4 Things that Big Bloggers tell You that You Shouldn’t Ignore

Bloggers are stub­born. It’s true. We grow and nur­ture our babies (our blogs) and we don’t want any­one to tell us how to raise them. Including those who have achieved what we are try­ing to. Specifically big name blog­gers who seem to have it all.

We sort of have a ‘We’ll show them atti­tude” if we are ever cri­tiqued directly or indi­rectly on how to make our blog bet­ter. Not only are we going to do it on our own, but we will do it bet­ter than them and bypass their suc­cess just like some­thing out of a teen movie where the nerd dethrones the jock as the most pop­u­lar kid in school. Okay this ain’t a John Hughes film so let’s get to the real­ity of it.

Most of these big blog­gers have been at it for years. Before WordPress and Blogger. Before Facebook and Twitter. Practically in the stone ages of inter­net access. So they, unlike you and I got a lot of their traf­fic and buzz the old fash­ioned way, like the late great John Houseman would say: “They eaaaaaarned it”.

So yeah they may have a few vital tips or two or a hun­dred that we need to pay atten­tion to if there is any chance we’re going to suc­ceed at blog­ging. Here’s 4 things that they tell us that we shouldn’t ignore (but do any way):

1. Becoming a suc­cess­ful blog­ger requires Hard Work

I mean you almost have no life hard work. A few weeks back I par­tic­i­pated in #blogchat on Twitter and I got kind of grumpy because some big blog­gers were talk­ing about the amount of work required. I was think­ing geez it can’t be that much work. So I took it to task.

I put in some solid straight pur­pose­ful hard hours at blog­ging. I’ll tell you I was exhausted. Posting every day dur­ing the week (M-​F), guest post­ing, com­ment­ing blogs, net­work­ing, work­ing on my social media pres­ence. It was tremen­dous work. But you know what? It’s pay­ing off

Here’s my April 24^th — May 24^th Stats on Google Analytics

And here is May 24^th — June 24^th

So I am pleased. I can def­i­nitely tes­tify to the fact that putting in the work equals results. We live in a very instant soci­ety and every blog­ger thinks that overnight we are going to blow up. Some do, but for some it is a very slow process that depends a lot on how much effort we put in to it. To remove any notion that it is easy, if you haven’t already (which many of us have) read/​watch Chris Brogan’s “What it takes to be a Overnight Success”.

2. You won’t make a liv­ing blog­ging.

When I read Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk’s post, “Reality check: You’re not going to make money from your blog” I was crushed. Like I men­tioned recently in my post, “3 Simple ways for Bloggers to Make Money” you can make some money, but I’d hold off on pur­chas­ing any kind of bling other than of the bub­ble gum machine vari­ety.

It’s bet­ter for the big blog­gers to tell us this now. Right upfront. Then, we don’t go in with these unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions (like we all already did) of mak­ing thou­sands a month just from blog­ging alone.

You have to have other skills plus a day job to make money. Things like build­ing web­sites, cre­at­ing blog tem­plates, free­lance writ­ing, or flip­ping burg­ers are a lot more lucra­tive than just run­ning and main­tain­ing a blog.

3. Say it with me, “Content is king”

When I started blog­ging I thought these were just pompous words that big blog­gers say to us lit­tle blog­gers, but it is absolutely true. It doesn’t mat­ter how much you love blog­ging about canoodling with the fam­ily cat unless you have 10,000 cat canoodlers run­ning to your blog every day it’s point­less. You’ll always only have a few read­ers.

We have to write what peo­ple want to read or what are we doing? That doesn’t mean we can’t write about what we want to it just means we need to com­bine a good niche, with great writ­ing, and even bet­ter mar­ket­ing.

Read Copybloggers: “20 Signs that Your Content Sucks” ( I have some work to do)

4. Have a great blog design

Honestly unless you can shell out the money for some­one to design your blog this can be a chal­lenge. It is one of the most cru­cial though because your blogs design is the dif­fer­ence between some­one being on your site for 2 sec­onds or 2 min­utes.

Big blog­gers say a great header is a must. How many of us have stayed on a site sim­ply because they had a great header even if the con­tent wasn’t? We all have. So that’s half the bat­tle. Now that WordPress 3.0 has launched and yes *fist bump with an explo­sion* we all love the new default theme Twenty Ten, but it’s guar­an­teed that of the mil­lions of WordPress blogs half of them will have that tem­plate. We have to step away from the pack and try to be dif­fer­ent.

My blog tem­plate is a pre­mium style free theme, but I learned code, hacks and short­cuts (another work in progress) to try to tweak it to fit my per­son­al­ity. So the advice about design I gained from big blog­gers was invalu­able becuase my bounce rate went from being 80% to 22%.

Read Nicholas Cardot of Site Sketch 101’s “5 Great Tips to Spruce Up Your Blog’s Design”

While well-​known blog­gers have gone where the aver­age blog­ger hasn’t they always share their process with us. So instead of ignor­ing their sug­ges­tions let’s take the time to learn from their suc­cesses and fail­ures to become bet­ter blog­gers.

Thanks for read­ing,