It's very easy to start a blog but it can be very difficult to make it successful.
No, I am not talking about success just because of number of posts published or number of comments.
Those are not always evidence of a successful blog. For your blog to be considered successful it should be profitable.
Other people are reading: How to Promote Your Tracks Using SoundCloud Plays
In most cases, profitable means it's making a lot more money than the time and effort you put into it.
True - it can take time to make a blog successful, but it can happen, especially if you follow and apply the right principles to your blogging.
This article looks at 11 of such principles.
1. Start with the End in Mind
Yes, ' Start with the end in mind "!
I first read this from Stephen R. Covey, the author of the extremely popular " The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."
How very true, especially if you want to succeed in blogging.
Starting with the end in mind is very important in blogging as it helps you know where you want to go, even before you start.
It also helps you know what you want to achieve as a blogger, in the early stages and on the long term.
Knowing what you want to achieve will help you come up with the right steps you are going to take, to reach your goal.
If you don't know where you are going, you certainly won't get there, would you?
Same applies to blogging.
You should have a goal in mind before you get started.
I know it can be hard to have an exact goal when you start, especially trying to make it elaborate.
So in the beginning don't worry too much about making your goal or goals elaborate. Just have some kind of goal to strive towards. It can all become a lot clearer as you go along.
And even more importantly, knowing where you are going and what you want to achieve will keep you motivated to keep going, until you succeed.
2. Know What You Need to Do to Achieve the Success You Desire
Knowing where you want to go and what you want to achieve, even before starting will help you put together a plan of action.
Yes, it's not enough to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve.
You need to know exactly what to do and how to do them, to achieve the success you desire as a blogger.
It pays to have a clear program of action, detailing what steps you need to take, on a daily or consistent basis, to achieve your goals.
This includes putting together your plan for the next couple years for your blog, as well as what your monthly, weekly and daily activities will be.
Of course you don't have to be extremely detailed, but it pays to put down as much information as you can.
You can adjust and improve things as you go along, but it's very important to start the process.
Even if you have been blogging for a long time but haven't done this or stopped doing this along the way, it's not too late to start now.
If you do this, you will be surprised how much easier things will be for you, moving forward.
3. Make Sure Your Blog Solves a Problem or Satisfies a Need
Ask yourself...
- What problem(s) does my blog solve?
- What urge, desire or need does it satisfy?
- Are the articles I write helping anyone?
- Do they cover the problems people have?
If you are not happy with the answers you get, then it will be hard to make your blog successful.
That's unless of course you are blogging just for the fun of it and don't care about making it successful.
If you care about making it successful, then it absolutely should solve a problem or satisfy a need, urge or desire.
If it doesn't, you will end up wasting your time working on a blog that doesn't help anyone, least of all you.
Why would anyone read your articles or take your blog seriously if it doesn't help them solve a problem or satisfy their needs?
For example, a very comprehensive article I recently wrote on Kingged.com solves a problem for women looking for business ideas to start.
All (or most) of the articles you spend time to write should do the same.
Even if it is just to entertain readers, your articles should be useful if you want your blog to be successful.
4. Make Sure You Are Building an Email List of Blog Visitors
It's a good principle to do all you can to get return visitors to your blog.
And one of the best ways to do that is to get as many of your visitors subscribed to your email list.
This is because it's very hard to get a visitor to return to your blog otherwise.
In fact, it's said that most visitors to your blog won't ever return, no matter how awesome your content is.
But by getting visitors on your email list, you can always email them again when you have new content or even have something to sell or promote.
And unlike other forms of traffic, you can always rely on traffic from your email list.
5. Have a Plan in Place for Getting Search Engine Traffic
You can't ignore search engine traffic these days, as a blogger.
Google is still King and you absolutely still need search engine traffic.
Yes, it can be volatile but it's worth working towards, especially because it can bring crazy amount of highly targeted traffic to your blog ... when it eventually starts working.
Yes, it takes time to work and start seeing results with search traffic, but the time will pass anyhow, right?
And it's not too hard to get search engine traffic, if you have that as part of your plan.
