Blogging for Success: My Letter to a Frustrated Blogger

Just published a post on Aetwork and was reading the stuff here when I saw this letter by a frustrated blogger. In brief, it was a blog post about how bloggers get stuck into a vicious cycle of hope, hard work, achievement & failure and quit blogging at the end.
I read it all and something triggered my mind. I felt like I have been there and done that. In fact, that very experience has led me gradually to a significant success.
From my 4+ years of experience and lots of brain-sucking observation, I know exactly what had been missing when I was in the same position. This is the same thing most bloggers miss and fail to revive.

Blogging for so long and not successful yet? Here’s what you might be missing

 

Suppose blogging is a nail you want to pull out of the wall. So what will you need for that?
Most of the bloggers would say “force”, but this is where they get it wrong.
The force alone won’t be able to pull out the nail. You also have to complement it with the right direction all the way. No matter how much force you put, if you are not applying it outwards, it won’t come out.
Makes sense?
All the bloggers who are working hard and not being successful are doing this very same thing. They are applying lots of force, but the direction is somewhat improper.
If you think you are failing despite your direction is true, and force is enough, keep that in mind and read further. You will find the answer.

Is your Blogging direction towards success or away from it?

Below is a diagram that helped me a lot to decide my direction of blogging. Ideally, I should be at the centre of this graph where all the circles intersect.
The ideal choice for your blogging direction is where you can have

1. Personal satisfaction
2. Social status
3. Money

Any aspect is missing and you’ll lack inspiration and determination.

Money:

The most critical point of this whole talk. Getting traffic is much easier than money itself, but without money, you won’t be able to keep up the energy for much long time. In the letter by a frustrated blogger, the author has said that he is making $1-2 per month only, but this makes perfect sense to me!

In his case, I can see that the author uses only Google AdSense to monetize his blog. AdSense pays only when someone clicks and traffic doesn’t mean clicks. So I think the author could have summed up more money by diversifying the monetization options. He could have released an e-book or added some inline text advertisement or endorsed some hosting plan or a blog theme. In short, you must diversify your monetization to get maximum money out of your blog.
Another money factor is the blog’s niche itself. In a niche like WordPress, Blogging, Marketing, etc., you can easily have lots of products and services to promote which would get you more income compared to a random blog that can’t monetize on anything else ads. Hence, you should choose a niche with the least competition, max traffic and more monetization opportunities.
Here are some amazing hand-picked articles from Aetwork, which would show you how to make money from your blog. Caution: All tricks require work to be done.

1. 50+ Marketing Tools For Bloggers
2. 7 Tips to Get More Blog Readers and Keep Them

Skills:

Nobody enjoys mediocre information repeated hundreds of times, so make sure that you know quite better about your subject than the other bloggers. Such exceptional knowledge only flourishes when you are passionate about your subject.

If it is your passion, you will always dig deeper & be able to write comprehensively about it. Plus the fluctuations in your readership won’t diminish your energy which is quite necessary because blogging takes some time to succeed. In addition to the subject knowledge, you must learn basic grammar & vocabulary, blog promotion, social marketing, HTML, CSS, basic troubleshooting, etc. to take it to a professional level. If you don’t know anything technical, better to publish on a multi-author platform or social community rather than your blog. It will save you time and effort from the technicalities of the blog.

Satisfaction: 

Satisfaction, for a blogger, is being able to blog about something he loves and getting social acceptance for that. In addition to finding out your blogging niche, you must make sure that blogging makes you socially acceptable. You might not want to be criticized by your relatives and others for spending your valuable time failing miserably.

A big reason for quitting blogging, especially in India, is that you don’t get social approval taking blogging as a profession. To deal with this, you should start blogging part-time and make it full-time only when you are successful enough. If you argue that you can’t get enough time this way, you are not built for blogging then. Many successful bloggers, in fact, most, started blogging in their free time and eventually made their way to success.
In all, don’t depend upon hard work only. Set the correct direction of hard work too:

• Choose the niche that brings traffic and money both
• Make sure you are interested and knowledgeable about the subject
• Write in-depth and to-the-point always
• Learn complementary skills to make it professional.
• Start part-time, make it worthwhile full time &
• Don’t depend upon a single income channel. Diversify

If you can decide on something that satisfies the three primary needs stated above, your chances of keeping up with your blog and being successful ultimately will be maximum. Be honest with yourself and figure out the missing stone in your path.

Just make sure that there is no lagging in your efforts to make every post the best on the topic.
In all, if you can decide on something that satisfies the three primary needs stated above, your chances of keeping up with your blog and being successful ultimately will be maximum. As you get the right direction, your force i.e. your hard work will eventually start showing the output. So be honest with yourself and figure out the missing stone in your path if you want to succeed.

RECOMMENDED: 15 Motivational Movies for every Entrepreneur

Want to add something to the post? Share it in the comments section below. And don't forget to check out the other posts of  #Aetwork.