11 Reasons Why They Are A Successful Blogger And You Are Not

What makes a blogger successful? As you troll the web looking for content filter through your cranium, you run into bloggers who are making a really good run at the whole making a living online thing. As you struggle to get your following, you might start to wonder what makes those blogs successful when yours is not. You try to pump out quality content on a regular daily basis. You are following all of the tips and guidelines that the successful bloggers are throwing out there, but you are still struggling to make more than 10 bucks a month and get past 100 subscribers. Is there a secret society of successful bloggers that I am not apart of? Will I get an invite at some point in time where they will share their secrets like in the movie The Skulls? Maybe their is a secret scroll I need to find that will lead me to traffic and subscribers. What am I missing? What makes them so much different than me?

Let’s spell it out…

11 Reasons Why They Are A Successful Blogger And You Are Not

1. They Are Original – Even though it may not seem like it right now due to the massive amount of bloggers that are copying their success…successful bloggers were original at the beginning of their road to successful blogging. As they continued to see their results climb to the sky, they started to see other bloggers copy their idea and try to flood the market with unoriginal ideas. For you to be a massively successful blogger, you need to have an original voice, idea or subject that is going to grab readers into your content. If you are just planning on mimicking someone else’s success…you might as well save the muscles in your fingers and find something else to do with your time.
2. They Are Running A Business – If you find yourself saying, “It’s a great side thing that brings in a little extra income”, you are on the road to mediocrity. Sorry to give you the harsh truth, but it is true. If you view your blogging as a little side income, that is all it will ever be. You have to start viewing your blogging as a real business that generates real income even if it does not at this point in time. 99% of all start-up companies make absolutely nothing in their first year of operation, but they treat the business a lot more seriously during that first year than bloggers do. If it cost you 10 grand to install Wordpress, would you be blogging differently than you are right now? If the answer is yes to that question and you have the dream of making it big through your blog, you need to change the way you are doing things right now.
3. Testing, Testing And More Testing – Successful bloggers do not stop at one great idea and sit back and relax. They also do not give up after one of their ideas just happens to not give the result they were looking for. Successful bloggers test ideas, monitization techniques and business practices over and over again, and that testing never stops just because they are seeing success or failure. If you really want to make it in any business, you have to get used to testing your ideas and applying that knowledge to the future.
4. Outsourcing – No one…yes even you…can be everything to everyone and be successful. Outsourcing is one of the major aspects of blogging that separates the successful from the tired and lonely. If you are not good at css coding, why are you wasting an entire day trying to style your navigation bar on your blog? You could be spending more time generating content and ideas that are actually going to increase your readership and bottom line! Get someone else to could slap that out in 5 minutes to do the job.
5. They Deliver The Goods…Without Fail – I hope you know this by now…but successful blogging means delivering the goods on a consistent basis. This does not mean that every article you publish has to be a 2,000 word piece of literary art, but it does mean that you need to deliver content that your readers want on a consistent basis. And you have to do this without fail.  If you plan on just winging it and hoping for the best…you better set yourself up for failure now instead of later.
6. They Plan Their Success – There is not a business out there that can be sustainable in the long haul without some sort of plan. Are you going to start in a sub-niche and conquer that in the web world before you start to expand? Are you going to start a forum once you reach a certain number of newsletter subscribers? What are you going to do when the traffic your blog is bring in might require that you bring on more writers? By thinking of the questions beforehand instead of when you are a day late and a dollar short lets you plan for a successful future and capitalize on situations that your competition might not. It is a great idea to physically write out your plans for this week, the next month, the next year and maybe even longer. This road map will help keep you focused and on track.
7. Time – The blog of a successful blogger has some deep archives. As much as we all wish blogging was just an overnight success…it isn’t. You need time and testing to build your readership and content archives. Very rarely, we will see some incredible idea that hits the web like a tsunami, but that is less than 1/2 a percent of all successful blogs, so I wouldn’t bank on that happening to you. You need time to hone your skills, become a better blogger and generate enough content that you can actually look like you know what you are talking about!
8. Expertise – Successful bloggers have positioned themselves as an expert in their field. Keep in mind, they might not have been an expert in the beginning, but over time…they became better at what they do by engaging themselves on a daily basis in their subject matter. This experience built up and they are now seen as an expert in their field of study. If you want to be successful as a blogger, you need to position yourself as an expert in your niche.
9. They Teach Their Readers – Everyone in every niche is looking, yearning, bleeding to learn something new and become more proficient in the subject matter. One of the most beautiful things about blogs is the ability to teach readers and that is what will really launch your blog to the success you have set in your head. Engage with your readers and find out what they want to be better at. If you can bring them to a new level…they will lift you up to an even higher level.
10. Luck – Yes…there is a tad bit of luck thrown into the calculation. Just like anything in life, a little bit of dumb luck can really help you out in the long run. The trick is capitalizing on that luck so that you can repeat that success in the future. Don’t be one of those bloggers who says, “wow…that was cool” without really looking into the aspects of that luck that brought you success. If you can repeat it on your own without the need to just fall into randomly, you can see even more growth.
11. Passion – I saved the best and most important until last. Successful bloggers have a true passion about their subject matter and that drips all over their writing and engagement with their readers. If you do not have a real passion about what you are blogging about and your blogging…you are going to fail. Blogging originated with people putting their life and passions on a screen. That is the foundation that blogging was built upon and you are just going to fizzle out and fall into the web oblivion without that same amount of passion for your work. This is not a get rich quick scheme so you better enjoy what you are doing while you are slaving over a keyboard for pennies on the minute. If you would not blog about it for free…you probably should not be blogging about it at all.

So there it is…the nuts and bolts that separates the successful bloggers from those that are just hamsters running in a wheel. When you look at the list, it seems like an easy concept, but most bloggers fail to even consider any of it. Part of me thinks that most bloggers really believe that successful blogging just comes through attrition…I mean…look how easy those bloggers make it look! It must be that easy to do in real life…right? Wrong…

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