Humans are fascinating creatures!
They can easily spend thousands of dollars in buying expensive gadgets or beautiful cars even if they struggle with paying their bills at the end of the month. Being this kind of person is not coherent with a successful blogger persona.
Intelligent people understand that they should not go beyond what they can afford.
First Things First
You cannot build a house without first gathering the needed materials. If you try to do that, you will end up losing time, resources and money. Instead, you need to have a long term plan before doing anything and taking the right decisions is the most important part of it. As a blogger, it is essential that you take an approach on accomplishing the things that matter for the current stage of your blog’s growth. For instance, there would be no real point in worrying about monetizing your blog if you have not acquired a traffic base first. This just serves as a way to lose focus and time over what really matters.
A Clever Blogger Schedules
There is something that all successful bloggers have in common. They know what needs to be done, they feel it. Wasting time is not what they would ever do. On the contrary, they invest their time properly and make the most out of it. In short, they schedule. Don’t think that they create a real step by step procedure on what will happen 3 days from now. However, they have a plan on what SHOULD happen in 30 days, they set up milestones, watch how they evolve, evaluate and correct them. I thought that giving you an example of an effective schedule would be a nice idea. Using it as is now is not really the point. What you need to do is go in your own pace, but be consistent and stick to the plan. Let’s start scheduling, shall we ?
Days 1-15 : Go Live, Write Your First 10 posts
The first thing that you need to do, is of course start working on your blog. It is always a good idea to create the basis of your blog by writing about 10 posts. Try to include topics that you feel confident about, the ones that you would think they have the potential to go viral. After all, your first goal is to start blogging. In order to do that, you need to create your first content.
Days 16-31: Put Your Blog Aside For a While, Guest Post And Network
Now, you may groan a little about that. I am sorry, but this is what you have to do now. You have just created some nice posts in your blog, but nobody knows about you. Would it make sense to keep on writing more content for your blog, just to look at it while it rains outside ? Beginners think that they should just keep on creating more and more content and people will eventually find their blog. It does not work like this though. You have to spread the word about your blog.
A great way to do this is guest post for other blogs. Write posts, but write them for other influential blogs of your niche. This way, people that are interested in your niche will get to know that you exist. Better yet, if your guest post presented some valuable information to them, they will visit your blog. Your networking with the market that you target has just started. Further expand with socializing in blogs, forums and social media.
Days 32-63: Iterate Between Writing For Your Blog And Other Blogs
A successful blogger is a passionate writer. He wants to please the crowd. Even if that means that he does that by means of writing for other blogs. Now that you have already written content for other blogs, balance things a bit. For every 3 posts that you write for your blog, write 1 guest post for another blog. Decide whether you want to write multiple or single posts for a blog. Writing multiple posts serves for better interacting with a blog’s community, while writing a single post for each blog, gets you more backlinks that increase your search engine results over time.
Days 64-95: Establish a Visitor Base, Make Everything REALLY Easy
By now, you would have noticed that we are on the two months milestone. You should have created more than 10 guest posts and thus slowly gain some publicity. It is now time to work on converting them to loyal visitors. Make everything easy for them. Provide paths. If they want to subscribe now, it should be dead easy, a single click. If they want to comment, the form should already be visible. Make your blog a great experience by predicting what they would ask for. After all, selling a product is much more efficient if people do not need to subscribe in order to checkout the items that they have placed in their shopping cart, isn’t it ?
Image credit : calendar