Do You Need Talent To Grow A Successful Blog?
I was reading a post over at DoshDosh where Maki notes his RSS readership broke the 10,000 subscriber mark and what he did (or really, what he didn’t do) to realize that result. Here’s his post -
Dosh Dosh Reaches 10,000 Subscribers (and the Reason Why People Subscribe to a Blog)
I have to admit to feeling slightly irritated reading the post, or really, wanting to add more to the topic raised by Maki to clarify what I see as a keep point, something top bloggers sometimes forget about, so here goes…
Maki Has Talent
Maki is a great blogger (and writer), everyone knows this and his blog has grown into one of the top in the industry as a result. In his post he outlines a list of what I would call “traditional advice” about what it takes to grow a successful blog and how he didn’t do any of it, including -
- Not displaying his feedcount as a social proof tool until after he broke 10,000 subscribers
- Not submitting guest posts to other blogs
- Not running contents
- No paid advertising to promote his blog
- Not writing a blog post every day
…and the list goes on.
Maki has not done any major promotions with a free report, or video or podcasting either. Essentially he has sat down and week after week put out solid written content, responded to comments and emails from his readers and not been very proactive beyond that to grow his traffic. I don’t think he has an active comment marketing strategy either – in that I mean he’s not commenting on other blogs to bring traffic to his in a strategic and focused manner.
Basically, he has pretty much bucked the trend and not done anything I recommend in Blog Mastermind or countless other bloggers suggest as good practice to grow a successful blog (things even Maki recommends to other bloggers).
So do we have it all wrong? Should we follow in Maki’s footsteps and put out solid content week after week as the only marketing strategy we need to grow a top blog?
The Key Resource For A Sustainable Blogging Business
Welcome to the next article in my series on blogging as a sustainable business model. In part one of this series you learned about the staple monetization strategy that most probloggers use – creating content to bring in traffic and increase income.
Using the example of Darren Rowse in article two, I concluded that despite the fact that a few top bloggers earn a full time income blogging, and even more money in the case of Darren and bloggers like him, it is still not a sustainable business model when so much responsibility for output rests on one person. In the previous article before this one I listed some of the advantages that many top bloggers enjoy, which the average person does not.
If you have not read the first three parts in this series please do so before continuing with this article.
- Part 1: Is Professional Blogging A Sustainable Business Model?
- Part 2: Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Professional Blogger?
- Part 3: The Advantages Top Bloggers Have That You Don’t
Points of Leverage
The problem with the current model for professional blogging is the lack of a strategy that actually leverages the content = traffic = money equation in a non-linear way. Most professional bloggers apply the time = money formula directly to the content = traffic = money formula, placing a big limitation on the total output possible. This as I mentioned is self employment applied to blogging. Blogging is not a bad job, but it is still a job – and you may not want a job forever if you share my belief that happiness comes from freedom.
What we need to do is create a model that doesn’t restrict content = traffic = money, but instead exponentially multiplies it, and to do this we need to finds way to leverage our resources.
