The Worst Advice You Could Ever Get!

Hey everybody, it's been a while since I've added a post here at how to be a successful blogger. I had just developed this blog under the title, "Let's Discuss Blogging" when life got complicated for me and forced me to leave it for a while. I could've just come here and written from the seat of my pants just to keep it going, but that's not me. So I put it down until such time as I could come back and put the time and research into what I right here.

Speaking of which, there's only so much you can write about a subject before you exhaust the information relevant to the subject. There just comes a time when you don't have any more to write about that subject, or at least you don't think you do. Sometimes (more often than not) your mind just won't cooperate with you creatively. That usually means you need rest. A days rest will do and other times you need a little more. But if you're writing about a lot of different subjects on different venues like I do, you can run into too much for the mind to carry.

People who love to write can sometimes take on more than they can handle. Even with all my experience that still happens occasionally, leaving me with a burden to bear.

I don't believe in writer's block. I think we come to a time and place when our minds have stopped cooperating with us on that subject for reasons such as; brain fatigue, the industry you write in has aged and information about it has saturated all media outlets.

Sometimes your creative juices are interrupted or the dynamics of the field have changed and you need to catch up on everything all over again. The important thing to do as a writer is to keep doing it, even when you want to quit.

You must become quite adept at creative brainstorming to keep a great series of blog posts going. Sometimes you must write when you don't want to.  As the primary writer at "Personal Development For The Gifted" I've learned some things about writing blogs and one of those things is: sometimes you catch a tiger by the tail. That website is a tiger. It requires a lot of research, time, study and hard work by the very nature of its subject matter.

By the amount of work required to keep it going, it has to be monetized for some kind of return on labor-intensive investment. Doing that requires a whole other set of business skills. You need to learn website analytics.

And by learn I mean you need to learn what the data in your analytical analysis implies and reset your sails to an adjusted course guided by the information in your most recent analysis. A process I have experience in having run storefront businesses. Budgeting for a store from business forces careful business analysis.

Blogging is something a writer must love to do or else its easy to give up. You have to like helping people succeed, helping to understand a complex subject, or helping them to avoid danger or injury. Notice the keyword here: helping. Blogs are small to medium-sized chunks of information about a subject important to others in one way or another.

And, by that definition, it means they are everywhere and in every industry. Blog writers are hired all the time. It's a huge industry with lots of room for growth. Banks hire bloggers, in fact, every company that exists should have a blogger on board. Blogging is an integral part of the new age of business, the new millennium and the new tech age. Things happen so fast and change so frequently that without blogs you'd never be able to keep up. But, there are misguiding data out there about blogging. Here is some of the worst advice you can get about the state of blogging.

1. There's no money in blogging anymore!
2. Don't link to other sites, your reader will leave your site
3. Google does not use your meta tags or meta keywords anymore
4. You get more traffic if you leave your website URL in the comment boxes of other sites
5. You must write new content every day to get and keep search rank
6. You must go out and get backlinks
7. If you don't make this much money in six months blogging's not for you 
8. You only need to post once a month
9. Blogging isn't that much work

1.) To make money blogging you have to write often. The more you write the more money you will make. You have to keep writing new posts in order to promote the post you wrote just before the one you're writing now. That's how you build traffic and get clicks on your ads or content marketed products. And it doesn't hurt to embellish your blog, particularly with an RSS feed, share buttons, and social media share links. The key to your blog is traffic.

Without traffic, your blog will go nowhere. Search engines, social media marketing, and your backlinks hold the key to your traffic. This is additional work you must do or pay to have done. I go into more detail about search engines, social media marketing and backlinks in other posts within my network of blogs. You can find links to all of them in one place at jimisound.com.

2.) To write a blog you have to read up on the subject of your post. You have to look for new relevant information about the subject of your post that your readers have not become privy to. This is what starts a buzz around your blog, what makes you something of value to your developing following, other bloggers and what prompts them to leave comments and link back to your blog. This is what motivates other sites to backlink to yours.

With a growing backlink activity, your blog will climb the ranks of search results for your area of expertise. And with that comes more money. Your reader will not leave your site but for the time it takes to learn why you shared the site with them. Only an inexperienced web surfer would leave your site, lose track of it and never get back to it. They know that if you are the place they learned of this new site, that you are a place to learn about more good stuff.

3.) Google still uses your Meta tag and meta keywords for the description of your blog in search results. So be sure if you write a description of your blog you use the same keywords or key phrases to create the description as are in your content or the content of your blog.

A poor site description or one not relevant to your blog will kill your search ranking efforts. Google works with correlations. Does everything line up? Does the site's description give a snapshot of what readers will find at the site? Do the keywords fit flawlessly into the content? And, are the blogs written with authority, and or references?

In other words, does this writer exhibit experience in the subject he or she writes about and does the blog come across as accurate information? Does it inform the people in that industry? Does it deliver?

Keyword phrases should be used instead of single keywords. Searchers use phrases with the most common being three words or more. The better you become at demystifying how a searcher will phrase a question that will lead them to your site, the more traffic you'll get once you rank for those key phrases.

To rank for those phrases you have to learn how your competition is ranking for them or wait for them to pull the plug on that site. And that's isn't likely to happen. So you need to do keyword research and reveal their strategy so you can rank for those same keywords. Or, simply create better content.

Obviously, sites at the top of Google search have titles and key phrases that searchers tend to use. They know their niche to find sites like theirs with their form of information. That is where your competition is. Your competition lies in the writing and the subject matter and your ability to know what people want to know about that subject. And, you'll need to know which people need to know it and where to find them.

