Aim for the Stars
Every month, I get thousands of readers to this blog.
I say that not to brag but to stress the importance of sticking with things.
I didn’t always have that much traffic. I was fortunate that I had heard about John Chow before starting this blog. I had read his free eBook, so I had a head start in knowing some of the things to do to start getting readers to my blog. I had my first comment (from Michael Kwan) on this blog in just a little over three hours after my first post.
Some of my early commentators don’t appear to have blogs anymore. Some are gone completely; others have sat idle for months, even over a year. The blogging crowd changes constantly. Some people leave with some notice. Some have gone on to build other blogs, and let their original blogs fall by the wayside. Some have moved on to other things, and blogging was no longer at the top of their interests. Others just left without a word. What happened to them? Did they simply move on to other things? Did they fall on hard times and couldn’t afford Internet access anymore? Did they have health problems?
When I was getting started, I met a number of bloggers who started around the same time I did. Many of them had also read John Chow’s eBook, and they were interested in “blogging for money.” And, that’s where consistency really pays off. You have to keep at it. A number of these “blogging for money” bloggers were gone in a couple months. New ones sprout up now and then, and are often gone too with a couple months time.
Many such bloggers aim for the stars, but they give up before their rocket reaches the launch pad.
Mind you, perhaps some of them started earning money in other ways, and decided to focus on those things and quit blogging in favor of those efforts. But, I suspect that may not be the case with some of the money bloggers. I’m sure a number of them thought it would be easy to make money blogging. At the time, John Chow was making maybe around $20,000 per month on his blog. So, I know many people figured that, heck, just 5% of that would be great! I’m sure many people would be leaping for joy if their blog brought them an extra $1,000 a month.
But, you are not going to get to that overnight! It took me over a year of blogging before I had a month that approached $600. I am sure I would be doing much better if I blogged more consistently with higher quality posts rather than phoning it in, as I have been largely doing lately.
You have to aim for the stars! But, you can’t quit before you’ve launched your rocket!
Traffic, the key ingredient to any blog, takes time to build. Sure, you can find ways to speed things up, but if you don’t have the time or money to put into building traffic and producing content, you largely limit your focus to one or the other. And content is really where your initial focus should be. Make sure that it’s good stuff you’re putting out there. Then, you have to wait for organic traffic to build and people to start hitting your site. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do any traffic building efforts to start. You need to put some work in at building traffic, but your main focus should be content. Write your content, invest the bulk of your time on that, and then try to bring in traffic in the time you have left.
This is true no matter what kind of business you want to get into. You have to be patient. Overnight success rarely happens and, when it does, it was probably the result of a lot of hard work and preparation… and patience!
my readership has since dwindled down A LOT since I started only posting once a week. But at least I know the people who do read/comment on my blog are my real friends.