This guest post was written by John Mak who provides solid information about software and other related products.
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I never knew I could come up to this level. Working from home and blogging almost full time is something great! I work when I want, and take a break without having to write an official letter to the management or to any boss. It wasn’t all roses, but I believe you can achieve it if you are determined.
Bloggers First Enthusiasm
When you are on the process of starting out on something new, how do you feel? Remember this is not just any other business but a business you probably have some passion for and believe it will give you a breakthrough. What fascinates most beginners is the enthusiasm of dealing with the new factors surrounding internet marketing; setting up a website, learning about online marketing as opposed to offline money sucking strategies, understanding SEO, taking advantage of the abundant priceless info products, working with new people, making new friends, helping and being helped, following the new marketing rules as applied to individual niches and a whole lot more.
Amidst all these, only those who are principled enough normally survive this stage. Many people see blogging as a get rich quick scheme. You need to focus on your efforts and not on the immediate outcome. This may be a bit hard but no pro blogger would say that he or she wasn’t tempted to look back and crosscheck achievements with efforts. However, you should be focused on your long term plan and never give up.
…If you are not ready to work for a least 20 hours a week with little or no income, forget it. It won’t work for you; you have a long way to go and it won’t happen overnight.
Dealing with Frustration
Building a strong and lasting online business takes time and the fight starts right from when you made up your mind to embark on this journey. First, you need to spend what seems like endless hours reading and learning new ideas, strategies, and trying to correct your mistakes. Things may even be worse if you are not techie savvy (though there are many automated systems to help out with this these days). Soon you will need to choose a blogging platform, design a website, upload your content and face many other technical issues like creating templates, installing plug-ins that will aid your business and creating widgets where necessary. You will do all these even without any guarantee of income from the site.
What happens to most Newbies? They become overwhelmed by the task and end up following any information that seems the easiest.
…your success depends on how long you take to make up your mind to pursue one thing, as hard as you can, until you start getting profitable results from it.
Facing the Internet Big Boys – Search Engines
Perhaps you managed to stick with it long enough to start witnessing some action on your site. The site’s traffic starts improving, you now have more visitors a day and everything seems good. But then something happens; suddenly, the whole thing dries up again. You ‘googled’ your promising-keywords and your site wasn’t part of the search results. Then you are back to square one….confused, frustrated, and about to give up. At least 55% of successful websmasters have witnessed this on the course of their career. Are you facing this situation and right now are you confused? There are only two things you need to know for now:
- Use unique content
- Get quality backlinks
These are among the main factors Google uses to rank websites. You should not just go out there and start getting backlinks from anywhere. A high quality backlink is a backlink from an established site that is already trusted by Google. Also, the link pointing to your site must be well anchored with the keyword you are targeting in your site. Posting value adding, unique, well optimized content on your site and generating quality backlinks will make Google bots and other search engines fall in love with your site.
…If you think that there are “cheat” ways of getting more traffic to your site or affecting the decision Google bots make on your site’s ranking, then you are up for an unfortunate surprise.
Have Patience
It may be hard to tell somebody to work continuously with no sign of some profitable result. As bad as this may sound, it is true. Anybody who has reached great heights in internet marketing will probably testify to this. It takes slow but steady process to truly achieve any remarkable result in the blogging industry.
…Don’t ever dump your blog. Keep reminding yourself why you started the blog. This will help to keep you motivated and focused so you can retain the same enthusiasm you started with.
When blogging is run like a real business, there are slim chances of failure. Learn, plan, take action, correct yourself, learn from the best and keep yourself motivated and focused. You will reap the benefits of an established blog if you keep working with the tips explained in this post.
Author’s Bio
My name is John and I own simply1software. I liked technology since I was a kid. My favorite time was at my friend’s house playing games on Amiga 1500! Now I provide solid information about software and other related products that you can find on my blog.
Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
John – you couldn’t be more right about how difficult it can be to not give up. I look at my traffic some days and think what the heck am I doing? Am I wasting my time? But you’re right, it is all about time; dedicating your time, and then giving it some time to grow.
thanks for the reminder!
