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Running a blog isn’t a short sprint. It’s a marathon. Just take a look at some of the top-ranking blogs on google and you will find that none of them has just one post and no subscriber list. In fact, the most popular and high-ranking sites have been blogging consistently and building an audience over years to establish a well-deserved spot on Google’s first page rankings. But becoming a successful blogger is so much more than just blogging consistently. It’s also about mindset. In today’s exhaustive guide, I’m going to be talking at length about how to develop the kind of mindset required to become a successful blogger.
1. Treat Your Blog As Your Business Not Your Hobby to Become a Successful Blogger
The first important mind hack is to treat your blog like a business and not a hobby. A hobby is essentially what you do for fun. While there’s no reason a blog shouldn’t be fun, you need to get serious about blogging if you want to turn it into a successful revenue-generating machine. When you think of your blog as a business you will start to take accountability, create goals, and measure progress, all of which are essential to building a successful blog.
Define Your Goals
Have a clearly defined goal for your blog. Is your blog about creating awareness, establishing your authority, or building an audience for products that you will eventually sell? Having a clear goal in sight is important so you can direct your efforts in an organised manner to achieve your specific goal.
“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal,” said Earl Nightingale, American radio speaker and author.
Establish Accountability
Your next step is to establish accountability for yourself. Break your main goal of setting up your successful blog into smaller doable tasks such as creating a WordPress site or writing the very first post if you’re a new blogger, for example. Give yourself timescales for each task and hold yourself accountable to complete each goal.
Measure Progress
The next step is to write down or record your main goal and the individual smaller tasks using some sort of tracking mechanism whether it is your MS Excel worksheet or app designed for this purpose. You’ll feel a sense of accomplishment as you start to tick off your individual goals and see visible progress.
The Importance of Discipline
You simply cannot achieve anything if you do not have discipline.
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment, “ said Jim Rohn, American Entrepreneur, author and speaker. Enough said.
If you are the type to give up half-way or simply don’t want to commit to anything long-term you may as well STOP READING now. On the other hand, if you’re willing to be disciplined and apply yourself regularly and consistently to working on your blog and doing everything it takes to make it successful, the end result is a no-brainer.
Have Your Own Office
I cannot stress enough the importance of having an office where you can work from. As you develop a habit of working from your home office, your mind and body will get trained to get straight to work the moment you settle down at your space. Your home office doesn’t need to be fancy. It can be that corner table in your living room where all you need to do is grab a chair and connect your laptop! Here’s a lady who works from her corner coffee shop every morning, which she finds is her most productive time of day.
Speaking of most productive time of day, do you know what yours is? For instance, I’m more of an owl in that I do my best work towards the end of the day. Set up your blogging habits in such a way that you are working at the best time of day for you.
Be Visible
If you’re wanting to become a successful blogger, you have to get comfortable with visibility. It’s the fine art of being seen, and also being seen as relevant. If you’re a natural people-person, skip this section. Visibility can be difficult for introverts and for people for whom this does not come as easily. I find the best way to overcome this is to focus more on what I do and what I deliver and to focus less on me. Let your work lead here.
2. Get Ready to Learn, and Keep Learning to Become a Successful Blogger
Whether you’re a complete noob or a seasoned veteran, there are always things to learn in blogging. New bloggers are often overwhelmed by the huge amount of information that’s available online about how to set up a blog, get it running, and finally monetize it. It’s not surprising that many bloggers often give up.
As a new blogger, here are the key factors I suggest you start looking at, in sequence, to avoid burnout and overwhelm.
Setting Up a Blog and Starting to Blog
This covers all the practical elements of how you go about actually creating a blog or website online. Setting up the blog should be your actual first step. Once you do that, Congratulations! You can tick off one critical component from your successful blogging checklist. I would simply recommend that you look through YouTube for how to set up a professional blog for free (if you’re on a budget) or by using paid resources (if you can afford it!). I also recommend you stick to WordPress as the site you build your blog on.
Next, you can start to actually create blog posts on your website. As a new blogger, you want to start getting into the habit of looking for the information you need whether its subscribing or following influencers or looking up related YouTube videos.
Identify Different Types of Tools You Need to Set Up a Successful Blog
Next, you need to identify the different types of tools you will need to make your blog successful. Chiefly these fall into 3 categories
Site Enhancement/User Experience tools that as the name suggests, enhance the user experience on the site. For example, the number 1 user experience killer is a slow website loading time. It’s a universally acknowledged fact that a user will leave a site if it takes more than 5 to 8 seconds to load.
