The One Thing You Need To Do To Guarantee Your Blog’s Success

Don’t quit. 

The #1 reason most blogs fail is that people stop writing before they have a chance to get noticed.

Why? Because writing is hard!

Writing is hard work, not magic.

It begins with deciding why you are writing and whom you are writing for.

What is your intent? What do you want the reader to get out of it? What do you want to get out of it.

It’s also about making a serious time commitment and getting the project done. – Suze Orman

There’s no such thing as “instant returns” or overnight success when building a blog. It just doesn’t work that way.

Building a readership and turning readers into customers requires a long-term commitment. Period.

Think of it this way, writing is like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the more natural it becomes. There are two reasons you need to exercise your writing muscle daily:

1. The more you write, the better you get.
2. The more you write, the more confidence you gain in your writing ability.

You can’t wait until you’re in the mood.

The more time you spend worrying about constructing the perfect writing environment, the less time you’ll have to actually get the writing done. Get over it. Put your butt in the chair and just write.

For one hour, two hours or three. Daily.

Show up, day in and day out and just write.

Let’s say your a real estate agent. If your real estate blog is your primary marketing tool, you need to make writing a part of your prospecting time.  Real Estate Broker Irina Netchaev closed 80% of her transactions last year as a direct result of her real estate blogging efforts and that was no coincidence…

It finally dawned on me that I had to look at developing content as prospecting time. I made a decision to allocate an hour a day to research and write. My goal was to have 3 to 5 posts a week, especially when my blog was still a baby.

Learn to eliminate distractions.

You might be getting your writing done at home or at the office… While neither of those might be your ideal writing environment, you can at least take steps to minimize distractions. Do this by:

• Closing all of your other window browser tabs to focus on your writing.
• Closing your office door. If you don’t have one, try headphones and putting yourself on “Do Not Disturb” mode.
• Closing your email.

Do everything you can to eliminate distractions and focus on the task at hand…getting the writing done.

Write for an audience of one. 

Stop trying to be everything to everyone. You’ll end up with a bunch of loosely written content and wind up an expert at nothing.

Instead, determine who you are trying to reach early on and write content specific to that audience.

Again, let’s take the real estate example…

Are you trying to reach first time home buyers? Then write content specific to first time home buyers.

Are you trying to reach sellers? Write content specific to sellers. Things like how to price your home for sale in today’s current market or how to prep your home for sale.

The point is, identify your target audience, then write answers to all of the questions they’re asking about buying or selling real estate in your area. Become the Go To expert for everything real estate related to that core group.

You do that by showcasing your knowledge on the blog day-in and day-out.

Showing up matters more than ever, particularly if you promised you would.

Not just showing up in person, but showing up emotionally, or with support, or with a resource that was inconvenient for you to produce.

We’re no longer judging you by what sort of widgets your factory makes. We’re judging you by what we can expect from you in the future. – Seth Godin

I read this as setting an expectation with readers. An expectation that they can come to rely on you to continue to generate useful content. That they can trust that you have all the answers.

And trust always comes before the sale.

Stop looking for the finish line. 

Because there isn’t one.

Blogging is a marathon. A never-ending marathon.

The more you feed the blog beast, the more traffic you generate.

You have to consistently feed the blog beast in order to earn and keep people’s attention. It’s like Jerry Seinfeld once said,

People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.”

The second you stop delivering useful, relevant content, you’ve lost them. But don’t let that deter you, just remember…

Writing is hard work, just like any other job.