The other day a quote popped up on a spam e-mail I had received. It was a classic “buy this stock” letter and looked like all the others, except for this single paragraph:
No matter which way you ride it is uphill and against the wind
I thought about that for like 5 minutes and realized something that shocked me, the quote is as true today as it was 10 years ago (eek, I was only 8!). It is a “timeless” idea that will never fade away, and it can be applied to everything, even professional blogging.
Whenever I look at bloggers like Darren Rowse or Steve Pavlina all I can think of is, “damn, they are inhuman.” They are like robots. It is just amazing how much content they write.
As we all know, the way they got there was through extremely hard work (months/years of it, before making any real amount of money) and they sacrificed their free time. Their journey was uphill, and now they are finally at the peak enjoying the view.
Right now I’m stuck on the middle of the hill. Nusuni.com has some fairly good content, but the problem is with traffic building and increasing the readership. There is still a really long way to go, but at least I’ve gotten the really easy (and annoying) stuff out of the way (picking topics, getting used to writing a lot of posts, etc).
I think most bloggers are stuck at the same point. How is that extra step taken, how do you step over the boundary that separates the little guys from the a-listers, and how do you know if you should take an opportunity or ignore it?
It is obvious what separates the destined-to-fail bloggers from the ones who will become professionals. The bloggers who will fail give up too easily, and the bloggers who will make it are extremely determined, and they’ve learned to trust their gut instinct.
I suppose how optimistic you are also plays a large role in the grand scheme of things. It amazes me how many bloggers I talk to are incredibly pessimistic and are always talking about giving up on blogging. Because I am not yet a professional blogger (haven’t finished the journey up the hill yet), I won’t go around saying “you can be successful in blogging by doing this, this, and that”. Instead I will tell them what I tell people who complain about programming being too hard to do, if you are unhappy with something then change it. If you hate doing something you don’t have to do, then don’t do it.
I think it amazes them how I can have a week with an average of 300 unique visitors every day, then get a random week with only 50/day and still be happy. I think that having a positive attitude will be what pushes me to take that final step onto the part-time professional blogger platform, then take another step up to the full-time arena.
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July 26th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Hi Jeremy,
I think you’re definitely the kind of person who could become successful blogging because you’re positive about it and seem to genuinely enjoy creating content for its own sake. I think too many bloggers blog only for the potential rewards and not for the sake of blogging itself, and that’s a surefire way to fail.
I think the most important quality of a successful blogger is that they love what they do, because that passion will definitely infuse their writing with energy you can’t get anywhere else.
July 26th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Thanks, that is definitely a nice boost.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I’m starting to think that I might have to do the same thing myself. I’ve seen my visitor count climb (and I still can’t explain the 600+ on the 17th) as well, and I think that its time to start setting an agenda (since whatever I seem to post hits the first page on Google for the search terms I choose). You’re more focused at this than I am. Do you have any insight into this phenomenon? I know that this post is sort of saying that you don’t and want to know, but I think that you do have a talent for this kind of thing and that you’re going to “soar” soon. Your topics are timely, juicy, well-written, and intelligent. How can you go wrong?
July 26th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Yeah, this site is finally starting to get some decent rankings to, although it is my little experimental thing so sometimes it’ll get 40% of traffic from Google and the next day it’ll get 0 lol.
i think the biggest thing is just the links that those popular sites have…. without links all you can rank for are really long tail keywords and phrases (which isn’t bad if you have a TON of content), but even 1000 links is enough to really give you a boost. Most people say quality is better than quantity, but with the current algo quantity seems to be the key.