If you read my first blog post, you will have seen that my online journey started way back in 2011 and I admit that I haven’t been very successful. In fact, I have started John Thornhill’s Partnership to Success programme 4 times and each time I have failed for various reasons, but the one issue that has always left me struggling has been blogging!
Now, I have read lots of articles and reports about blogging and about how easy it is. Actually, I have written before about how easy it is, when in reality I have found it very difficult.
Having returned yet again to the online community, I have spent even more time analysing why I have found it so difficult and my findings are:
- I have never started a blog about something that I was passionate about. I have discussed ‘passion’ in a previous post and the reality is that my passion is in the world of classic cars, but I have never written about them before! Why? Well, primarily because I have previously sought to find a mentor to teach me and they almost exclusively focus on ‘how to make money online’ and how to attract readers who in themselves want to make money online. Now, that is fine, but that then invariably means blogging about the precise thing that you are learning or wanting to learn about, which means that if you have no prior knowledge or don’t have the confidence to write about things you may not fully understand then you become trapped in a vicious circle!
- Different ‘experts’ and ‘gurus give conflicting advice on how to write a blog. I have read that a blog post should be a minimum of 400 words and I have read that a blog post should be a minimum of 1,000 words. I have read that you should post every day, whilst others suggest writing twice a week!
- Some Mentors seem to suggest that quality is key whilst others focus on quantity. It is probably true that readership varies dramatically and that some readers do like short posts whereas some are more discerning and wanting quality informative information.
- Most bloggers/mentors are ‘seasoned’ bloggers and really can’t relate to the novices that they are mentoring. Imagine that you are a full-time blogger with 50,000 views per month or even 10,000 views per month, you can probably write a blog post in your sleep or even write about today’s weather and probably get the number of views that many of us starting out could only dream of!
- Many people starting out are ‘scared’ of the reaction of others and whether or not your post is of any interest to anybody else. I know, that I have those fears every time I write something. Even when I used to write professional reports for my work, I would often have doubts about its content and presentation. We humans love to criticise/critique other peoples work, especially if we think we know something about a subject.
In many ways, the true answer to my conundrum (how to overcome my struggles as a blogger) is probably just to ‘go for it’ as they say, but that is not my nature, although I know that I have been ‘spinning my wheels’ for far too long, so here I am, hoping that someone somewhere is interested in what I have written!
My strategy based on the above is thus:
- Remember that what I really want to do is write about my passion, but I need to learn things to do that, so write about the things I learn as I go along and use that information to develop the blog that I really want!
- Don’t get too hung up about numbers, but remember that the longer (and more informative) the post, the more chance it will have of being of interest to other people. (The average length of a page that ranks on the first page of Google in 2020 was 1,447 words – https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking ). I am trying to set a target of 1,000 words.
- The number of times that you should post can diminish as your experience and knowledge grow, because having built your list of followers/subscribers, their interest is more likely to remain and they will look forward to reading your content. Initially I am planning to do 3 posts per week.
- Do the best you can. There are over 600 million blogs in the world today and 1.9 billion websites worldwide. There are over 6 million blog posts published every day and over 2.5 billion each year! https://earthweb.com/how-many-blogs-are-there-in-the-world/ . You will never be able to please everybody, but somebody out there must be interested in what you write!
- ‘Just Do It’ as the Nike tagline says. I find that bit hard, but here we are!
The final part of my strategy is that before I publish anything I will make sure that I have written at lease 5 and hopefully 10 blog posts that are ‘oven ready’. The very successful blogger Anil Agarwal (BloggersPassion.com) recommends having ‘not less than 5 articles. The more, the better’ as it reduces your bounce rates, increases your business impression by showcasing your expertise on the subject and it gives you some ‘breathing space’ to follow the next part of your course/strategy.
