Blogging experts like John Chow and Jeremy Shoemaker are always telling us how easy it is to make a success of our blogs, but, as we’ll see in this article, blogging isn’t for everyone.
All successful bloggers know the reason they’re successful is because they spend time and effort building up their blog traffic, newsletter subscriptions, SEO value etc piece by piece. Most of the new bloggers that pop-up everyday thinking that blogging will be easy and they won’t have to put the effort in.
Where do they get these ideas from? The experts. It’s one thing to be inspired, it’s another to be short-sighted. Let’s see why blogging isn’t as easy as the experts make out.
1. Acceptance
A lot of acceptance goes in to the makings of a good blogger, accepting you need to learn from others, accepting you are less of a blogger than others – in order to be accepted as a guest blogger for example, accepting people who comment on your blog – generally have the right idea. Most people who are new to blogging are very stubborn and think they can get traffic using their own method, as if they can pick and choose – which we all know is not the case.
2. Laziness
I know when I started off, I was very lazy about getting things done, I’d listen to others and take notes but I rarely put much effort into the actions. Laziness really doesn’t help with the important stuff like SEO, gaining traffic, guest-blogging, I never did guest blogging when I started off because I convinced myself there was no point and I wouldn’t gain anything from it.
3. Time
Becoming successful takes time, writing posts takes time, finding the right keywords for your posts takes time. You can become very successful by managing your time properly. Most new bloggers seem to spend a lot of time on their blog to start with and then drop it the next week, as if it were a child’s toy.
4. Consistency
This is what kills of most of the bloggers in the blogsophere, you see many blogs that have been abandoned, sometimes the blogger makes another blog and the cycle continues. If you aren’t consistent how are you suppose to become successful?
5. Planning
Taking time out and planning your approach for the best method to gain traffic, to gain SEO value for your site, to gain more followers on your social networks etc. Having the time to think about innovative ways of gaining something for your blog is a very important factor of blogging.
So new bloggers have a lot of reasons to chicken out. Blogging is all about hard work, if you ask any blogger what the definition of blogging would be, they’ll reply with a similar answer – hard work.
If just one new blogger reads this and learns from his or her mistakes then that would make my day.
Guest author Adam Smith is a social media blogger who writes about his methods of gaining more Twitter followers, Facebook likes etc. on his blog SocialPuma.com. You can also write guest post here.