Successful Blogging Does Take Time
I was about to start a series today on how to start blogging, but I’m postponing it to tomorow because of a great article Darren Rowse of Problogger.net just wrote. Although it’s not entirely accurate, as he himself says more than once, it’s a good indicator of what it takes to be a successful blogger, at least to get to the top 100 of Technoratti.
He went and manually analyzed the top 100 blogs on Technoratti to see “what lessons I could learn from ‘top blogs’”. What he found was that the top 100 blogger had been blogging for an average of 33.8 months, almost 3 years! The median was 28 months, more than 2 months.
So as we mentioned in our seminars, blogging can be a great way to make money, but you have to keep at it to really be successful. Don’t expect to get rich overnight, it probably won’t happen. I’m sure we can all find exceptions, but looking at these stats, it clearly shows that it does takes some time.
My favorite analogy is going to the gym. Don’t expect to be get massive muscles in a month or two. No matter how hard you hit the gym at first, it takes time. And this is the downfall of most people, they get a membership to the gym, go crazy for 2-3 months, if that, and then stop. They feel all the pain, but barely get any reward. The reality is that it takes time, you need to prepare for it. FollowSteph.com, my personal blog, has been growing for about 1.5 years. I can tell you that my montly growth now is higher than all my COMBINED traffic for the first 3 months! Yes, that’s right, more new people are coming to visit FollowSteph.com each month than the total number of people who visited it for the first 3 months. And I virtually stopped promoting it on top of that!
So don’t be discouraged if at first your blog is getting little traffic, it takes time. The rewards can be great!
[…] So what do you do? I generally suggest writing what your passionate because that will be more interesting for people to read, it will show in your writing. Plus you’re much more likely to continue writing than just go for a quick sprint like most people. The rule of thumb is that it takes time for a blog to be successful, so pick a topic that you can stay with. […]
[…] Successful Blogging Does Take Time This is my own article from my other blog. In essence, I’m showing that successful blogging does take time. […]
You said it before, I believed you … still, good to have the reminder!
My first site, http://www.dougs-travels.com, has been going for about a month. It has yet to see significant traffic, but there is a good reason for this - actually, several. First and for-most, I’ve not promoted it much yet. I’ve done a little, but I am still working on getting some good content on it. Right now I have some rather sub-standard content (just to get things going quickly) - since I don’t have much traffic, this is irrelevant! Mean while, I am upgrading content, and doing some promotion (which right now is more research than planting active links). The result? Not much so far! Why am I doing it? For the effects I expect in a year or two!
I will be travelling to Mexico again at the end of this year so I will be able to add fresh content then. I plan to have some regular traffic to http://www.dougs-travels.com by then so that there are people to read it!
Thanks again Steph, for the reminder (which serves as encouragement too!)
–Doug
You’re welcome