Interesting content? Find your audience? Talent? Luck? Hard work? Active promotion?
This is all important, of course. But even this is not enough for successful blogging, in my opinion.
While you're thinking about the question, I'll start from the beginning.
I am an Internet marketer and have been attracting paid traffic to clients for 10 years. In recent years, my clients' budgets have been measured in millions, and traffic in tens and hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month.
A little over a year ago, I started working at an IT-Agency (www.it-agency.ru ). We have a personal training plan, which, in addition to a huge list of everything else, includes maintaining a personal blog. This carries the goal of training employees to form their thoughts, isolate units of meaning from their work and promote the agency.
Six months ago, I created a website and started writing articles to it. And recently I went into the statistics of the site and found 149 unique visitors there for all time. That is, an average of 25 unique visitors per month. At the same time, half of the traffic came from the ITA-Agency website. A quarter are my friends from social networks who were just curious, and the remaining 37 people are users who went to the site on their own. And the graph of unique visitors looks like this:
Not even an Internet marketer understand, that at this rate this blog will not become at least a little successful and I can not even continue.
My professional pride was hurt. But there were only 18 posts in the blog and the problem of my lack of motivation became obvious. I may be a good marketer, but to promote a blog, I need content that needs to be written. In order to have something to promote, you will have to treat the blog as a second job.
A good blog is a very, very much invested time. This is the creation of unique, interesting content and the constant development of oneself in the chosen or selected topics.
A good readable blog means extra time to create a website, study trends, promote, analyze and communicate with users in the comments.
To promote a blog, you can turn to professionals, but it takes money. At the stage of creating money from the blog, you will not see it for a long time, if you are going to monetize it at all. And then I came to the main question.
Why do I need a blog at all?
I wrote articles in it because I was told to write. But I don't want to waste my precious time doing what I was told to do.
It turns out that the most important thing for blogging was to find a goal. That goal, at the thought of achieving which the eyes will light up and incinerate laziness. A goal that will force you to open a text document and write, write, write.
I thought a lot and realized that I wanted to take over the world. More precisely, not so (why you should not want to capture the world and let's analyze the mistakes of beginners another time). I want to conquer the world. And a blog is a great tool for that. If you don't like pretentious expressions, then I'll decipher it. I want to become one of the most widely read authors of our time. And one of the coolest Internet marketers in the Russian and English-speaking world.
While I was thinking about the question “why do I need a blog?”, I realized that the other goals do not light up my eyes and do not make me write. Suddenly, I found a purpose in life. I know that to achieve this goal, you need to invest a lot of time, effort and imagination. And be sure to set more realistic micro goals that will not be a matter of life and they will be possible to achieve in a limited time. For example, I set the first goal: to get 1000 unique visitors to the site by June 1, 2023. And you also need a plan, a theme, a strategy and a willingness to suffer a lot of defeats, if it works at all, talent, luck, hard work. But I hope I have enough of it.
If you run your own blog, share in the comments, why are you doing this?
After a while I will tell you how to start your blog, if you have figured out the question why. Subscribe so as not to miss.