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Set Your Blog for Success With These Simple Tactics

Posted By Guest Blogger 11th of June 2013 Miscellaneous Blog Tips 0 Comments

This is a guest contribution from freelance writer, Ayelet Weisz.

Blogging is hard work.

You need to come up with fresh, quality materials on a regular basis, promote them, connect with readers, network with peers and mentors – and that’s before you even see a single dollar for your effort.

I’ve put together some simple business tactics to help you set your blog for success, so you can live the pro blogger dream.

Set Inspiring (But Realistic) Goals

Now that you’re your own boss, you’ve got to set up internal motivation. The biggest success stories didn’t get there with someone telling them what to do every five minutes.

Dreaming goals

Mark Aplet – Fotolia.com

A great way to keep yourself motivated is to set up goals. Of course, I don’t just mean any goal. Making a million dollars by the end of your first year as a blogger might not be the most realistic goal you could think of.

The truth is, you have no way of knowing what will happen by the end of your first year, and you have no control over of others’ choices – Will they read your blog? Will they buy your products?

However, you can eliminate some of these unknown factors by conducting research about the possibilities your market contains – and you can increase the chances of realising your dreams by setting a different type of goal.

Focus on what kind of content you’ll write, how much content you’ll write, how you’ll promote it and when.

Focus on numeral items, like 8 posts a months on your blog and 8 guest posts that you’ll pitch to big blogs. Don’t set a goal of publishing 8 guest posts, only of submission. If someone says no, you’ll still have the confidence boost of reaching your goal. Then, you can exceed it by pitching that guest post to an additional blog.

Track Your Progress

The next step is to get the gold stars out track your progress. Write down what you are doing, what your productivity rate has been and notice what times a day or situations support you in getting more work done.

Set a meeting with yourself – be it once a week, once a month or once a quarter – to see how well you did, to discover your strong points. It’s important to be honest on where you need to be more accountable or get support.

Encourage yourself to ask questions, to say “I don’t know”, to ask for help. Sometimes, that help will come in the form of adjusting your expectations or re-shaping your schedule. Embrace your humanity as you embrace your new blogging journey.

Give yourself time, be gentle – and leverage your failures

Starting a new venture is never easy. Acquiring an abundance of new skills and tools takes determination, focus and accountability.

You will make mistakes.

Give yourself a time of grace and don’t be hard on yourself. People around you might pressure you. They could be your friends and family members, they could love you and want the best for you – and they might not believe your blog is what’s best for you. If it takes you time to monetize your blog, and it probably will, they’ll doubt it even more.

Don’t get carried away with that. It will take time. Embrace it as an opportunity to show yourself you can do the impossible.

Support yourself through this time. Join professional online and offline groups, share your challenges with people who understand rather than with people who don’t, and plan ahead financially.

It might work best for you to save a few months’ or a year’s worth of salary, then take that time off paid employment and market like there’s no tomorrow. Alternatively, it might be best for you to start building your blog slowly, as you keep a part time or full time job.

Expect to make mistakes. 

These mistakes will be your guiding points to grow your blog even more as you go on. They could be transformed into guest posts on big blogs, case studies you can use to show your expertise (and how you turned failure to success) – and they can even turn you into a good mentor one day!

If nothing else, you’ll be able to look back one day and have a really good laugh. You’ll also be able to see how far you’ve come.

Socialise

Starting out at the blogsphere can be intimidating.People already know each other and the job.Friendships and communities have already been formed. Relationships with influencers are being shaped and re-shaped every single day.

Linked

Image copyright stock.xchng user lusi

This experience becomes easier once you feel there’s someone you could turn to. You, of course, need to have communication tools and the courage to connect when entering a new environment.

If you’re fearful about connecting with industry members, start small. Post comments on their blogs, then connect with them on Twitter or Facebook. Join online communities and reach out to one person at a time in a personal message.

Ask for their help, or offer a solution to a challenge they brought up. If they happen to just start out as you are, perhaps you could be a force of empowering support to one another, sharing tips and encouraging each other when one loses sight of the light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe you’ll even find you have additional interests in common!

Did you face any of these challenges when you were starting out? How did build your blog? Or perhaps you’re just starting out and picked up some great tips for the road ahead. Share your story!

Ayelet Weisz (www.AyeletWeisz.com) is an enthusiastic freelance writer, blogger and screenwriter, who focuses on business, technology, travel and women’s issues. Get her free report, 48 Must-Live Israeli Experiences, on her travel blog, and connect with her on Twitter.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Great tips! They are simple ideas I certainly can use.

  2. I’ve been learning a few of these lessons as I’ve been going along in the last month since I launched my blog. More than any, that it’s going to take time to get it to where I want it to be.

    I definitely need to work on reaching out to other bloggers too, this is something I’m going to be rectifying soon.

