5 Things You Need To Succeed At Blogging You’ve Probably Never Thought Of

April 2, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

The following is a guest article by Tim Brownson. No need for further description – title says it all. I really liked reading the post, hope you do as well!

At the time of writing it is estimated there are over 100 million blogs worldwide. Yep that’s what I said, there are over 100,000,000 blogs…. and counting.

How many of those do you suspect are making a 5 figure monthly income which seems to be the gold standard by which blogging ‘success’ is measured?

The honest answer is I have no idea, but I do know that blogging to make money is ridiculously hard and insanely competitive and it seems there are currently an infinite number of bloggers on an infinite number of typewriters chasing a finite number of readers.

But let’s pretend for a moment that supply and demand doesn’t exist and it really is possible for every blogger (who wants to), to make a good living supplying quality content.

What then would he or she need to know above and beyond the same ole, same ole to succeed?

To begin with I’m going to make the ridiculous assumption that you understand the mechanics of successful blogging. You know all about SEO, social networking, and you are committed to writing regularly about a topic that some people find interesting. You also understand how to monetize your blog and you even have your ebook ready to be launched to an eager receptive audience.

You may be wondering if all that is in place, what else could possibly be missing, and the answer is, plenty.

1. Patience

If you’re naturally an impatient person you may want to rethink whether blogging is even a viable career for you. The alternative could be you end up very stressed and incredibly frustrated.

Wanting to get on with the job in hand is all well and good – but it doesn’t matter how far your veins bulge out of your neck, Google won’t be indexing you on a daily basis to begin with and people wont be beating a path to your door the minute you throw the virtual doors open

Unless you are very lucky, have lots of spare cash to advertise or have oodles of time on your hands to go on a mass commenting frenzy, it’s unlikely you’re going to see much of a return inside six months. It can and has been done, but for every person that pulls it off thousands don’t.

2. Acceptance

One of the biggest killers of projects is perfectionism in all its various guises. If you are to stand any chance of getting to the stage where all you have to do is switch your computer on to make money, you need to accept that some of your early stuff will be less than stellar.

It took me two years to become happy with my writing style and find my groove. Writing is a practice and you’ll improve in the same way as you would if you took up playing the guitar, speaking a foreign lesson or goat wrestling.

Accept that some of your early stuff will not be perfect and publish it anyway. In fact publish it BECAUSE it’s not perfect. You’ll only really learn and develop as a writer by getting your stuff ‘out there’ and seeing what response you get, or even don’t get.

3. Failure

You may be sick to death of hearing the the phrase “fail, fail often, and fail quickly”. Well tough because you’ve just heard it again.

It makes perfect sense to fail as quickly as you can so that you can learn from those errors and move forward. You brain learns much more quickly from your own failures than it does from reading or hearing about other peoples.

Ask any successful person you admire if they have screwed up at some stage in their career and somewhere in the region of 100% will say yes. The ones that say no will either be lying or they never really did anything of value.

I’m not saying don’t learn as much as you can and avoid the really obvious pitfalls, but you won’t start to really learn until you start to put your material out in the public domain.

When (and not if) something goes wrong ask yourself one simple question: “What can I learn from this?” If you can take some valuable experience with you, and know that you won’t repeat the same mistake, then it’s been worth it.

Anybody that has failed spectacularly only to go on to bigger and better things will tell you they wouldn’t have it any other way. We need that dopamine crash that accompanies failure to learn and ensure long-term success.

4. A Thick Skin

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your blog is, how much you pour your heart and soul into it, how genuine you are and what your quality of writing is like, some people will still dislike you. In fact, the more successful you are, the more some people will want to see you fail.

You’ll probably receive abusive e-mails from time to time as well as commenters who want to make you look foolish and/or criticize you. That’s just life. You need to either laugh it off or prepare yourself for long periods of misery and self-loathing.

Deal with criticism the same way as you deal with compliments: with a pinch of salt. Of course you will prefer to receive compliments, we all do, but they’re really two sides of the same coin. If you take the good stuff too seriously, you’ll not be able to deal with the bad stuff when it arrives.

5. A Sense Of Proportion

Your blog is not you and it’s not your identity. If it crashes and burns that doesn’t mean you do too. I know you want a successful blog with people lining up to comment and pay homage, but it’s really not life or death.

Keep some perspective. Go balls out, but don’t stay attached to the results. Maybe it will be your second or third blog when you really get it right? Not only will that mean you keep a sense of balance, but conversely it will make you more likely to achieve your aims anyway.

Tim Brownson is a an English Life Coachand author now living in sunny Florida. He’s currently involved in a project to giveaway 1,000,000 copies of a book he’s co-authored called How To Be Rich and Happy

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