6. Have a Plan in Place for Getting Social Media Traffic
Even though social media traffic isn't as powerful as search engine traffic, it shouldn't be ignored if you want to succeed with your blog.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the others are not going anywhere anytime soon. They will continue to bring massive traffic to blogs around the world.
In fact, they are getting even more popular with billions of active users every single day.
It starts with sharing your articles on the popular social media platforms of course but getting active on some of them is also important.
I don't recommend getting active and spending too much time on all the popular social media platforms though.
Instead, pick one or two that work best for your target audience and focus on getting the best results from them.
7. Write Your Articles to Offer the Best Solution to Readers' Problems
People want to read articles that not only offers solutions to their problems but the best solutions.
There's no point writing an article that confuses the readers with multiple options to solving their problems.
Instead, do the hard work for your readers in your articles.
Research or even test out the various solutions to the particular problem(s) and provide them with the best solution(s).
In fact, put yourself in the place of your readers and ask yourself...
Does this article provide you with the best solution(s) to the problems you have?
If it doesn't, then you haven't provided them any value.
Instead you have ended up wasting their time reading the article (and as a result ended up wasting your time for writing the article).
You don't want readers to waste even more time contemplating the multiple options you have given them.
8. Share and Promote Every Single Article You Write
Why spend the time to write an article if you don't do anything else to promote it?
With the millions of blog content getting published daily nowadays, it's hard to succeed without doing some form of promotion yourself.
Yes, there are currently millions of articles published every single day.
That's a staggering number of articles.
Of course many of them are very high quality articles but only a tiny percentage will be successful, no matter how well written they are.
To help your articles, you should make it a principle to promote every single article, even if just sharing on social media and emailing it to your list.
The more you do to promote your articles, the better chance they have of succeeding.
9. Continually Improve Your Blogging Knowledge and Skills
No matter how much you already know and can do as a blogger, there's always room for improvement.
And with the ever-changing nature of things on the Internet these days, learning and continually improving your skills is very important.
What you learned last year could be stale tomorrow but you can't know that if you are not constantly learning and improving yourself.
Thankfully it's not that hard to keep your pulse on the latest blogging trends.
Just visiting other blogs in your niche to learn what others are doing can be a good starting point.
10. Network and Build a Relationship with Other Like-minded Bloggers
Even though you can succeed building and running your blog all by yourself, you need other bloggers to help you achieve a lot more.
That's why networking with other like-minded bloggers is a very good principle to blogging success.
Thankfully it's not that hard to network or even build a good relationship with other bloggers.
It's as simple of taking time to visit and engage with other bloggers on their blogs and social media pages, when you can.
The more you do this, the more familiarity and friendship you build with such bloggers.
And before you know it, you have dozens or even hundreds of bloggers you can call friends.
You can learn from such bloggers and even form long and profitable business relationships that help you blog long term.
11. Rinse and Repeat on a Daily Basis
At the end of the day it's the repeated actions that make you successful!
Doing something once will give you results, yes, but it won't be enough.
Doing more of it, again and again and again is where success lies.
Take raindrops for example...
Just few or even a couple hundred rain drops won't make much impact enough to be called "rain".
The Native American author, actor, poet, musician and political activist, John Trudell, put it succinctly when he said:
"... when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm"
Same with your various activities while blogging.
If you want to truly build a successful blog that will stand the test of time, you need to rinse and repeat the various activities on a daily or consistent basis.
It's in the consistency of your actions that your blogging success lies, long term.
Author Bio:
Joy Healey lives in the beautiful city of Norwich (UK). She has two grand-daughters and three grand-dogs. Her hobbies are reading and line-dancing.
Because of poor pension planning Joy is still working as a computer programmer and is building an online business, part-time, "Blogging After Dark" at JoyHealey.com.
If you still have any question, do share via comments.
If you find this article interesting, don't forget to share it with your friends and family.
Why?
Because, Sharing is Caring!
Don't forget to like us FB and join the eAskme newsletter to stay tuned with us.
Handpicked Blogging guides for you;
