That’s what I believe…

Great article you have here.

-Scott

While you read this, please remember that I am not a successful blogger, not even full time blogger, I am still learning, but looking at the development of blogging is pretty amazing. Blogging has changed the internet, it’s no longer belong to ju…

I have noticed that I have seen jumps in hits to my blog when I post certain pics of Anime figures I will have for sale in my store ( the sexier the better it would seem ) but I still have a long way to go, and in what direction I take the blog itself in the future, but I do agree with you , that content is king, and I have to say that even in a niche market, you won’t be a superstar blogger overnight. Consistant effort is the key I think, and sometimes a bit of experimentation and luck helps.

have a great weekend Yaro

It’s funny that I read your blog, Brian’s, DoshDosh, and Caroline’s faithfully. (And Dr. Mani’s )

And Maki, yes, we wouldn’t mind that interview.
No one would consider self-promotional or egotistical at all.
It’s clear your like the athlete who says very little and instead, let’s his play dictate his caliber. All while focused on ‘the team’.

So if a dialogue between two ‘experts’ like Yaro and Maki would edify students of the game, lets have at it!

(And Yaro, you’ve obviously got the formula!)

-Ed

“nothing he wrote was half-hearted – every article was a pillar.”

I think that is the key, if we have a great content we don’t have to fully rely on wild marketing efforts (even it is still needed), people will look for your great content because they need it.

Average bloggers will mostly think on how to post as many as content as possible within a specified time span but sometimes forgetting the quality of the content – a common mistake – if I am allowed to say that way.

I am a great fan of both Yaro and Maki, if we can combine Yaro’s marketing strategy and the way Maki write his contents, it’s going to be a great way to blog I guess

@Evan – Early mover advantage is definitely real.

@Caroline (and Maki) – I was under the impression that Maki might write about a lot of different marketing techniques on his blog, but doesn’t necessarily do them himself. So I presume social media is one area he spends a lot of time, which is definitely a form of marketing.

@Maki – Thanks for dropping by. So can we do that podcast interview now? Your audience wants to know the man behind the blog

Thanks everyone else for the lengthy comments too.

Thanks for the mention and all the kind words.

As I’ve mentioned in the post, blog marketing is very necessary for growth… It’s important to get your stuff in front of people, and its far easier for them to pick it up and recommend it when it’s good content.

So in a way it all comes down to having strong content and consistent hard work as a foundation, as you’ve mentioned so accurately.

My little one year experiment was probably just to show myself how I far I’ll go with a minimalist approach. It was refreshing in a way because I only had to churn out articles and network with people via social media.

Is this method for everyone? Probably not. The main reason why I framed my post by using negatives (what I didn’t do) is because I think the emphasis on having solid content/writing cannot be stated enough.

Talent/ability is really subjective.. I will say though that good writing skills are vital for most online ventures.. blogging or not. It helps to be persuasive in copy for social media, direct response marketing and email networking.

I don’t consider myself to be talented, many of the projects I have started and blogged about were failures! Yes there is obviously something that people like. In my case, I think it’s my honesty in the way that I write and the content of my blog is very very different to Maki’s.

With regards to promotion though, Maki does do a lot of self promotion but in a different way. He uses social media. He is a massive user of sites like Sphinn, Digg, StumbleUpon. He doesn’t comment much but he does use email marketing – he’s talked about that several times in posts about pitching to people and so on.

One thing I really agree on with your post is that it is easier to grow a blog now, especially in a big niche like money making simply because of all those big sites. This is something I alluded to recently – the vast majority of my traffic comes from other sites that link to me so if my blog was in a tiny niche I wouldn’t enjoy anywhere near that much exposure.

And by the way your comment about “Yaro” being used as a flag for spam filters made me laugh out loud

If you are blogging to bloggers, then you can expect them to be RSS aware and subscribe to feeds. You can expect them to be into social media and you can expect them to behave in a web savvy way, consistent with all of the standard marketing tricks. The same applies to tech blogs and several other niches.

However, the rules and the measurements of success are probably very different elsewhere. I write mostly about environmental issues – where fewer readers are into RSS and social media etc.

Most readers read my stuff in the office where they can’t watch videos etc. The techniques that apply and the measurement of success is very different.

So personally I didn’t get very excited by claims of 10,000 subscribers since that would never be possible in my niche anyway. I guess what I am trying to say is that it would be good if blog tutorial’s sometimes focused a bit more on wider issues. Perhaps they do, but I don’t get that impression right now.

[/ramble]

But great post by the way – enjoyed it.

In many ways, it’s like the concept of ‘making money online’. There are oh-so-many ways to do it – and some will fit you better than others. And there will always be the one maverick (or few) who bucks the trend, yet is massively outperforming the rest.

The thing is, when it comes to TEACHING someone how to do stuff – make money online, or create a successful blog, or get a top search engine rank – you cannot recommend an ‘out-lier’ technique, tactic or strategy. You must teach a ‘system’ that is duplicatable and reasonably repeatable.

Entrepreneurs will try to replicate Maki’s style – but without the talent and ability that Maki has in heaps, the same result may be elusive, if not impossible. On the other hand, any blogger setting out with a dream and following a consistent marketing plan WILL achieve middling success, even if not super-stardom in every case.

Why are there so many ‘systems’? Because people are unique, play to their strengths, and certain approaches work better (or worse) for them.

Which ‘system’ to follow? Any one is fine. Yet, for a student, the best chance of success comes from going through a system devised by an already successful teacher – rather than follow an explicit, elaborate (or even simple) idea put forth by someone who isn’t yet successful (yet, by all accounts, SHOULD have been just by following his/her own plan!).

That’s the tough part. Picking a teacher to follow and emulate. Then comes studying their process, learning relevant lessons (both from successes and mistakes), and then implementing the best practices into your own system.

It often isn’t possible to do that without more extensive mentoring or apprenticeship when it comes to nuances and complex bits – though the broad principles are often visible for anyone to study and copy just from observation.

And because I’ve been fascinated about the role ‘influence’ has in blogging, and building a blog with influence, I changed the focus of mine to write about this topic. From the look of it, there’s a lot of interest about it. My blog growth trend, though not as impressive as Caroline’s, is certainly encouraging enough to keep the experiment going.

My own approach was to mix both Maki’s and the more ‘conventional’ ones – create great content, and then tell the world about it (or at least as much as I can get through to telling!)

All success
Dr.Mani

I think if a particular topic interests someone and they choose to write about it AND it becomes successful, then there really isn’t a question whether or not you need talent to be a successful blogger.

Blogging also doesn’t need to be based on some skill or level, not everyone blogs for the same reason, nor wants to be what you think they want to be. JMO.

Jackie

It really shows that content is the most important feature of any blogging success. Yeah, great marketing can make an average blog successful. But no amount of marketing can fix poor content. The ideal combination is great content AND great marketing.

Jeff

My guess is that blogging is very new and the rules aren’t really established yet. Also people’s ego probably doesn’t allow them to say, “Well, actually ,I was just lucky”. Darren Rowse is a noble exception. Lots of different things will work, some of it will just being in the right place at the right time. People aren’t necessarily successful because they think they are. Many think there success is due to their excellence, with some I agree, with others I suggest you look at their content and decide for yourself.

It helps to be early in a niche.

On the other end of the spectrum there are bloggers who do marketing until the cows come home. It’s just too bad the content of their blogs doesn’t always warrant the effort.