For some time now I have been wanting to write a post in which to reflect aloud on what are the factors that make your blog one of the few that is successful in its niche or that ends up being part of that 95% of abandoned blogs in its first year of life.
But for this, today I do not want to do the typical list of things that you must do to make your blog succeed, but rather to load a few myths that I read over and over again and that I already wanted to dismantle.
If you have been interested in blogs for some time now, I assure you that some of the things I call false myths will surprise you because you will be very used to seeing them circulate around. It is important to dismantle these myths or, at least, to qualify them because they can become really toxic, both for the blogs that start and for those that have been operating for some time.
5 Persistent and very toxic myths for your blog
The truth is that I have more and more mania to that custom that we have to give true certain things because they repeat them ad nauseam, because they say some “guru” or because they are simply saying of all life.
Many of these phrases are only things that at first glance sound good, but if you start to analyze them a little, you discover that they are totally hollow or simply false.
In the world of blogging, how could it be otherwise, things are not very different and the worst thing is that I have to admit that even I have fallen more than once in letting myself be carried away by the false myths in this blog, without sufficiently nuance what he said? So this post is also a good occasion to, in some way, correct these errors.
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Myth # 1: Creating a blog is easy
Yes, indeed, creating a blog is easy. You go to WordPress.com, you open an account and in 5 minutes you are writing your first post.
But this, in reality, is not the expectation of “creating a blog” that most readers have when they say they want to create a blog. What they refer to should be called “create a blog project” which is, if you notice, something really different and much more difficult than simply opening an account in a service like WordPress.com.
I am the first to recommend being pragmatic, not delay in launching your blog going around and around I do not know how many things, be practical, open an account on Blogger or WordPress.com (the latter option being the option I would recommend .
But you have to be clear that with this you have done nothing but simply put the first brick of your blog project. If from here you simply limit yourself to creating and publishing your content without further ado, it is probably only a matter of time before you become part of the large club of abandoned blogs.
Myth # 2: The best platform for your blog is WordPress.org
One thing that bothers me, especially in the advertising of WordPress courses, is the message that if you want to have a “serious” blog, it has to be by noses a WordPress blog with hosting. Somehow, between the lines, the message is usually transmitted that “if your blog does not use WordPress.org with hosting, it’s crap”.
Come now, man…
I would like to see if any of these people who so blithely pronounce such a dangerous message to a beginning blogger have the courage to say that, for example, Seth Godin’s blog, which many cite as the most important marketing blog in the world, is “Shit.”
WordPress.org effectively is the most powerful blogging platform and, by far, the most established in the world and it is true: using this platform opens the doors to another level of possibilities. But this does not mean that it is the best platform for your case.
The best blog for your case is the one that best suits your needs, period.
Why?
Very simple: because although WordPress.org is the best product, it also has its ” dark side ” of which I will talk at length in a few weeks, but basically summarizes that setting up a WordPress.org blog implies taking responsibility for non-trivial technical tasks for which you have to be prepared and of which in WordPress.com you forget .
They are not unattainable tasks for a non-technical person, far from it, but they do require a minimum investment in training, otherwise, you will have problems, especially if the blog effectively settles and a significant amount of traffic begins to arrive (hundreds of daily visits).
In practice I have been able to observe that for people who start and do not have a technical profile, this, together with the pressure of having to achieve a good rhythm of content creation, the great amount of time that must be dedicated during the first months to the promotion of the blog and other tasks can easily become too much, to the point of becoming a good reason for a blog project with good potential to end up failing, simply by exhaustion and frustration of its author.
I am the first to recommend WordPress.org with hosting as the best platform that exists, but at the right time and the beginning, along with everything else, is not exactly the best time:
“Why I use WordPress.org and not WordPress.com, Blogger, or any other platform”
Once you have your new blog under control, you will be the one who will see the optimal moment to consider the jump to WordPress.org that may be after a few months or a few years, depending on your needs. But in any case, by then it will cost you much less.
Myth # 3: With quality content the traffic arrives only
I myself have said it more than once, but on reflection I realize a problem: when I say it, I usually take for granted some things that I probably should not take for granted, such as, for example, that the author does an adequate job of active dissemination by social networks.
