How does this all relate to you and your blog? What should you do first? This section gives you an idea of what to expect and how to create your own plan of action for blogging.
Some tips on what to expect when blogging:
Don’t expect instant success. You aren’t going to have 1,000 readers in one week. You aren’t going to make $3,000 your first month. Maybe in six months you will. That is the beauty of blogging. Although you start out with nothing, you can create something that is successful and rewarding. You just have to keep a long term perspective and realize blogging success won’t come as quickly as you want it to.
Traffic takes time to build. Instant success isn’t possible because it takes time to build up decent traffic. Without major promotion or stories from huge websites you will be building traffic slowly over time. Every time another blogger links to you or you create an SEO optimized blog post, you are adding to the amount of traffic that will come daily to your blog. Over time it will grow and grow until you have thousands of visitors per day. Just don’t expect that to happen in the very beginning.
Relationships with bloggers are important. There is not one blogger or group of bloggers that dominate health blogging because it is such a diverse group of bloggers. Once you find your place in the niche, reach out to the blogs that seem to have lots of readers and traffic. These bloggers are going to be the busiest, so don’t expect a response right away or even at all. Leave comments on their blogs and maybe shoot off an email letting them know you exist. Over time build the relationship. Becoming friends with bloggers in your niche will help you succeed over time.
Work hard or expect nothing. If you aren’t willing to put in some work on your blog and building traffic, then nothing will happen. You can read this ebook or a million others that tell you what to do, but unless you actually start putting in the work you won’t see anything happen. No matter what the “gurus” will tell you – you can’t get rich without work. Unless you are already famous, and sometimes even if you are, blogging takes work to be successful.
Action Plan
I know this might all seem very overwhelming, especially if you are just beginning. You need to work on all of these tasks at once, yet there are so many things to consider. Where do you start? Here are my recommendations for steps to take first:
- Start blogging. Blogging is your most important step even though it will eventually take the least amount of time. In the beginning create good content and figure out your writing voice and blog direction. You also might want to work on creating a collection of pre-written posts to use when you are to busy to blog later.
- Build links. Links are the most important thing for your blog. The sooner you start building links the sooner you will start to build authority with the search engines which will bring you traffic. For the first month try to build 2 – 4 links per week to your blog. (You can build more, but this method won’t overwhelm you with everything else you need to do.) You can try guest posting (which will get you some immediate social traffic as well), asking bloggers for links to your awesome new posts, or posting articles on content websites.
- Get social. Do you have a Twitter account? Do you have a Facebook account? Do you belong to a forum? If not, sign up for these in the first month. You don’t have to spend all your time on them – in fact, you shouldn’t. Once you set everything up, spend 5 – 10 minutes on each promoting your new content and responding to other people in the niche to get involved. Over time this effort builds up.
- Comment on other blogs. In the beginning, you need to get your name out there. The easiest way is to comment on other blogs. This might seem time consuming but it will increase the number of comments you get on your blog as well as increase traffic. Spend a few minutes each day reading other blogs and leaving intelligent responses. If you are going for a traffic boost focus on the more popular blogs. You might not get the author to click through immediately but other readers might. This will also get you involved in the existing health blogging community.
- Don’t advertise. In beginning you don’t need to advertise on your blog. You don’t have many readers and little traffic so you won’t be making any money anyway. Don’t worry about advertising or trying to make money for a couple of months until you have a steady stream of traffic to your blog every day and have built some trust with your audience. Once you have started the blog and built up a little bit of traffic you can focus on the monetization.
Take this list of beginning tasks and create your own daily tasks to complete. For example, a daily task list in the first month might include:
- write a blog post
- spend a few minutes updating and interacting on Twitter and Facebook
- email a blogger about writing a guest post
- comment on other blogs
The next day’s list might include
- write a guest post
- spend a few minutes updating and interacting on Twitter and Facebook
- comment on other blogs
Focus each day on just a few tasks related to blogging. The best thing to do is focus on the things you feel are important and drop the rest. It’s very easy to get sidetracked online for hours and not get anything accomplished. Set daily limits on what you need to do for your blog and with social media each day so it doesn’t take over your life.
Building traffic and content are your most important tasks. Everything else will build from those two things. When you create daily task lists, you ensure you get the things done that need to be done. Over time your lists will get longer and more complicated, but should still concentrate on a few tasks each day to grow your blog and traffic. Creating quality content and helping people find it are your main goals and everything you do should contribute to accomplishing those two things.
This will start you out on the path to health blogging success. Eventually all of these things – blogging, getting traffic, making money – will be something you work on all at the same time without thinking about them as much. They build on each other and eventually things start to click, so it seems like they almost happen without putting any effort in. This comes only after a lot of work done in the beginning building your blog’s content and audience.