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Bloggers have all sorts of different goals when it comes to putting their thoughts out there for the world to read. There are as many different approaches to blogging as there are bloggers. The good news is that bloggers need not worry about things like content and style, that stuff comes naturally. There are plenty of other things that appear with blogs that make themselves known over time. Blogging is a great way to get your thoughts out there, but knowing what I know now opposed to what I knew when I started, I would have saved myself a lot of time and stress with blog building.
The first thing with a blog is you need to find the right platform for your blog. Getting on a good platform means your blog will have great visibility and you will have the tools you need to maximize the eyes that are on the blog. That is why the most popular blogging platforms are so often used – they give bloggers the tools needed to make their blogs that much more widely distributed and higher up on the search engine rankings. However, every blogger knows about blogging platforms and building content, but not every blogger knows about these 5 things that follow.
Blogs are Not Successful Overnight
The reality is if you post on Medium or some other blogging platform, the chances of you gaining incredible notoriety out of the gate is non-existent. Building a proper audience takes time, and there are plenty of bloggers who started out on Medium like beasts only go away. Quitting when you don’t get the instant success you want is a bad idea.
There are more than two million blog posts published worldwide on each day. The reality is that getting your voice out amongst all these other voices is really hard work. The reality is that it takes consistent posting and promoting for your blog to be successful. It will not happen immediately, so don’t look for the instant gratification, instead spend your time creating great content and promoting the hell out of it so you can position yourself for the best possible outcome.
View the World as a Writer
Perspective is an amazing thing and when you write about generic stuff, you get a pretty lame audience that is not interested. The people viewing generic stuff are not people interested in hearing interesting things – which means they won’t share your work. The best bloggers view the world differently. What they do is check out the world as it is, and capture the images of what they see, but put it into words.
The bottom line is as a writer, your job is to give people information that they might not have and then to mold that information into something compelling and actionable for your readers. See the world as a writer would – take a view of things and find how to express it in a way that is interesting and compelling, and that is where your readership will begin to take shape and thus that will help you grow your audience.
Find People Who Push You
When it comes to competition, remember that the best thing to do is find the people who will make you better and learn from them. Networking is so important, so whatever your niche is, find the people who create interesting content and learn from them. Use them as a measuring stick for your content as well. Seek out their honest feedback, and that in turn will make your writing more crisp and punchy. Plus, having more established people in your network means your blogs are pushed out to a wider audience.
There are plenty of ways to find your network. One of the easiest ways is to write about someone who is doing something interesting and creative. One thing that a lot of writers don’t see is that you are not necessarily competing for an audience but looking to share an audience. This type of mindset will help you get in touch with smart people and in turn, it will make your blogs that much more better and relevant.
Be Who You Are
The biggest mistake that writers make is adopting a voice they think their audience will enjoy. This is counterproductive and a massive mistake. Your audience is smart and sophisticated, they know when they are being pandered to, so don’t do that. Instead, when you write you want to make sure that your writing comes from the heart. It should be authentic, brave, and wise. You should have no problem expressing yourself.
Will this make you vulnerable? Absolutely. The reality is unless you are willing to sacrifice something to be a better version of yourself, then you are not ready to take the next step towards becoming a great writer. You have to be willing to show yourself to your audience, that will make them have much more respect for you and in turn will result in your readership rising, because your audience knows authenticity when it sees it.
Focus on the Journey of Writing
Writing is about sharing experiences and enjoying where you are going. Don’t make your content about how many people are reading it. That is just a bonus. What you want to do when you write is make sure that you are enjoying the process a learning as you go along. Playing the result – valuing the blog if it has a certain amount of readers is a foolish endeavor because then the value of what you do is out from your control and you are leaving it to others to determine the value of it.
Things will have meaning to you if you care about them; make sure that as you write, you are enjoying the experience of creating something for other people to consume, it will make it that much more rewarding for you, and that love will translate to the readers as well.