    • Congratulations on your new blog! Good for you for taking under consideration that it takes time. Just keep moving forward one step at a time.

  3. Thank you for the tips. Some of them I have already implemented, but I can always improve in other areas.

    It’s always good for me to get an outside perspective on ways I can better my own blog :)

  4. I really appreciate your post. I am revamping my personal blog and starting a new travel blog. I’ve got nine posts written now and will soon have close to double that, which will get me a good month into the first launch with a few weeks of additional material after that. I’m hoping that will be enough to launch the blog.

    Since posts for my new blog are my current focus, I appreciate your thoughts on numeral goals. I love having 8 a month be my goal, with 8 guest post entries as a secondary goal. Thanks!

    • Having a backlog of posts is great, because it’ll make it easier for you to focus on marketing. I love numeral goals – they make this journey easier for me. Hope they do the same for you :) Good luck with your new travel blog – looking forward to discovering it!

  5. Thanks for the ideas in the post. I hit my first goal of 100 unique readers in my first month of blogging. I had no idea if this goal was realistic or not, when I set it. However, the things that I thought everyone would read, the martial arts posts, really did not get much traffic. I moved them to our academy webpage, so I could focus on the things people read the most. Blogging is not intuitive. Posts that you think will be huge fall flat, while “filler” really takes off. I guess the key is to always focus on content. Thanks for the ideas.

    • Congrats on getting the amount of readers you hoped to get! Perhaps try to list goals like actions to take in order to reach your next reader goal and see if that helps too. And true, not every post you think will be a success is actually a success. I think it’s great you’re staying attentive to what your readers want to read.

  6. Hello Ayelet, Darren and fellow bloggers,

    I have started my newest blog almost 3 months ago. It is about scuba diving. I am a freelancer dive instructor. I have an average of 30 visitors each day in my blog.

    What I am doing is to visit other successfull blogs in my nich and try to contact them for guest posting and interviews (I have succeeded to make an interview with one blogger that I take as a role model). I also comment on these blog’s posts but not for every post, only the posts that I also have few knowledge.

    I also follow and write in some of the scuba diving forums. Because my nich is my major, I can easily talk about it.

    And ofcourse I am following problogger. I am applying what I read here. And I take results. Great platform for bloggers like me, who have newly started.

    Thank you.

    • Congrats on your new blog, Murat, and on investing time and effort in learning and marketing. And what a fantastic niche. I want to try scuba diving one day :) Thanks for sharing!

  7. Hi Ayelef, thank you for the awesome tips you have dished out here. I was not having plans on the number of guest posts that I publish each month and most often, I don’t publish at all neither do I make out time to evaluate completed task nor new task. This post and that of Darren’s Video tutorial on planing for the year is really for me and I sure will put them into action.

    • Thanks for your comment, Onyekachi. You’ll find your own way and incorporate what’s best for you. Hope this post gave you a few ideas :)

  8. Very useful tips. Especially for new bloggers who might have thought blogging is easy. Great job Ayelet.

  9. Setting realistic goals and tracking your progress <- PREACH

    When I first started taking IM seriously, I set up unrealistic goals as "this month I'm gonna add 150 pages of content and I will write it myself" before anyone calls me crazy, that's still only 5 pages per day which is doable but it's not sustainable plan to do it longterm. Writing that much content will lead to mediocrity or even worse, generic spammy content.

    • I did read a case study of a company that published 3 posts a day and ended up increasing traffic by 500% over time, yet I’m not sure it was done by one person who also had other blog-related responsibilities. Perhaps you can set monthly goals, break them down into weeks and days, then sit at the end of the month and see how well you did. That’s how you’ll know what’s realistic for you. I also like to leave time in the schedule for unexpected occurrences or things taking longer than I thought.

  10. Hi Ayelet, Darren,

    Very nicely said about not being hard on yourself and expecting to make mistakes. In my own efforts, I bring the attitude that it’s an experiment. Parts of the experiment will succeed and others may fail. Those that fail, I try to learn from, and move on quickly. Joining professional groups with like-minded souls is a must: very few among us succeeds without help or support….

    • Good idea about treating it like an experiment. You can also leverage the times things don’t go as planned – that’s how I landed my first ProBlogger guest post :) Thanks for sharing your tips!

  11. These are awesome tips you shared here Ayelet.
    I will be making use of most of these tips.

  12. Hey Ayelet, When someone completely new to blogging is just starting out, how can that person come to terms with what is realistic and what is not? I understand for nearly everyone, earning over a million bucks in your first year of blogging seems outrageous, but I was wondering how can a new person tell what is outrageous or not. Any pointers?