Kathy
I tell buyers of my blogging course and any newbie clients…don’t expect to see any results until after 6 months of regular blogging (and all the things that go with blogging!).
Andrew
Hello Kathy,
We all need time to learn and do things the right way. We don’t just have to quit! It’s a process we’re learning through the years. Thanks for commenting!
Hi John,
I am new here. Thanks for this no BS article about what we are in for trying to succeed in the internet marketing business.
I find it quite motivating to find so many ‘gurus’ like yourself out there sing the same tune. Its honest inputs for anyone trying to succeed in this line.
Cheers
Thanks Jimmy,
I think in our days with all that’s happening around us, we need to be true and share our experiences! It is great to meet new people with the same needs and willing to climb higher and learn more about life generally. Thanks for your inspiring comment.
John
Jimmy
Unfortunately there are still too many ‘scammers’ out there trying to make you believe you can make $10k a month from next week!
The truth is far from that!
Andrew
Very well put John. It takes time and patiences. I have been doing this for sometime and it can be baby steps, but if you are having fun and get to know the right people that can help it makes a world of difference.
I have had to find where my strenghts are and my weak areas, like technical for weak. When you can seperate the weak from the strong, and get the right help to make up the difference you move forward.
Thank you Andrew for sharing Johns voice with us.
Debbie
Great point of you Debbie! I know that all is in the mind. We can control the mind and we can do great things! I agree with you when you say about separating the weak from the strong. It is huge to know how to do that. Then things are better in your mind and you focus on where you want to go easily!
Thanks for the constructive comment. Glad to meet you.
John
It was nice to meet you to John. Thanks Andrew for introducing John to me.
Debbie
Debbie
You mention 2 excellent points:
1. Relationships. You know I keep going on about building relationships…to succeed!
2. Strengths/weaknesses. The quicker we realize we have both and we should concentrate on the strengths and get others to cover our weaknesses…the better!
Excellent comment.
Andrew
Patience and having a passion for your topic will really help as a new blogger. Enjoying what you are writing about will make it easier to be consistent with creating your content. Then just focus more on writing and less on trying to make money and other things as it will take time before your blog draws the kind of attention to be successful.
Richard,
Credibility is the first goal. By writing quality content as you said and building trust between you and your audience it will definitely bring you success! I wouldn’t say though that you can’t make money sooner. It’s about what works for each one of us. Maybe my way won’t work for you or the opposite.
Thanks for sharing,
John
Corinne,
Starting something is hard. In the beginning there are so many things to consider. But if you really love what you do, it will become easier. Thanks for stopping by.
John
Try your hardest. If in the end you still unable to reach it, then so be it, at least you gave it a shot.
Andrew
I saw this quote somewhere today:
“If you try and fail…it’s not so bad. If you failed to try…that’s bad”
Or smiliar words.
Andrew
Persistence and Faith! Two great things that lead to success. Thanks Andrew!
Hey John,
I feel like I wrote those first few sentence. 2 years ago I started my first site without knowing anything about seo and blogging and how to even buy a domain name.
It took lots of hard work and more important as you mentioned Patience. But finally, almost a year ago, my traffic got to the point where I started making enough money to live comfortably without having to worry about having an offline job. Although I still work at my 2 offline jobs since I am a workaholic, but I am planning to put all my efforts into the site and maybe developing a few other ones.
I couldn’t believe I was there. Even til this day, I still feel like its unreal and every day I think its going to end.
It is amazing to me that someone like me who until 2 years ago didn’t even know what SEO stood fro, could achieve this and that makes believe that anybody can do this if they out enough effort into it.
Satrap
Good on you.
If the 2 years…what do you think has been your biggest mistake?
Andrew
Thank you Satrap,
Everything is doable. With patience and persistence you can achieve whatever you want! The internet is knowledge. If you know where to look for, you can adopt a way to find what you’re looking for.
Great to see you around,
John
Two things really stand out to me here.
One is that it takes a lot of effort. A lot of “overnight” successes put in a ton of work before they ever saw that success.
