How to Become a Successful Blogger

When it comes to blogging, the mission is clear. You want success. The question is, what does success entail? That’s clear as well. You want to write and share compelling content that readers would be happy to visit regularly and you’d like to cultivate a situation where those current readers, as well as new readers, would easily find such content. That’s it. That’s success. You write the content and people easily find the content on the internet. If you can achieve those two things, your job is done. The issue is, how does a person “write compelling content” and how does that content magically “appear before the right eyes?” The devil, unfortunately, is in the details.

In today’s post, I’d like to share eight methods for locating and capitalizing on this success we all seek. As I’ve shared in most of my posts up to this point, successfully doing anything isn’t as much of a challenge as we think it is. Succeeding merely takes focus, brainpower, and commitment, with the commitment part taking priority. I’ll share two quotes by Henry Rollins to bring this point home:

“I don’t have talent, I have tenacity. I have discipline. I have focus and I know without any illusion where I come from and what I can go back to.“
and
“The repeating factors of my life have been application, discipline, focus, repetition.“

You needn’t be the smartest person in the room. But oftentimes, you do need to be the hardest working. Work goes far in this world. And with enough work, results are bound to eventually flow in by themselves.

Tips for Blogging Success

While work is the critical factor that drives success, no one ever said we shouldn’t work intelligently. Or efficiently. Work and effort are oftentimes synonymous with brighter days ahead, but effort with focus and brainpower will ensure you’ll be around to enjoy those brighter days. One of the greatest factors that influences blog abandonment is burnout. The other is disinterest. If you avoid burning yourself out by developing a plan of action and a system of blogging that can yield the greatest amount of success with the least amount of effort, well, you’ll just have figured the entire thing out, haven’t you?

Find Yourself a Niche

Niches are good. Niches are profitable. Niches help bloggers focus on exactly what readers want. Do you know what my niche for this blog is? It’s blogging. I could be writing about anything at this very moment, but I choose to write posts that help readers learn how to blog for themselves. I enjoy blogging and writing about blogging, so my job isn’t very difficult. I actually get excited before writing a post. I enjoy it and because of that, I think I produce work that’s better than the work I’d produce if I didn’t enjoy what I do.

When many bloggers start out, they have no idea what to write about. Because of this, they write about everything and quickly lose focus and direction. And then they quit. Trust me when I say this. I’ve had this happen to me many a time.

Because niches are so confining, they inherently create focus. What’s more, niches actually aren’t as narrow as most folks might believe. I have friends who practice physical therapy. At first glance, one might consider that a narrow field. One that’s not very profitable if written about on a blog. One that doesn’t offer much information to write about. At first glance, a physical therapist might have trouble thinking of topic about which to write, but have you even seen physical therapy channels on YouTube? Or psychology channels? Or dermatology channels? They’re huge and those who are running those channels are making a ton of money doing so.

So yes, while niches can seem narrow and by seeming so, they can create focus, there’s actually a treasure-trove of content from which to draw ideas to post. Niches might not be wide, but they sure are deep.

When it comes to blogging, what is a niche? It’s a variety of topics that are similarly themed, that are helpful, and that solve problems. Why are niches valuable? Because a large portion of people on the internet are looking for solutions to their problems. They’re looking to answer their questions. When you dive deep into a topic in which you’re interested, you can become an authority to answer such questions. You become a problem solver and people love that.

I’ve spoken to many new bloggers. Sentiment I often hear sounds something like this: “I’d like to write about so-and-so, but there are already so many blogs about that.” True, there may be far too many travel blogs, but have you ever considered limiting your writing to your home city of London or New York? Or perhaps limiting yourself to just the East End or the Upper West Side? Trust me, there’s enough content to go around and it’s honestly almost impossible to drill too deeply. And the good news is, as you drill down, competition begins to wane. There aren’t many bloggers who are blogging about the Upper West Side of Manhattan at this very moment. The field is wide open.

