PureBlogging

If you really want to have a successful blog, doing the same things that everyone else is doing will not cut it. Your blog will just be another “me, too!” blog. If you write the same kinds of articles with the same kinds of headlines as everyone else, you will not succeed.

There is a flood of mediocre blogging advice out there. Rise above it and look to yourself to make your blog succeed. Here are some thoughts regarding this:

• Know why you’re in the game. Know why you blog. Know the purpose of the blog. Write it down. Make sure everything about the blog fulfills its purpose. Know what you expect to get out your blog, what you expect to accomplish with it. This is Step Number Zero. If you don’t do this, if you don’t know this, nothing else about your blog will be strong–nothing. This is your “true North” on your compass. “Making money” isn’t good enough. Everybody needs to make money, no duh. I have news for you: the money is a side effect. What’s more important is knowing what you want from blogging.
• Know who you’re blogging for. Know what they love, hate, fear, and covet. Know how to push their buttons. If you don’t, you can write all the “Cosmo” style headlines you want, and your blog will never be a success. When you know who you’re writing for, you can create content your audience cannot live without. “Everybody” is not your audience. People just like yourself are not your audience.
• Put as much of your personality into your blog as you possibly can, so that there’s no way anybody but you could do it. For over 99% of the blogs out there, I could switch author names around and you wouldn’t be able to tell. You call that successful? I don’t. People don’t want your blog, they want other people whom they like. Be that person in your blog.
• Be a producer, not a consumer. Spend more time creating your own unique material, instead of just reading everyone else’s and then linking to it. Have you every made a copy of a copy on copy machine? If you keep making copies of copies, what you end up with looks vague and distorted. You want to be at the beginning of that chain, not at the end. Producers are leaders, consumers are followers.
• Think big, take chances, do things that frighten you and push you out of your comfort zone. Ask for that interview, that guest post, that link. You never know until you try. Show some guts.

This a rare blog post, in that “following” the advice in it makes you a leader, rather than just another follower. None of this stuff is easy to do. In fact it is very difficult. The harsh truth is that most blogs suck. Most bloggers say they want to succeed, but then they want nothing but easy answers and magic formulas. Since this post is not another top ten list, most bloggers will already have stopped reading it.

But you know, at this point in the over-saturated blogging advice field, information that helps bloggers become leaders, rather than just another kind of follower, is really about the only advice worth our attention.

PS - thanks to James and Harry for the wake-up call and the inspiration.

Photo by Fransisco Antunes