The worst thing about blogging, is that you have millions of competitors out there, uploading new content every second. The good news however is that most of them are pretty bad. Usually it’s the same problems that keep popping up, preventing bloggers from truly creating an audience for them to speak out to.
Now take a long hard look at your own blog. Are you blocking your own blog’s potential? Just stay away from these blog killers and you’ll do fine.
1. Selfishness
This is the big one.
Here’s the 101 on how making money with social media works:
You have to GIVE away content or information, valuable to your audience. It might be to give advice, make people laugh, or just to cheer up some of the sad guys struggling through the day stuck in their cubicle.
You give. And then tomorrow, you give some more. And the next day, you give more.
Then, after loads and loads of giving, you are allowed to make a (worthwhile to your audience) offer and you finally get to do what you came to do in the first place. Business.
Then only (a small selection of) your audience will respond.
The beauty of this, is that if the information you GIVE to your audience is valuable enough, it will attract a large number of people, and your blog will grow.
Now it is pretty much the same amount of effort to give your brilliant content to a million users, as it is to give it to one. BUT, to every individual reading your blog, you are GIVING much more than you are ASKING for.
This is the reason all of these “get rich quick” schemes don’t work, and why they’re extremely ill-suited to social media. They’re only about TAKING, and not about GIVING.
2. Sloth (Laziness)
When consulting clients on social media marketing, the usual response after realizing exactly what they need to do to make the most out of social media, would be something like:
“That sounds like a lot of work”
What you need to understand, is that ‘A lot of work’ is more in the liking of running a bricks and mortar business. Where you work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Now in comparison, running a content-based business can in fact be a lot of fun, with very low overhead, few to no employees, not much stress (by comparison, anyway), and yes, less work.
Not NO work. Less work.
3. Impatience
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither were blogs with audiences running well into thousands. All of us get frustrated when you are posting like mad, but still after three months you don’t have the masses following you.
It takes patience and time to build a loyal audience, and momentum is key in the success of this. Blogs don’t blast off at the speed of light, because they would then most like crash just as fast. You have build up your audience steadily at first, after which it will start snowballing.
If you haven’t reached snowball point yet, ask yourself:
- Are my topics actually interesting to someone other than my mom and my cat?
- Do I give my readers more than I ask to receive from them?
- Am I working on cultivating a network of like-minded bloggers, and supporting their work as much as I hope they’ll support mine?
If you can honestly answer Yes to these questions, all you can do is wait. Be patient, blogging isn’t going anywhere.
Tags: Blog, Blogging, Social Media,
Posted by: Zeandre West