So adapt your phrasing to attract the kinds of visitors you want to find your site. The kinds of visitors who would click the relevant ads on your site or buy the products made available on your site.

4.) Never ever impose on another bloggers site! That is black hat stuff. Google doesn't like that, the other blogger won't like it and any reader who sees it won't like it; and won't click on it. It will actually detract from your business by leaving your URL in comment boxes like that.

You can find some examples of that on jimisound.com where on some pages at the bottom of the page they put a comment box. If you look in those comment boxes you can see where a reader left some rambling comment that's not relevant to the page of the comment box, and then their website URL.

That is very unprofessional and leaves a nasty smear on that person's web presence.

Only leave your site address on blogs that have deliberately put a box inside their comment box to leave your sites URL. These are the blogs that have noted to Google that its okay to follow that link and give credit to the site designated by the link. Anything short of that and all search engines will ignore your URL.

Keep in mind that all search engines lead right back to Google. That all search engines play by Google protocols. Finally, you can attach a URL to your name and copy paste your name into a comment box. Most people will test a name to see if a URL is attached to it.

5.) If you try to write a new post every day on your blog you will run out of things to write about long before that day should arrive. Meter your posts on niche specific blogs. As your audience grows you will have stragglers who don't get around to reading your blog right away, but they will eventually show up and catch it.

Even if you did write a post every day your readers are not always going to be there every day. So you have to manage your writing times so as not to exhaust yourself. Otherwise, the quality of your writing and the authority of your posts can suffer.

Have em wait sometimes before you write again to a blog. Then write a blockbuster. That way they learn that good things come after a period of waiting for your next blog post. I have followers on Twitter that have been with me for over ten years.

Search rank isn't determined by how often you write, its determined by how authoritative your blog is. I know of blogs that haven't had a new post in years, yet that blog is still sitting at the number one rank for its keywords and that subject on Google search and all other search engines. When you hear me speak of evergreen writing that's what I'm talking about. A writer who can own a subject and writes it in a way that the information, data, and value never get old, is a writer who addresses key points is always relevant.

6.) No, you don't have to go out and get your backlinks! In fact, that's a very bad idea. Organic backlinks are the best backlinks, everything else is black hat backlink building. You can get away with black hat backlink building but Google's latest bots know when they are looking at a harvested backlink and you could be penalized.

Just write good relevant content until you get noticed so you start to pick up natural backlinks. Some of them won't be as valuable to you as others but all backlinks from ranking or authoritative sites carry a great deal of ranking authority and can pull your site up with themselves. Just become a reliable blogger and you'll be fine.

7.) If you're in blogging for the money, it might discourage you over time. Gone are the days of easy money blogging. You'll earn every cent you get. And you won't start earning a cent until your groundwork is done. Time is necessary for you to gain your footing in the blogging business. After that, you'll wise up and make some money.

You will become anxious, think you know what you're doing before you do, and find you haven't graduated yet. That happens to all of us. But in time you'll learn what works and what you cannot do in the blogging business.

The notion that blogging requires a uniquely skilled individual to make money are directly related to a team effort blog that delivers a high quality, very useful "service". These blogs earn 6 figures a month.

Limiting the amount of money you can earn or giving yourself a deadline to make money just doesn't hold water.

Some blogs don't gain momentum as fast as others, but all blogs in niches, all blogs are written well (readers can understand them), and all blogs with few or no grammatical errors are read. Some may be more popular than others sooner. But all things are seasonal and your blog may come into season when you least expected it to. That's when they explode with popularity. So, just keep at it.

8.) You need to post more often than once a month. Posting once a month will only get you a once a month following and if you listen to the sound of that, it doesn't sound like much. Once a month would make your blog a wasteland. I've written for magazines and online news networks and there you learn that you have to write copiously. We try to post a new blog once and twice a week.

I can get away with leaving a blog for a month because I have so many of them and my followers know that.

My followers have been acclimatized via social media to expect that of me from time to time.

They know I'm always writing somewhere within my own blog network or on someone else's blog. Because occasionally I give them links to my work on other blogs. They know that if I'm not posting in one area I'm posting in another.

They are willing to wait for me to post in an area they want more of or they will request via a comment on a post, or send me a message requesting another post in the area where they want to see more blogging.

I do this by linking all my blogs to one another and promoting them individually at separate times on social media. Word begins to spread and soon traffic is back to a blog that was left for a while. But you still risk losing some followers along the way. I am a prolific writer, I like for people to sit down and read.

That way they get enough learned about the subject that they can from there go out and have a meaningful conversation with a professional about the subject.

Or at least get enough information to construct a smart search phrase on the subject. I don't want my reader to get just enough information to wet their pallet. That leaves a lot of sinkholes for them along the way as they try and expand on the information I gave them. I like to take the time to give them more details in one writing episode.

9.) Blogging is a lot of work, really! It is a lot of work. If you're doing it right, you're working your ass off. Now add to that keeping your family going, keeping your regular job going, school, volunteer work and whatever else you have in your life. Then there's SEO you have to learn, or at least how to correctly do your onsite SEO stuff. You can have the offsite stuff done for you, including the site platform SEO settings, but there's a lot more you need to do in the way of social media. It's the stuff you do off-site that benefit your blog the most. And it is that stuff that many bloggers farm out because it's just too much for them to keep up with. That's it for now.

I hope this was helpful.
Happy blogging!