The truth is this: your content can be as good as you want, but if nobody reads it, it gives the same. Therefore, in addition to writing it, you have to “sell it”.
Since nobody knows you at first, this implies things like rolling up your sleeves in social networks with each post to gradually get readers to reach a “flash point” where you will already have a loyal readership high enough to enjoy an automatic diffusion of your contents.
That will be the point at which your blog will really begin to maintain a level of stable visits with increasing trend and, therefore, at that point the phrase is no longer hollow, because past the ignition point, it is true that the content Quality works only because your readers will share it willingly and because it will generate conversations, although between doing or not doing an active dissemination work there will still be a notable difference.
The key is that you must be aware that you do not have an infinite time to reach that point , you have to reach it before the lack of visits bury your motivation and confidence in yourself and leave. There are very few people who have the perseverance and faith necessary for the initial “drought” of your blog for more than one or two years without demotivating completely.
Myth # 4: At first you do not need to know about SEO
I cannot disagree more with this phrase.
The reason is that doing at least one basic SEO on Page job is very profitable because with a little practice it is simple and quick to do. In my case, I usually do not take more than 10-15 minutes per post, although there are also many posts where I do not do any SEO because I really do not find specific searches of sufficient volume to be worthwhile.
In the case of a blog that starts, do that SEO work when possible, in many cases it will be the difference between having and not having visitors. There are searches in which a newly created blog can compete and that can bring with luck 2 or 3 visits a day.
The difference between 10 posts with a level of null SEO (which is usually the usual) in a blog that is starting and 10 posts where the author has been concerned to find a niche for each post (i.e. one or more searches to the (s) to optimize) can be the difference between having 0 Google visits after a day (the usual) or having 20 or 30, guaranteed, every day and without investing a minute in an active promotion work.
And when the blog has gained more authority and can compete in larger niches, there will be 2 or 3 visits per post, but 10 or 20. Make your calculations…
I’ll just tell you that at this moment, this blog and only Google, you get around 1500-1600 visits per day, and that the vast majority of content leaves much to be desired in terms of their level of SEO. I calculate that if they had been well optimized from the beginning, we would be talking right now between 2,000 – 2,500 visits a day, only from Google.
Myth # 5: Either you write for Google, or you write for people
I read very often lately that “you write for Google or write for people” and that writing for Google sooner or later will end up sinking your blog.
Frankly, this seems to me one of the biggest nonsense that currently circulates in the blogosphere…
What’s more, this phrase is what is known as a “false dilemma” because there is no such dilemma, you can perfectly reconcile content writing thinking of your audience with doing that basic SEO work in the content so that, apart from being attractive for the reader, they are optimized thinking about the searches that people make about the subject in question.
What the phrase refers to really is not to take things to absurd extremes, which is where it recovers its meaning: if you only think of niches, volume of traffic, optimal keywords, and there is a content that is unnatural to read, which gives a “weird” impression when reading, with posts that do not connect well with each other, very scattered thematically, that do not fit with the expectations of your community, etc., then you will have made a bread with some cakes and tea. You will be uploading your blog.
But as you see, you really have to get to serious extremes so that the phrase becomes true, the problem is that most people, as is normal, interprets the phrase in the sense that the mere fact of optimizing a post to SEO level is already counterproductive to your audience when it is not like that at all. Moreover, as we have already seen, in Myth No. 4, you will be harming yourself if you do not do it.
Concluding
As you see there are a series of phrases that you have read or you will read that it is not that they do not help you, but that they can be really counterproductive to develop the real potential of your blog if you follow them blindly.
If you want to make your blog really successful and that success in a blog comes as soon as possible, the skills you need are fairly simple to summarize:
- Being able to find a suitable topic(a niche) for which there is an audience that demands content.
- Know how to create attractive and quality content that really adds value to the reader, that is enjoyable to read and easy to understand.
- Be able to organize your blog so that readers find what they are looking for.
- Have basic knowledge of copywriting, especially to know how to write titles that attract the attention of your potential readers and make them really enter to read your post.
- Have basic knowledge of SEO to know how to find the searches that people make around your content, know how to position yourself from the beginning as best as possible in the results of those searches and how to gain authority to position yourself with time every time better.
- Know what they are and how to get the most out of the broadcast channels from the beginning for your content(social networks, email, RSS, etc.).