What are some exciting and highly profitable niches that are also ultra-deep? Think:

• Real Estate
• Gaming
• Finance
• Technology
• Pets
• Travel
• Health
• Social Media
• Mobile Phones

It wouldn’t be difficult to drill down into any of the above and still have an exorbitant amount of content from which to pull. For example, let’s take pets. Let’s drill down to dogs. Now let’s drill down to Doberman Pinschers. Now let’s drill down to Doberman Pinscher puppies. Training. Diet. Lifestyle. Care. Health. You get the idea.

Lose the Fear – Promote, Advertise, & Share

When it comes to marketing a blog, there’s a bit of a conundrum. In order for your blog to become popular and for you to become confident with your work, you need to market your blog and yourself, but at the same time, people generally enjoy visiting popular blogs the most. It’s like, in order to be ranked well by search engines, your blog needs to be popular, but the only way to become popular is to rank well in the search engines. It goes round and round.

Here’s the trick – write awesome content and then share it with a small circle of people who really care about it. If you start small, there’s more chance of acceptance and support and less chance of rejection. And as more people accept your work, you can slowly grow your circle as well as your confidence.

The one barrier I see most that blocks people from promoting their blogs is their humility. Bloggers are a special sort of folk – they don’t toot their own horns and they don’t particularly enjoy promoting themselves in forums and on social media. That’s a shame because there are a lot of people out there who would truly enjoy the excellent work these bloggers produce. My advice to the humble among us is to get over it. You’re going to need to get the word out and the word needs to be spread by you. But again, to make things easier, start small and build up a loyal following of people who care about your success. Your crew will grow by itself as the word slowly spreads.

Capitalize On Your Successes

I remember once reading an interview with the owner of one of the world’s most popular tech blogs, Hongkiat. His name is Lim Hong Kiat and way back in 2011, his blog garnered over six million pageviews per month. Today, the traffic is probably higher. Lim also, at the time, collected over 75,000 readers via RSS, newsletter, and social media. That’s just crazy.

At first, I wondered how this one person was able to attract such traffic, and I suppose the person interviewing him wondered the same thing. Lim was asked, “How do you manage to rack up such high traffic? What are your tips/tricks?” To which he answered:

I guess – ultimately – if you give them what they want, they’ll stick for a while. If you are writing content related to your visitors’ interests, they will eventually come back for more.

I like to dig into the metrics, analyzing their demographics: what people are reading, what interests them the most; are they clicking related contents for more, etc. This kind of gives me the direction of what we should be writing.

Simply put, Lim Hong Kiat gave his readers what they wanted. And like he said, in order to do that, he dived into his metrics and found where most of the action was. And then he built upon that. Not a bad idea.

As you write your posts, use your own metrics to learn what your visitors are most interested in. And then continue writing about those things from all different angles. If you do this, you might just enjoy a similar success as the gentleman I mentioned above has enjoyed and continues to enjoy.

Catch ’em Early & Hold On to Them

The concept of catching your readers very early on and keeping them isn’t new. It goes hand-in-hand with a section I’ve written in a previous post about writing seductive excerpts and introductory paragraphs. Regarding the amount of time it takes to catch an online reader’s attention varies. I’ve read reports that a website author has a mere seven seconds to do so:

The website visitor should be able to figure out what the website is about within the first few seconds of landing on the page. You can accomplish this with your logo, slogan, and website copy on your homepage.

I’ve also read that it can take between 10 and 20 seconds:

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, viewers typically leave a website within 10 to 20 seconds. You won’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.

Basically, you can’t screw this up if you’re looking to attract a new reader and convert that reader into a return visitor, subscriber, or whatever it is you’re interested in doing with him or her.

If you look around on this very blog – the one you’re currently reading – you’ll notice that I’ve got (what I think are) enticing excerpts on the archive pages as well as seductive introductory paragraphs on the post pages themselves. Both of these paragraphs are meant to first, give the readers some idea of what the post is about, and second, draw the readers in to read the entire post. And after that, inside of the post, I try my best to answer questions and give the readers the information they seek. Beyond that, I attempt to offer information readers didn’t even know they wanted. But without seducing these people and drawing them in with my excerpts and intro paragraphs, I wouldn’t have a chance to do any of this.