    • It’s pretty challenging to “guesstimate” things when you’re entering a new field. My best advice is to make sure you keep learning about it – plus to set action-oriented goals. The point about the million dollars – or even one dollar – is that, in a way, you have zero control over whether this will happen. You do have control over the steps you take in order to reach financial goals. So the day-by-day goals you need to focus on need to be which actions you’ll take. Focus on getting great at one new skill at a time (i.e: learning to write for the Web, guest posting, Twitter).

  13. Blogging is not bed of roses nor is it a short journey; hard and continous labor is the secret of successful blogging

  14. I absolutely agree with setting up realistic short term goals. There’s no other way of tracking your progress or keeping yourself motivated.

    Thanks

  15. Great post.

    I’m just wondering if anyone still uses Blogger?

    I use it because it’s owned by Google so assumed it would be better for SEO and adsense.

    If anyone knows how to make their Blogger site better, feel free to drop me an email

    • Glad you enjoyed the post, Jason. Unfortunately, I’ve never used Blogger. Hope someone else has tips for you.

  16. A certainly helpful post for a beginner blogger like me. Great Tips!

  17. Great tips you got there, thanks Ayelet.

  18. Great Post Ayelet! These tips are great for beginners like me. Thanks a lot for the tips!

  19. There is nothing like overnight success. One should work hard to achieve it. Great post.

    Thanks for sharing.

    • Thanks, Amrik, and it’s so true. It takes a lot of time and effort, and willingness to learn new things.

  20. There is nothing like overnight success. One should work hard to achieve it. Great post.

    Thanks for sharing.

  21. blogging is not that easy, it entails hard work and dedication which is a must to every blogger who wants to be successful in this endeavor. Another thing that would make a blogger prosper, is writing quality posts and not quantity. Write at your own phase and write in away that your reader could relate to what you are conveying.

    great post

  22. Persistence pays off. There have been many times that I’ve questioned myself as to why I would continue to write when nobody’s reading it anyway. Writing is only half the equation. Promoting your content is just as important. I’m learning as I go. Great article.

  23. I think this information is the road to guaranteed success if we exercise patient and discipline while following these key tips. Great post!

  24. When I first started blogging I focused on reading and commenting on other small blogs in my niche. It allowed me to gain unique insights that I wouldn’t have gained by simply reading the other big bloggers everyone else was reading. In addition, those other small bloggers would often reciprocate and begin reading and commenting on my blog as well.

    I’ve been blogging for four months now and I still don’t have a lot of readers, but they’re growing every month. Two months ago I was getting 8 unique viewers per day. Last month 12 and this month 15-20 daily. I’ll probably need a thousand times that many viewers to make a living from blogging, but knowing that I’m helping out 500-600 people every month is still awesome in itself!

  25. great tips especially for newbies! your biggest achievement is the fact that you have decided to blog. Things online can be overwhelming and quite lonely so its important to address these issues quickly definitely don’t be to hard on yourself and always share with others when you are having difficulties! as you gain experience things will become clearer and you will flow, trust your ideas and instincts and you will be okay.

  26. Another great post, sir! I especially enjoyed the part about having realistic goals. I have ran into many new bloggers that want to become wealthy in just a couple of weeks after starting their blog. I always do my best to encourage them to make better goals that will work to bring them profit, instead. Keep up the great posts and have a good day.

    • Realistic goals are indeed a powerful way to set yourself up for success. Glad you enjoyed the post!

  27. Great tips and suggestions in regards to setting up some benchmarks for yourself and realistic goals. I appreciate all the helpful information. I’ve also realized that networking and the social aspects of my nitch is also imperative that that success and have spent quite a bit of that timeframe in networking, SM channels and connecting with my readership. Thanks for sharing these great articles.

  28. Thanks for this useful and wonderful tips. Blogging is not a easy to do, but these types of tips really helpful for blogging.

  29. Very informative post.

    I myself, an amateur photographer, am starting a new photography portal and am working my way up to achieve a wider audience.

    I think one of the best tips is to really believe in what you like and work from there. It will keep you going when you face difficulties through your journey.

    • I agree, believing in your path really helps when you face challenges. Congrats on your new photography portal!

  30. thanks for sharing these informative article i really appreciate it

  31. So many people are not okay with mistakes, it has to change. Mistakes will happen and often we learn our biggest lessons from mistakes :)

    • Good point, Tahlia – mistakes are pretty much a necessary part of life in general, and blogging in particular. It’s what we do with them later that matters.

  32. Hi Ayelet, I really liked your article, because sharing is caring. I learn a lot from blogs and bloggers, and really like the interactions with good people. I appreciate everyone in the community working hard to make it rich with content, also the different perspectives helps spark creativity in the reader to write more articles. Thanks for your contribution.

    • Thanks, Rick! I enjoy reading different perspectives and interacting with other people too, so I’m grateful for all this great feedback from readers :)

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