While the mechanics of blogging are amazingly easy to master, creating a successful blog is actually much HARDER than it looks.
Yesterday, my email box was filled with people who are suffering from what I call the “Baby Blog Blues”.
These bloggers are not web development professionals, but they’re average every day business owners who want to use their blog to promote themselves and their businesses. They’ve been blogging (some regularly, some not so regularly) and they’re frustrated. In some cases, they’re getting traffic but no comments. In other cases, they’re not getting traffic OR comments.
In one case, the blogger who wrote to me desperately wants to build a strong community, just as Cath Lawson, Liz Strauss, Barbara Swafford, and Hunter Nutall have done. She wants loyal readers who contribute regularly to the discussion. She wants to give a topic and allow others to discuss – which is exactly what happens in the strong communities above.
At the moment, her blog just isn’t “established” enough to achieve this and I’m calling this syndrome the Baby Blog Blues.
I’ve come up with this “word picture” because I can’t TELL you how often I’ve had potential clients who announce, “This blog HAS to be generating a four figure income in less than 6 months or I don’t want to do it.” After 10 years, I’ve FINALLY learned to say “Thanks for contacting me – good luck with that.”
When you first launch your blog, it is like a baby. Few parents expect their newborn infant to generate income to cover their expenses. (I had to re-write that sentence to say “few” instead of “no” because – well, the tabloids are FILLED with stories of parents who had children with the sole intent of turning the baby into a cash machine – the last names Lohan and Spears come quickly to mind!)
In the beginning, your blog is a baby! It needs time and effort invested on your part to make it grow. In the case of a human baby, time will work its magic and your child will grow even without top quality nurturing. The passage of time guarantees that your newborn will grow into a toddler. Allow more time to pass and the toddler will grow into a child. Eventually, in the cruelest twist of all, the child will grow into a teenager. While time is the biggest factor in a child’s development, time is not the sole predictor of blogging success.
In the case of my aspiring blog client, she’s got an infant “blog” sitting on her lap and she’s watching Cath, Liz, Barbara and Hunter with envy as they prepare for their blogs for the senior prom.
What this client doesn’t recognize is that these successful bloggers spent a lot of time creating blog success. They have spent their time blogging in the dark. They have spent weeks, months perhaps YEARS posting article after article with few if any comments. Most bloggers learn to blog through trial and error. The faster you learn the essential “tricks” of the trade, the quicker you can get moving in the direction of blog success.
Trust me when I tell you that all of the bloggers I listed above did a LOT more than just post to their blog once a week and wait for the traffic to come to them. Like the mother of a newborn human infant, these successful bloggers have gone through the 4 hour feeding schedules and diapers phase with their blogs.
While the passage of time will eventually transform a human infant into a teenager, the same doesn’t hold true for your blog. If you don’t nurture your blog, it won’t grow – it’s as simple as that. The GOOD news is that you can ignore your blog for months and then when you begin nurturing it again it will spring back to life. In other words, no matter how sick your blog is now, you can always resurrect it.
By the way, the client with “blog envy” purchased the 8 Week Power Blog Launch program 2 weeks ago. Over those two weeks, her Alexa ranking has already decreased almost 800,000. (Alexa is a highly flawed system which ranks web sites from 1- 24 Million where #1 is the best, 24 Million is the worst so a rapidly FALLING Alexa rank is a GOOD thing!) In the course of 2 weeks, her blog went from the 2.4 Million range to the 1.6Million range and has passed more than 3/4 of a MILLION other websites in the race to number one.
She’s definitely on her way to achieving blog success – I just have to keep her focused on the fact that it takes TIME to create a successful blog.
Blog success is not an overnight proposition. It takes TIME and it takes EFFORT – just like parenting, except when your blog achieves “teenager” status you CAN put it to work generating income – unlike human teenagers!
In the beginning, if you went to Google and typed in “widgets” Google would search through it’s index looking for sites about widgets. (This is horribly oversimplified and ignores the supplemental index – I know, I know – this is a PRIMER not an advanced study!)