Catch potential return visitors with information you can share above-the-fold, which means, at the top of the page. Before the primary content. Make this top content brief, attractive, and helpful. You won’t get a second chance to make a first impression, so get these paragraphs right.

Keep Readers Interested

A long time ago, I learned that you have to request that people do things, else they might never do them. I worked as the Creative Marketing Director for a cluster of radio stations in New York. It was my job to build, maintain, and market our station websites. On certain pages, I had calls to action and at times, I took for granted that our listeners knew how to click links that contained keywords. It would go something like this:

“Come stop by our amazing concert this Saturday afternoon!”

With the linked text being bolded, like above.

What I discovered after speaking with many of our listeners on the telephone was that they didn’t know where the information for the concert could be found. In my mind, I thought, “Well, just click the link!” Unfortunately, without being explicitly told where to find the information, these people were lost. With this revelation, I changed my tactics and text to:

“We’re having an amazing concert this Saturday afternoon! Click here for all the information you’ll need to visit.”

When it comes to making your blog as sticky as possible (keeping visitors around longer and/or having them return for future visits), you’ll need to tell your readers exactly what to do. Don’t be shy about this, but don’t be overly aggressive either. Offer newsletter signup forms, links to related articles, links to your social media channels, and anything else you can think of to keep people interested in your work. If you scroll around my pages on this very blog, you’ll see that I employ all of the above tactics. I try my best at weaving them into existing content and on sidebars as to not annoy anyone. I do try to make these options as visible as possible though.

Open Your Avenues of Distribution

After you begin writing on your blog, you’ll quickly realize that extending your reach can be an effective method for attracting more readers. The truth of it is, no matter how popular your blog becomes, people will eventually forget about it. They’ll need reminding in any way you can think of – that’s why it’s critical to reach out using different avenues of distribution. Remember, beyond reaching out to current readers and finding new ones, various avenues of distribution keep your content entertaining and exciting. As you’re probably already aware, seeing the same old thing day in and day out can become tiresome. Wake your content up a bit by:

• Using Substack to send a newsletter.
• Using YouTube for video.
• Starting a podcast.
• Posting and becoming active on forums.

There’s no shortage of ideas for extending your reach. To start, yes, post on your blog, but after that, think of different methods for interacting with and keeping your audience entertained.

Stay Attractive & Keep Your Quality High

I’ve said this a thousand times – it doesn’t matter how pretty your blog is, if you’re not offering very high quality posts that either answer a question or solve a problem, you’re not doing your job. Now mind you, blogs that describe your daily life are fine, as long as they’re good. What’s good? Check that out here. There are tons of people online at this very moment because their bored. They’re not necessarily looking for their life’s problems to be solved. Perhaps they want to simply read a cool story. If that’s the case, give them something to read.

When writing your posts, think about satisfying your readers. Think about how you’d like to feel after reading something. Think about your readers sharing your posts or telling others about them. Don’t just write, “I went to the mall yesterday.” Share the entire story:

• What were you thinking when you rolled out of bed that morning?
• What prompted you to make the drive to the mall?
• What were you looking to buy?
• Did you see anyone you knew?
• What did you eat?
• Were there many people at the mall?
• Was your visit during the holidays?

Paint a complete picture so when your readers are finished with your story, they’re satisfied. All because you shared something that was of extraordinarily high quality.

Write Regularly

One of the often overlooked aspects of becoming a successful blogger is blogging frequency. Google and the other search engines have fallen in love with regularity, so when you begin blogging, don’t ever stop. Put yourself on a schedule and get used to following it. How often should you write? I’ve got just the answer for you. Enjoy!

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What’s your opinion on all this? Are you a successful blogger? What have you done to pave the way? If you’ve got ideas or questions about what I’ve shared above, please leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!