
We have developers and designers and even a team of digital marketers that could write for it.
What I didn’t plan on, was failure.
Blogging is like anything else. Blogging has its own set of rules and very specific actions you need to take for it to be successful.
Some of my blogs have failed and some are taking off and driving sales, which is truly exciting. Below are 18 of the things I have been learning. Hopefully this will help inspire you to start a blog and/or help keep you motivated, if you have been blogging with little success.
- Seek out blogging experts only, not mentors on any other topic
There is a huge difference between SEO specialists, social media consultants and true blogging experts. Consider reading the blogging posts of Jon Morrow, Neil Patel, Michael Hyatt, Kristi Hines, Jeff Goins, Darren Rowse, Jeff Bullas as well as Brian Clark and Sonia Simone of Copyblogger. I’m tempted to list a dozen others here but I’ll keep it to just a few essentials.
A couple of cool links to Internet marketing blog lists are here (On inbound.org from Darmesh Shah of HubSpot) and here (On Unbounce written by Kristi Hines) but try to stay focused on just the blogging content at first.
It also pays to look at recently started and successful blogs. A couple examples of blogs whose founders have taken Jon Morrow’s blogging course are makecreativitypay.com and afineparent.com
- Choose the right audience for your blog
The following quote is from a $1,000 course I bought from John Morrow called Your First 10k Subscribers.
Jon starts his course by talking extensively about how important it is to select the right audience.
For example, if you want to create a nationally popular blog with tens of thousands of subscribers you can’t select a group of people that is so small of a niche that there will not be a wide enough appeal.
While niching it down works great in most forms of marketing, Jon says that with blogging it is the opposite.
For many who want to impress just a specific group of people with your thought leadership, even a blog on one small segment can be enough of an audience.
But what Jon is saying, is that if you want lots of subscribers and a truly popular blog, then you can’t narrow your focus to less than a potential audience of 5 million people. Preferably in an age group of 30 to 55 and that will have an ongoing interest in your topic.
My niche legal marketing blog has generated customers that found me through Google and then signed up for thousands of dollars a month.
As of April 2011, there were 1,225,452 licensed attorneys in the US so that is clearly less than 5 million people. If you add in their marketing directors, it is quite a bit more but it’s important to know how large you audience is.
So it depends on your goal.
- Define your vision and metrics of success
Starting off with a clear vision and trackable metrics of what success looks like is the best way to ensure that you don’t fail.
If you want credibility with a small group and to improve your search engine traffic around a niche topic, then by all means you can go tiny and be a big fish in a small pond.
As an example, one of our clients is a personal injury attorney. They are one of many in a highly competitive area. We narrowed their focus to dog bite law specifically, including blogs on that topic and this has helped generate close to $1 million worth of business.
For me, on workingdemosite.com/authority, I would like over 100,000 visitors a month and over 50,000 subscribers. With a goal like that if I only target people in a very narrow area I will miss out on larger volumes of traffic and the ability to sell products or services to large groups of people.
Jon mentioned that most of the audience of CopyBlogger, when he was there, were people that didn’t even have a product or service and that 90-95% of blog readers are beginners. They read a blog about marketing so that when they get the guts up to go out on their own they will know how to do it. That is a huge group of people to miss out on if you have a blog on marketing for just a narrow group.
Maybe your goal is largely to show your thought leadership to your current customers and improve client retention. A blog can be a great way to do that and while it may never generate a huge amount of traffic or sales, if mega blog stardom is not your goal, then it is still successful.
What is successful to one person might be a failure to another.
You should also set up Google analytics on your blog to track how many people visited, how long they stay, how many pages they visit and how many people subscribe or become a lead/sale etc. You can’t improve your conversion rate systematically without knowing these things.
- Create empathy with your readers
Whatever topic you choose, you should ideally have extensive experience in that area and have gone through the roller coasters of success and failure in that topic.
One of the most important parts of blogging is being able to empathize with your readers and let them know that you are right there with them, fighting the good fight.
