One Lesson All Bloggers Learn

Patience, Young Grasshopper

Every blogger eventually learns an important lesson.  No matter how excited you are about your website or blog, or how great you think it is, will take time and lots of hard work to become successful.  The internet is not longer an “if you build it they will come” platform for content marketers and authors.  Yes, there are more people using the internet than ever before and this means that you potential target audience is larger than ever…but, there is so much more content vying for their attention that you also now have more competition than ever.

Now, I tell this to you not to discourage you, but rather to help inspire you.  I want you to learn this less early, so that you can accept it and get to work without the false hopes and dreams that many of us clung to when we got our start.  I want to help you understand that to be successful on the internet, you need to be more than just a great writer.  You need to have the dedication and patience to see your project through.  I can’t tell you how many times I looked at my web stats, for each of my sites and thought

“Whelp…I’m not going to make it.”  But it’s not that I wasn’t going to make it.  Rather it’s that my timeframe or understanding of what the timeframe of success actually looks like.  

When I was working to make my different blogs become a success, I felt a bit like the Karate Kid when he was doing all of the chores for Mr. Miyagi.  It’s hard to see the benefit of monotonous chores like scheduling a bunch of social media posts about your latest blog when you haven’t yet seen the big picture, and realized that they are one part of a concerted effort that will elevate you to success.

Let’s think about it for a minute

You publish your blog online.  The chances that you have a few pages and maybe a couple of blog posts are high.  Google and other search engines need to know that your site exists, and then they need the time to crawl your site and determine whether the content you say you are creating is actually what you are publishing.  Then those search engines evaluate how authoritative that content is.  

They look at:

• the amount of content
• the elements you are using in your content structure like Header Tags
• the number of links you have included to other websites and how are those sites ranked
• the number of links coming into your website
• and more

Then they can start to rank your pages and include them as search results for your target audience.  Once your target audience begins finding you organically through search, they may start to share your site with others and you start to build your target audience.  While all this is going on though, you need to be continuously publishing new content that is meaningful to your audience.

What can you do to speed this up?

While it’s hard to make Google move faster, there are other things that you can do to help grow your visitors and website statistics.  These are tools and strategies that also require a lot of time and hard work but they will help you to reach your audience a bit faster.  I’ve learned many lessons about blogging and am thrilled to be able to share them with you here.  And I’ll tell you a little secret…McKeating Solutions…it’s a new blog.  I don’t have a crazy large or impressive readership…yet.  I’m working hard and using these same tactics just like you should and can be.  I wouldn’t tell you to invest the time and effort in something that I wasn’t valuing enough to do myself.

Social Media

A strong social media presence can help get the attention of your target audience.  Deliver your content this audience through social media and help create another funnel back to your website.  Today there is an accepted golden ratio – where if you spend 20% of your time writing your content, you should spend 80% of your time talking about it on platforms like social media.  This is hard because it’s a lot more fun to write it than promote it, but it is a necessary tactic.  A key here is to deliver a mix of relevant content that includes that which you have written on your blog or website as well as content written and published by others.  People will tune you out if all you do is talk about yourself on social.

Paid Ads

Whether these ads are on social media or search engines like Google, these ads can be a great way to target and deliver your information direct to your target audience.  You can get very targeted with these ads and deliver your content in a nice and neat little package.  Yes, your target audience is trained to spot advertisements these days, but that does not mean that they won’t click on them, especially if the information is relevant to what they are seeking.

Guest Publishing

This is a great tactic that works in both directions.  By publishing on other websites that are already ranked by search engines and established with their target audience, you can gain an introduction to that audience.  These websites and blogs will generally include links back to your website which can help their audience find more of your content, but also it helps tell search engines that you are being considered relevant by other websites.  By having people guest publish on your website you are asking them to send or direct their audience directly to your website.  This also helps to tell search engines that you have something that people want to read and it will affect the way they rank and score your content.