About

You need to be social

When I started blogging, I hoped that I would get a ton of traffic through search engines because all of the other popular blogs got a lot of Google love. The reality is you won’t get too much traffic from Google because your blog is new…it takes years before your search engine traffic kicks in.

Consistency is the key to growth

I never realized consistency was important until it affected my traffic…in a negative way. Sometimes, I used to write a blog each week, while other times I would write five blog posts a week.

What goes online, stays online

When I first started blogging, I used to create mediocre content. My content did all right from a traffic standpoint because I was good at leveraging social media.

Over time, I got lazy and the quality of my content continually decreased. This prompted a handful of people to email me and tell me how I sucked. To make matters worse, a few bloggers even blogged about how my content sucked.

Your brand is everything, and I hope you don’t have to go through what I went through. Treat it like gold and do whatever you can to protect it. Make sure every piece of content you put out on the web is a masterpiece because if you screw up once, it will be on the web forever.

I was able to recover my brand over time, but I did lose a few consulting clients during that time period, which hurt my income.


It’s all in the list

I’ve said it time and time again, the best traffic source for your blog is through emails. I used to be a big believer that RSS traffic was the best form of traffic, but over time people stopped using their feed readers


Blogging isn’t free

I started blogging years ago because I thought it was an affordable way to drive more business to my startup. And although it’s effective, it isn’t too affordable. Sure it’s cheaper than most marketing strategies, but it still costs a lot of money to do it right.
But if you are trying to make money from your blog, you will have to spend money to make it. Here are a few things that you will end up spending money on:

Unique design – you don’t want to use a generic theme if you plan on monetizing your blog.
Custom development – there aren’t plugins for everything you need. It costs money to have a developer create unique email collection modules or make an ad that scrolls with the user.
A/B testing – if you want to maximize your revenue, you will have to A/B test your call to actions and monetization methods. If you don’t have the skill set to do this, you’ll have to spend money hiring consultants.
Social media marketing – sometimes to get more social love, you have to spend money. Every once in a while, I spend money paying consultants to help me boost my StumbleUpon or even Facebook traffic.
The above bullet points are just some examples of expenses you will incur. You can spread out your expenses over time and figure out how to do things on a budget, but don’t expect to create a great blog for free. If you don’t invest in your blog, it won’t grow as fast.

It took me years before I spent money on blogging, and I wish I did it sooner as Quick Sprout would have been much larger. Here are my expenses for Quick Sprout last month:

Hosting – $750 (I use Akamai as my CDN, which adds up fast)
Design – $7,700 (I am releasing an Advanced Guide to Content Marketing at the end of this month, similar to the Advanced Guide to SEO)
Writers – $3,000 (I had a writer help me edit and correct the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing…it’s over 40,000 words)
Coding – $3,500 (I needed to hire someone to code the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing)
Time management – $4,000 (I have an assistant because it saves me 2 to 3 hours a day. I can then put those 2 to 3 hours towards blogging and responding to comments.)
Emails – $731 (my SendGrid and Aweber bills add up)
Plugin development – $4500 (I’m creating a WordPress plugin that will help me collect more emails on Quick Sprout and get more social media traffic.)



It’s easy to get new traffic, but hard to retain it

Survey them – learn what they want and provide it to them. I use Qualaroo and Survey Monkey to figure out what you wanted to read, and then I write it.
Build a community – if you can make your readers feel part of something, they’ll be more likely to come back. This is the main reason I focus so hard on improving the number of comments on Quick Sprout and why I try to respond to every email I get from you.

Collect emails – as I mentioned above, you should collect emails. It’s one of the best ways to increase your repeat visitor count.


Strike while the iron is hot

There’s always going to be a new method of content marketing that is hot…you just have to leverage it before everyone else. It doesn’t matter what your blog is on; you can always make boring topics fun to read…you just have to get creative.


People matter

When I started my first blog, all I cared about is how many visitors I had and how I could convert those visitors into customers. I never really cared about my readers.

These days, I don’t focus on visitor count or even revenue; instead, I judge how well I am doing by the following parameters:

The number of comments – usually when you leave a comment, you are asking a question. I then respond back as I love helping you and other people.
The numbers of emails – just like comments, most of the emails I receive are from you asking for help. I enjoy responding to you and others as it brings a smile to my face.


Conclusion

Hopefully, you can avoid the mistakes I made when I first started blogging. I would hate for you to repeat my mistakes as they hindered my growth.

If you want to make your blog popular, focus on solving one problem at a time. It’s going to be too hard to implement all of the tactics above…but if you focus on them individually, eventually you’ll conquer them all.