One of the exercises in the Your First 10k Subscribers class is to map out the desires / goals and fears / frustrations of your potential readers. Here is a screenshot to illustrate the point
Basically you want to envision the smart goals of others.
Think about what they want to achieve and turn this into a mission statement for your blog such as:
“I will teach homeowners how to pay off their mortgage and retire rich”
When you really get into the minds of your specific audience, you will create a stronger bond.
- Spend more time guest blogging than blogging on your site
One of the biggest mistakes I learned that I was making from Jon Morrow and Kristi Hines is that I am spending far too much time blogging on my own site as opposed to getting in front of larger audiences on other people’s blogs.
Sure, I have written for HubSpot, been featured in the Huffington Post and Forbes along with many others but for true traffic to come flooding in, you can’t be a tree falling in the woods that no one hears.
Back in the 1990s I created a logo, website (by hand-coding) and much of the search engine optimization for a new hearing aid site that later was number one in a search for “hearing aids” and got the company sold.
Search engine optimization was just that easy back then.
So it’s easy for old dog SEO people like myself to assume that all of our wonderful keyword research and content based on keywords will be enough to drive traffic along with some occasional public relations style link building.
No longer true.
These days it’s about building a platform and a true audience which usually comes by drawing in the audience of others.
High quality guest blog posts are one of the best ways to ensure that your blog is a success but you have to commit to regular writing and outreach.
- Get good at content promotion or fail
Neil Patel on quicksprout.com puts it this way:
“You should spend at least as much time promoting content as you do creating it.
This means that if you have 20 hours of time available for content marketing a week and a post takes 5 hours to create, you can only post twice a week maximum.
You might even want to stay on the safe side for now and choose one piece of content a week.”
How do you promote your content? Here’s just a short list:
- Guest blogging
- Connecting with journalists
- Building relationships with influencers (daily legit blog comments / share their work etc.)
- Quoting experts and asking them to share the post
- Doing webinars for people with large audiences
- Being featured in other people’s email lists
- Building and sharing on your own email list
- Join or start LinkedIn groups
- Engage with people on Quora
- Paid social media ads to your content
Here are more promotion ideas and another course that I bought from Kristi Hines on Blog Post Promotion:
- Get interviewed by podcasters and bloggers
Go to iTunes and search through the categories. Find people with at least 50 ratings and lots of interviews not just monologues. Reach out to them and asked them if they would like to interview you.
Also check out: How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You’re Not a Big Shot)
- Find gurus on sites like ClickBank
ClickBank.com is full of cheesy get-rich-quick people but you can also find great people that have high gravity scores to connect with. People that have books on Amazon, infomercials, newsletters that you can contribute to or podcasts that they mail out monthly, are all good places to get featured.
Sign up for their email lists and ask if you can speak at their conferences.
Don’t rule out paying the top experts for mentoring advice, which can lead to other connections.
- Do SEO and social media but don’t make it the initial focus
SEO and social media are very important to bloggers but in the beginning it’s more important to get in front of other audiences first. Having keywords in your blog posts is essential but if they are only driving a handful of visitors to your site a month then you are better off getting your content on places like the following:
- LinkedIn Pulse
- Medium
- Quora
- Top sites in your niche
- Choose the right platform
For blogs, WordPress is by far the best platform.
Don’t use any of the free tools or you will pay MORE for it later.
If you want to do it quickly, get yourself a good theme that is great for mobile.
WordPress is the gold standard and you likely shouldn’t consider anything else.
- Choose the right domain name
Boostblogtraffic.com is a good example of a domain name that lets you envision the benefit. The good news is, these kinds of domain names are much more readily available than many of the ultimate short key phrase driven domains that you might be drooling over.
Having keywords in your domain name doesn’t do that much anymore if anything, so don’t make that a huge part of your decision.
A domain name is one of the first things people will see, so it is important that it clearly expresses what you do.
Lots of experts seem to like namecheap.com and there are plenty of options.
- Grow your email subscriber base with a “bribe to subscribe”
Go to any top marketing guru website and you will probably get hit with a pop-up window to sign up for something.
Then you will notice that they always have some kind of top of the funnel call to action like an e-book or a short video course.
