Starting a blog is cool but maintaining it is a lot of hard work.
If you have just started out blogging, wrote a couple of posts and wondering what to do next, this post will serve as a good guide. If you are a veteran blogger and have been blogging for quite some time, you may give this a skip but I think you would also agree to what I have written below for newbie bloggers.
So back to the question
I have just started blogging and I now I am amidst of sea of information on what to do and what not to do. It looks like there are hundreds of things I need to tweak to make my blog more useful, seo friendly, so that it looks trustworthy and so on. What is the most important thing I should focus on in the very beginning to avoid distraction?
When you are just starting out, one thing you will do for sure is Google out lots of questions on Blogging. You will go to Google and try to find the answers to questions that arise in your mind. This way you will discover lot of new resources on the web and overtime, you will start getting lost amidst a sea of information.
There is nothing wrong with that approach, in fact it is the only way to succeed and become a better blogger – read new things and implement them in your blogs. But there is a caveat to that approach.
- You will be distracted by an abundance of information
- You will end up wasting too much time reading and too little time doing
- You will feel overwhelmed
- You will procrastinate
- You will not do that thing which is required the most – develop useful content
The Only Thing you Should do For 6 Months After Starting your Blog
The only thing you should do for at least 6 months after starting your blog is –
Spend 90% of your time creating useful, resourceful content. Rest 10% of the time can be spent on reading, SEO, tweaking the design and other managerial activities.
When you start a business, you need something to sell. If you do not have that thing, your business is nowhere.
In Blogging, your content is the product. So please spend most of the time writing and creating content which your readers or future readers will want. Avoid everything else, they are secondary needs.
The primary need is content, your website needs good content to attract traffic from search engines and social media. Without content, traffic won’t come and without traffic, you can not earn money. Hence, most of the time should be utilized in creating useful content for your blog until you get in the flow of writing, so much so that you are able to churn our 3-4 posts on a daily basis.
What about the design, look and feel of the website?
Nope. Not important. Just install a basic theme on your website and get started creating content. Tweaking the design and adjusting the theme of your blog is a never ending process. It will never end and this is not something which your blog needs at the very beginning.
At this stage, your blog needs content and only content, so please focus on creating content and forget everything else. When I started out writing blogs, I would spend more than 10 hours a day creating content for my blogs and my clients (I was freelancing on the side). There was no time left for doing SEO, tweaking the design, experimenting with themes, plugins and doing publicity of the blog on social media – it is a complete waste of time and effort.
I would again repeat what I had said earlier – do not waste time on other things but spend 90% of the time creating content which your readers want. Reading won’t help. Of course you should read other blogs but the key thing is – write first, read later. Everything else is secondary, you have to churn out 3-4 blog posts every single day and then do other activities like design, experiment with themes, promote content on social media and so on.
Now you may wonder –
why so much emphasis on creating content? Why do I have to write 3-4 posts a day? Can’t I go slow and write 2-3 articles a week. What if I don’t want to write 20 articles a week?
There is a reason why I recommend starting with 20 articles a week and not 2-3. The reason is – practice.
The more you write, the more your skills will be sharpened. The more you will be in the mode of writing, the more it will get polished and the more text your site has, the chances of getting traffic is higher. Unless you see traffic, comments and readership, you will get motivated and will eventually quit blogging. You will need to see people coming to your site, posting comments, clicking advertisements and only then you will be motivated the repeat this every other day.
So if you pour in 20 useful articles a week, you complete 480 articles in 6 months. In a year, you are close to 1000 posts and that is when you will start to see some revenue ticking in. When you see your blog is making money, you will be motivated and then you will put in more hard work, which will multiply and bring even more readership and revenue and this cycle will go on.
Speed is not only important but critical. You have to go fast, if you want to make money blogging. Writing a couple of articles a week won’t hurt but it will take you a long time to see some decent revenue.
So take my word, for the first 6 months, do not bother much about the design, seo and other things of your website. Just put a good design with decent typography and focus only on creating useful content for your blog. That is the only thing to focus on for the first six months, everything else is secondary.