The other is the importance of not giving up. When I do NaNoWriMo, a 30 day, 50,000 word noveling event, I see people that give up and quit, especially late in the first week or sometime in the second, when there is still a lot of time to reach the goal. The only true way to fail at anything is to give up.
thanks for sharing this great post!
Grady,
“Overnight success”…yeah…pull the other one.
People don’t realize how many weeks, months, years these guys have put into getting to where they are.
Excellent point.
Andrew
Hi John,
After reading your post, I feel motivated to continue with the little blog I started months back. I agree that writing quality content frequently can really wear us out, but if we do not do anything to it, we will not earn anything from it. My main problem about my blog is I do not have much time to spend there, but I do earn a few bucks and it makes me happy that I have a fair number of audience that visits and comments on my blog posts. It may be hard work, but I know I won’t ever quit. I plan that when I retire from my day job in the future, I can focus on blogging full time 🙂
Hello Felicia!
Thank you for taking time to comment here. Blogging and everything you do is something you must love. I know it’s hard when it comes in your mind that you have so many things to do while blogging, that’s why I would suggest to see it from another perspective, like a business and not like another individual job.
If you know how to manage your business and hire some employees, it will be much easier. You have to put yourself up and your business down so you can look at it from up there and see what needs to be done. If you only stay down; when you’ll look up you’ll see thousands of things to do that will drain your emotions.
Let money work for you and don’t work for money.
I am wishing you all the best for your success!
John
Felicia
It took me 3 years of part-time blog work before I could give up the 9-5.
Your drive will get you to the same point.
Andrew
I couldn’t agree more and the reason is that this mirrors most worthwhile things in life right? Exercise, self improvement, offline business, spirituality…whatever. If it’s good, it’s going to be hard for a while and you need disciplined practice. Why would blogging be any different?
Thanks
Mark
Discipline and practice is what we need Mark. Everyday is a new exciting day and it’s an opportunity to learn and act further than yesterday. Thank you for commenting!
All the best,
John
Sticking with it is the problem for me. Starting a new blog is always fun but after a while it gets tiring to keep on updating and posting.
You are correct that blogging run as a business is a good idea. That’s the only way I have kept myself going.
I know what you mean Orry. When I feel like this I remember a phrase:
“People have impotent goals, that is goals that do not inspire them”.
Starting a blog is fun, and everything new in life is fun. The problem is why you do it? How far can you see from the start point? Is it something that you seek for? Other questions may come to your mind. Personally I set a Higher Goal and then try to see how I can reach it.
Orry
Perhaps blogging isn’t for you? Perhaps you are not blogging on the best niche for you?
What do you think?
Andrew
With blogging and MMO, I’ve found that it’s important to utilize the skills that you already have, and get help for the jobs that you’re not particularly good at.
For instance, many of the most successful bloggers come from a writing background. This shouldn’t come as a great surprise — they love to write! On the other hand, they usually have limited technical skills. Sure, they could invest a lot of time learning everything they’ll need to know to create and maintain and website (HTML, graphics, SEO, etc.), but it’s much more practical to learn just enough, and outsource the rest.
In the old days (really, not that long ago) webmasters did everything themselves; but the web grows more complex and more competitive each day. We all have to evolve to survive!
Bruce,
I agree…use your strengths and use other peoples strengths to overcome your own weaknesses.
Many of my clients are great writers but they are not technical…hence they ask me to do it.
(And sometimes vice versa!).
Andrew
Bruce,
I think there are two types of people in business. Some who like to work day and night (with a meaning of doing something specific, like writing or blogging).. and others who can outsource and see their website as a business. The first kind of people work for money. They can’t stop writing or blogging because they like it! The other kind of people, they let money work for them.
Now it’s a matter of personality. Whatever makes someone happy is the ultimate goal in life.
Corinne
Those sort of topics are often missed out…making things sound hard…does not sell!
Andrew
You really stated good points here. However i think you missed one important thing in reaching your unrealistic goals and that is being passionate on what you’re doing. I think that the secret weapon in succeeding. You should be passionate on what you’re doing because everything else will follow such as patience and enthusiasm.