I have an Authority Marketing Checklist:
As well as The Big Dog Authority Marketing Quiz
Here is an example from Michael Hyatt:
Michael says:
“Everything on your marketing website should be designed around your “funnel.” That is, the path a customer takes from the home page (or a landing page) to eventually converting to a paying customer or subscriber.”
Those with the largest or most engaged lists have the most power.
Click here for more examples of email sign-up calls to action.
Having e-books at the bottom of your post that relate to that category is also a great way to not only build your email list but get qualified leads.
Just make sure you err on the side of getting these done quickly as you can always improve them later.
- Have a product or service to sell
Many newbie blogs don’t even have a service or product to sell. There is no reason you can’t make sales right from the beginning, if you have clear calls to action, to products or services for sale.
These will be much more effective ways to make money than having too many affiliate ads that may turn people off.
Affiliate links baked right into the content naturally can work great as a more subtle alternative.
- Focus on one blog
Maybe I am dating myself by revealing how much I geek out on old fantasy movies but in the 1986 movie the Highlander, the concept was that there could be only one top swordsman. Every time another one of them was killed, all of the power dramatically flowed into those remaining.
I have learned this painful lesson myself. Well, I am part Scottish but I don’t mean with swords. This lesson is much more lengthy and excruciating.
Even though I own a digital marketing agency and have numerous staff to help with my efforts, it’s extremely distracting to have multiple blogs at once.
Very few people are successful having numerous blogs and if you have several that have some traction, consider handing them off to people that can take them over, instead of trying to maintain them all yourself or destroying them.
- Make your blog shareable
Make it easy to share your blog by putting social media share buttons at the top and/or bottom of your posts. It’s a simple step, but one that is often overlooked or done poorly.
ClickTOTweet is a cool tool I have been meaning to try that can make it more likely people Tweet your post.
- Study headline hacks and learn how to write posts that go viral
After studying headline hacks, I had to take a look back at my headlines. Ouch. Trust me when I tell you that studying this even a little bit will change everything.
It will help you infuse your headlines with power words, benefits and empathy in a way that will make readers jump on and share them much more than letting them be merely keyword driven or “good enough”.
- Connect yourself with the Big Ten
The top 10 blog categories are below. Jon Morrow suggests ranking your potential audiences by their connection to the big ten, size and affinity.
Do you have the potential for content that connects to any of these big categories? If you can connect to some of these categories, you will have more opportunities to get large blogs to feature you.
You don’t have to pick just one topic but you do have to pick one audience and write only content that 80 to 85% of them would be interested in.
- Create great content but…
Of course you need to create great content to have a great blog, but it is so much more than that.
- Think about what types of posts will do best and how often to post (quality versus quantity).
- Think about the style and structure of creating perfect blog posts.
- Create viral content like roundup posts
- Know that “The secret to success in anything is doing what other people are unable or unwilling to do.” Jon Morrow
Even just these few links above could keep you busy for days or weeks.
Just make sure that this doesn’t dominate your activity because ironically the number one suggestion for Internet marketing – which is to create great content – is also where people can go deadly wrong.
Great content that doesn’t get shared is almost entirely useless.
Conclusion
Starting a blog takes a lot of guts. You have to be prepared to put yourself out there and commit to a regular writing schedule.
Many of the best authors write at least a little bit every day.
The rewards of blogging are great, so it’s worth it.
If you are willing to stick it out for at least a couple of years, probably more like a few years in many cases, you can become an industry celebrity.
You can also turn your blog into a book which leads to more media interviews and speaking engagements.
Want results fast?
Buffer pulled off building a huge audience in nine months by creating 150 guest blog posts but hey, you’re not Buffer right? Here’s their guide to guest blogging that shows how YOU can do it too.
The good news according to Jon Morrow is that the more competition in a space the better! So if you are feeling like someone has already stolen your thunder and blogged about your topic, just pick a slightly different angle on it and the competition will actually help you because you can connect with their audience.
You just need to be the answers to your audience’s prayers. Are you ready to inspire others and change the world?
