"Making It" Myths or How not to get famous Blogging, Part 1
By wrypatch
If you're interested in getting money or just readership for your site or blog, you've certainly come across a plethora of adverts promising the way to a million views on YouTube, 100,000 visitors a day to your blog, and more customers for your online business than you can keep up with.
Alas, this is a rather precarious situation if you think about it. Can you really rely on someone telling you how to get a million views who doesn't already have that many? Can you trust a blogger who claims the secret to high traffic who may not even have many himself or - worse - if he does have it, it's because he's blogging about blogging?
Or the supposed Internet entrepreneur talking up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) even though you heard about him - not through a search engine - but through a paid advertisement?
In short, No, you cannot trust anything you see about leveraging the Internet, especially if it makes anything seem easy. Getting readers is not easy at all. Keeping them is even harder.
It is because I am a case study in what NOT to do to get readers, fans, and views, that I wanted to share my mistakes thus far with others. Hopefully, readers out there will be able to benefit from my various wastes of time and save themselves a little sanity, time, and maybe money. Of course, more than likely, only a dozen people will see this, and only about a third of that will read it entirely. So, to the four of you reading this far, thank you.
The motivation behind selling you on how to sell is pretty simple: to gain money from nothing. After all, if someone gets you to buy a book, report, application, or program about being successful, then this alone is what defines their success. It's not as if a blogger who is actually read is going to try and sell you on the idea of being a "pro blogger"; they're probably too busy blogging.
Sure, Huffington Post and ProBlogger are a couple of exceptions to this rule, but let's break down their advice. (I've read both of their books).
Both are pretty honest about needing a good workflow and good consistency to acheive readership. That means you have a process for blogging and you use that process regularly. This counts for pretty much anything in life. If you garden one year - buying all the accoutroument - and then suck at it, you have to get right back at it the next season, and slowly you'll find that the same equipment you were using before suddenly produces better results. The same is true for a blog (though I certainly suggest blogging more than once a year).
But just like standard SEO, which says how important it is to use keywords, have them in your titles, body, alt-tags, there is an enormous difference in doing things right on a blog and seeing success.
For instance, I was keeping up four blogs: one with movie reviews, one on creative writing, another on local interests, and one on copyright law and digital piracy. I wrote on each one five times a day (taking off weekends). I used Wordpress and the sites were mostly self-hosted (3 of the 4) or used Blogger.
Here are the optimizing activites I engaged in:
1. Using keywords. This was often via Google Analytics where I could see what was searched for the most.
2. Using categories. On Wordpress, this is like adding a sort of broader, more inclusive keyword to certain blogs. It eases searching within your blog.
3. Hyperlinking. I linked to everything imaginable: my blogs, other blogs, Amazon, obscure sites, famous sites, and everything in between.
4. Backlinking. I went everywhere I could include my Web site and made comments. I tried always to make my comments genuine and useful, but - I admit - my only motive was to get that darn backlink.
And no offense to ProBlogger, but don't you think they have 100,000 views a day because they're talking about how to get 100,000 views a day? So it's really just a bunch of sap bloggers like me hitting ProBlogger, longing to find out how to get that many views and visitors.
Apparently, you just write about blogging. And it seems Huffington Post - while not about blogging - isn't exactly about astro-physics, either. What passes for news (political squabbling and celebrity gossip) is a pretty easy target. Put another way: I doubt HuffPost would be HuffPost if they were writing about knitting or carpentry or something that doesn't change every ten seconds. So advice from these big sources seems nearly as fruitless as advice from scam artists - because what really seems to matter here is subject matter.
You can write the best blog in the world ten times a day, but if it's on sewer treatment, you're likely to have eight regular visitors, my friend. And you probably already know them. Write a crap blog, often, about whatever garbage people are searching for most and you might still get no attention. Why? Because this demand will be met by people with more time, resources, and pull than you.
Let's end this segment on that upnote.
lmmartin 2 years ago
The way I see it is this: there are X numbers of people out there, a finite number of internet surfers and Y numbers of bloggers, writers producing verbage for the net. (And at times it seems there are more Y than X) Most of Y writes about how to make money on the net, and many of X seek that same information, and once they do, they join Y. So we have this self-perpetuating circle of people reading and writing about making money on the net -- like a snake swallowing its own tail. A self-contained little universe all chasing some elusive pot of gold -- looking for those residual incomes.
Which means 99% of what's available to read is tripe, relating key-words, and money making, and $ for clicks, and Google Analytics. If everyone is doing the same thing ... well you get the picture.
All you need to do is use the words: "lots of money, easy, no work" and they line up to be fleeced.
As PT Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
By the way -- great article -- from someone who writes to be read (only.)