In this case, a plugin (an extension for WordPress that ‘extends’ functionality) such as W3 Total Cache, can be installed on your site to increase its speed. Another tool which primarily focusses on reduces the size of your website images which can otherwise slow down the loading times of your site is WP Smush.
Content Marketing tools which help you market your content and grow your audience. These usually consist of your email marketing software (which enables you to capture subscribers) such as Mailchimp, post schedulers for social media like Hootsuite, and automated tools like the chatbot on Facebook. Sometimes content marketing tools can work equally well as user experience tools too.
Analytical tools which would be the tools you would use to measure the performance of your blog posts, identify the number of visitors to your site and where they’re coming from, and see where you rank in the overall scheme of things. Google Analytics and Alexa are two tools that come to mind.
I have not mentioned a lot of specific tool names, as I will be covering individual topics in-depth in the future. But the selection of tools can also be specific to the individual so I would suggest you do your research in this regard.
Develop Knowledge of Content Marketing and SEO
Content Marketing is the art of developing content that appeals to your target audience and makes them keep wanting to come back for more. It also covers strategies that you can use to promote your content to as wide an audience as you possibly can. One very basic example of content marketing is to create scroll-stopping headlines for your blog posts.
Another one is to write on topics that are of interest to your target audience. Here is a related post I did covering where you can get fresh and trendy blog post ideas. Another example is using Facebook to market your content by way of doing lives or posting content.
Which brings me to SEO. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the most important aspect of blogging that you absolutely need to learn. Even if you learn just one thing to perfection, let SEO be that one thing. SEO is how you modify your website, blog posts, and leverage other external factors to increase the amount of targeted (niche-specific) traffic that comes to your site organically. Having organic traffic that finds itself to your site as opposed to you paying for advertising helps reduce your dependence on the need for marketing expenditure.
Develop Targeted Products and Services That You Can Sell
Once you’ve stabilized your blog and have developed a loyal audience, your next goal is to monetize your blog, if that was your primary reason or part of your several reasons for blogging. At this point, you will need to bring together your expertise, experience, and understanding of your audience to create super-specific products and services that can be sold to them.
There is a process of evolution here and you may have to go through several different routes of testing and trying out different things before you hit your winning formula. You may even want to promote affiliate products instead of developing your own products and services which is an excellent idea once you have a good audience size for a related niche.
Rinse and Repeat
Remember when I said that blogging involves a never-ending process of learning and re-learning. Once you’ve built yourself up, you can’t ever get complacent. Always look for new ways to make things better and do things better. You can’t afford to stagnate when as recently as 2019, 4.4 million blog posts were getting published daily on WordPress alone.
3. Understand What It Means to Provide Value
Once upon a time, it was easy to get noticed and rank on Google. All you needed was a website and a few posts and you were good to go. These days, however, the dynamic has flipped 180 degrees on its head. As a blogger, you need to work harder and smarter to stand out and be relevant in a very crowded marketplace.
Everyone who’s Anyone is blogging these days whether it’s your friendly-neighborhood she-preneur or the local Car wash at the next pit-stop. How do you stand out?
Marketers emphasis the need to provide value and I would also add the need to be fresh and original. When you write a blog post always think about how you can deliver more than the next blogger. You can use the top 10 posts on the specific topic in Google for inspiration, however, your mindset at the end of the day, is to want to over-deliver and do it in the freshest and most engaging way possible. You have to train your mind to always think about what’s in it for your reader and not what’s in it for you no matter how much you like what you’ve written. Detach.
4. Network, Network, Network to Become a Successful Blogger
Every successful businessperson has a tribe, a network of contacts that they can go to for brainstorming, for advice, for referrals, and for collaboration. This is a vital, often less-talked-about aspect of building a successful blog. Joining groups and forums specifically designed to connect you with other bloggers who are on the same journey as you, as well as experienced bloggers who can help you move further along, is an important aspect of successful blogging.
Look for blogging groups on Facebook as well as entrepreneurial groups which are focused on building successful blogs. Also look for local groups, associations, and communities at your location where you can connect with like-minded bloggers. You’ll need a tribe to help you when you have your down days or are feeling a little less than motivated.
So there you have it, your complete and practical mindset training guide to becoming a successful blogger!
What is your biggest challenge when it comes to building or growing your blog? Share in the comments section below together with your website URL if you have one! I read and am grateful for every comment.
Until next time!
An SEO Copywriter and Digital Content Strategist based in India. I specialise in the strategic crafting of business content that increases visibility and generates organic traffic.
Email me at connect@irenelopezwriter.com or message me here