If you’re worried about competition in the blogosphere, the good news is, most blogs don’t make it past the first month or two.
My guess is, many bloggers jump on the blogging bandwagon believing they’ll make a substantial amount of money in a short period of time and when that doesn’t happen, they quit.
They don’t even give blogging a chance.
Although writing blog posts or publishing photos or videos can be easy, oftentimes new bloggers don’t realize there’s more to blogging than just publishing.
To become successful, we need to “get found”.
That’s the hard part; the part of blogging that takes work.
Now for the bad news; most blogs don’t make it past the first month or two.
Today’s Lesson
If you own a business in the real world, there’s more to it than just getting a business license and hanging up a “OPEN” sign. In order to get clients, you’ll need to advertise and network.
Blogs are no different. We need to advertise and network, too.
In previous lessons we learned how commenting on other blogs can help us get found. Although this technique helps, just leaving comments on the blogs of others is not enough.
In order to expand our reach we need to self-promote.
Self-promotion means learning SEO (search engine optimization) and attracting the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Self-promotion means we need to get out of our comfort zone, announce we’re online, try to entice others to come by our blog, to read what we’ve shared, to comment, to subscribe to our posts and to tell their friends about us, too.
Self-promotion entails setting up social networking accounts, getting others to not only follow us, but to read what we’re linking to and to share our posts with their followers.
Writing stellar content is the best way to make this happen, but one post, one link, one subscriber is only a start.
Self-promotion is something we can’t stop doing.
Self-promotion is never ending.
Most importantly, self-promotion is not a one way street. That which we want others to do for us, we also need to do for them.
Sadly, if we aren’t continually showing up in places where others frequent, if we’re not giving back or we’ve stopped publishing value based posts, we could be forgotten. If we’re not updating our blog, search engines could stop sending us traffic. When traffic dwindles, that which we worked so hard to build, could all be for naught.
… and another blog bites the dust.
Today’s Assignment
What method of self-promotion works best for you?
Care to share?
When we start blogging, we usually add blogging to our already busy schedule. As our platter of life fills up, we begin to feel overwhelmed.
Hi. I'm Barbara Swafford and I'd like to welcome you to Blogging Without A Blog. Grab a seat, share your thoughts and join in the conversation. 
Do you remember when you first started blogging?
Although I don’t think about it often, I still do.
I was scared to hit “publish” the first few times, and I worried because I kept switching my theme.
I didn’t know any of the blogging terms either.
Being self taught, I spent most of my non-writing time searching for help, but even when I found help, I usually didn’t understand what to do with it.
I was pretty naive.
Today’s Lesson
When I think back to when I first started blogging, I didn’t have too many expectations except for thinking I could make
lots ofsome money by having a blog.Truth be told, I wasted a lot of time on blogging activities I should have postponed until later or maybe not even got involved in, but that’s in the past.
What about you?
Today’s Assignment
Looking back, if you had to do it all over again, where would you have spent more time?
Where would you have spent less time?
Care to share?