There is a myth in blogging that if you do everything right your site will become a success over time. In fact, this is a popular belief with just about everything in life, and it is a myth because it simply does not happen.
The most powerful thing you can do in blogging (and life in general) is not become the best at what you do, but is simply this: ask for what you want.
When it comes down to it the ones who ask for what they want are the ones that reap the biggest rewards, and the quality of your work has little to no influence on what actually matters.
The Power of Asking
In this example, what your version of success is defined as is irrelevant, because simply doing everything right will only get you to the table. But it doesn't really matter what proverbial table you are at, because you will miss 100% of the opportunities you don't ask for even if you are better than the rest.
You have to take what is an uncomfortable leap by most's standards and ask for what you want.How does that equate to travel blogging? Well, there are numerous instances where bloggers shoot themselves in the foot because they are too timid to bring up what they want:
- Want to get invited on press trips / media opportunities? Ask about the opportunities and how you can help your potential partner reach their goals.
- Want to make a sale through an affiliate network or your own product? Ask your reader to buy it, and ask often.
- Want to get your articles seen by more eyes? Ask for social shares, and again, and again- as much as you can.
You may be the perfect candidate for marketing assignments, but you never get invited on them because you do not ask how you can be a part of them. You may have an optimized site for affiliate advertising, but fail to convert because you did not ask your audience to buy from you. You may also have one of the best articles ever written on a topic, but no one will see it if you don't ask your audience to share it if they enjoyed it.
It may seem simple, but the act of asking is often all it takes to change your blog, or just about anything else in life, for the better.
We learned this one the hard way.What We've Achieved By Asking
I say we learned this one the hard way because for nearly seven years we maintained an "if you build it, they will come" mindset to blogging.
If you've read any of our blogging articles on this site, you'll know that it didn't work out that well for us as our growth was stagnant at best and our income prospects were even worse. We had an audience of sorts, but were not capitalizing on it at all- because while we had a fair number of eyes on our content we weren't actually asking them to do anything!
Naturally, this is a problem.As one of the goals on our sites is increasing our latent income, we decided to add numerous prompts in our articles to remind our readers that they can help support our site by booking hotels through our Booking.com links and buying products through our Amazon links.
This is important, because as you'll likely see on this page, we flat out ask our readers to do this. It isn't a hidden link. It isn't a lame suggestion. We bluntly ask for what we want- and it is pretty simple logic for why we do it.
In most cases it costs our readers nothing extra to buy something they were already going to purchase if they use our links. The only difference is we get a commission which helps run our site, and all they have to do is book just a few minutes, hours, or days sooner than they planned.
When it comes to making a sale through an affiliate link, that is pretty safe logic. Like our article? Use our link to help us out. It is a pretty straight forward ask that requires little extra effort on behalf of our readers- and it works.
Since adding more focused prompts like these, our Amazon sales increased from around $30 per month to nearly $100 per month (a 300% gain!) and our Booking.com sales increased from around $100 per year to $100 per month (a 1,200% gain!) just to name a few. Considering our traffic only increased by about 50% over the course of the last year, this is pretty impressive when you keep in mind that all we did was ask our readers to shop using our links.
Now, in case you are thinking that this change was more gradual and was due to a shift of our audience, let me show you our referral table for Booking.com:
Anyone want to take a guess on when we added our prompts within our posts? Well, the first round was in November 2015, and a second round was in May 2016.
Surprised? I'm not. Asking really works wonders if you know how to do it right.
Preparing for the Future
When it comes down to it, our numbers are not really that impressive. That added $160 per month is indeed small (it equates to about $2 CPM per our current traffic levels of 85,000 monthly between two sites), but it also pays a good percentage of our bills.
What it does do, and is the critical thing to keep in mind when taking on this mindset for blogging, is it sets the pace for future growth.
Take that same $2 CPM and apply it to 200,000 monthly views. Now you're talking $400. Or 750,000 views (which is our 5 year target between the two sites), and you're at $1,500 per month just for asking your readers to do something they were already going to do.
When free money like that is on the table, why would you turn it away?
Now it is Time for a Social Experiment
For those who read our Blog Your Trip posts regularly, you'll know that we love to do a bunch of tests when it comes to showing the power of social media and blogging.
The above section is one example of how asking works to your advantage, but we want to try something more ambitious. We want to see if we can get 1,000,000 social shares on this post simply by asking for it.
We've never had that many shares on an article before (nowhere close, actually), but until recently we've also never asked for the shares in the first place. Since our prevailing theory of everything is you can only reach your goals by asking for them, it seems like a fitting goal for this post to prove just how powerful asking really is.
So, all I have to ask is this: will you share this post to help prove our point?
Use the links below to share this article on your social networks, or hover over the Pinterest images below to pin it to your favorite board.
The quest for 1,000,000 shares begins now.Like This Article? Pin It!
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