It sums up to one sentence…
It’s pretty damn hard to do when you see no results and have no clue what you are doing.
My dream of having a competitive website where people are dropping by my website and interested in my service as an email copywriter of 10,000 monthly visitors (it was a small dream…) was crushed by reality.
Yep… I learned a lot about blogging, writing, SEO, discipline, depression, and all those other goodies you get with failure.
Does it suck?
Oh yeah, it does suck (big time).
But it’s not a complete failure because I learned one really important thing…
That whatever I’m doing at my current stage is not producing the results I want.
So that just means I need to take do something different to produce the results I want.
What that is I’m not sure but when I do I’ll let you guys know about it…
…But what this blog post is about is that you can learn a lot from someone else’s failure with someone who is going for the same goal (aka starting a blog from scratch as a poor bum and wanting to have traffic flowing to your blog)…
So for you lucky readers who wants to start a blog in 2020 you can rejoice because I shall share with you the failures I went through which would cut down on your learning process (if you actually listen and take action…)
So without further ado, let’s start with the first misconception I had which was…
1. You can’t have just “Great Content”
And it makes sense. Just because you might have the best article in the entire world it doesn’t mean jack if no one sees your article.
If you are starting brand new then no one is going to know who you are and you don’t even have any credibility to back up whatever you are saying.
I even did all the SEO tricks that you are supposed to do such as:
- Researching popular articles people actually visit
- Figuring out the keyword
- And then writing a better article.
And what I learned is…
that if you are at a domain score of 1 then no matter how good your content is no one is going to see it.
You see, I thought I was going to be just like Gary Halbert who writes such amazing content that his website can jump up to the top 1000 during its peak.
But I realized there was a huge difference between a nobody like me and someone like Gary Halbert who already had an audience and has made millions and millions of dollars through copywriting and is sharing those same techniques on how to make more money for FREE on his website.
So unless you are already well-known you are going to need power for your website… also known as backlinks.
And you need a lot of high-quality backlinks if you are going to jump into a competitive niche like marketing.
You need some power, some oomph to jumpstart your business.
When no one knows you even exist it’s pretty hard to get those first few people to visit your website.
This leads us to our next question…
How Do You Get Backlinks when no one knows jack-shit about you?
And the answer to that is…
2. Do lots of Guest Posting In Your Niche
There are lots of strategies like finding broken links and sharing your article as a replacement or going through Ahref and searching for similar articles and asking them if they would add a link.
And those are viable methods but I don’t think it’s the best strategy when you have nothing to back you up.
And yeah… it also kinda sucks that you can’t have all your amazing writing pieces into one website but you gotta get your name out of there somehow if you want people to know you.
Plus… your writing isn’t probably all that good anyway.
You see, the reason why I like guest posting even though it may not be the fastest way is It’s going to force you to teach how to:
- Write a cold email proposal
- How to write in your niche with their type of language.
- How to get more leads for your service.
Plus… you get feedback if it’s good enough for them.
This means you can use your improved writing to start guest posting on other blogs!
And once you get your first guest blog written you can use that as leverage to write for your second.
And then once you are at a higher level and actually making some nice moolah you can start to outsource guest blogs for your blog and can create outlines and proofread the articles before you submit them increasing the number of backlinks you have.
And it all starts with the first guest post.
3. Writing Consistently Every Week With No Results Drains Your Mind
Look… I get it that some people just blog for the fun of it. You know, sharing your family and dog photos and being “live” on the internet.
But when you have something that has value that you want to share with other people and you see absolutely no visits to your website for an entire year you are going to start going a little crazy.
if you want fast results then I am going to say that blogging is probably not the best niche unless you have a good amount of money to invest and/or know exactly what you are doing.
I thought that writing every week would at least help me get at least 100 visitors a month… but alas… I am still at 5/month.
That’s why here’s my tip for people starting out:
- Writing 5 amazing blog posts so that you have something on your site
- Start guest posting the crap everywhere else.
- Post something on your website at least once a week.
Because it’s like a snowball effect.
When you start getting more backlinks on those “amazing articles you wrote on your website” then more people are going to visit your site which tells Google that your site may be worth visiting which will allow your website to rank higher.
And just the act of writing something once a week will at least get you more disciplined and better at writing.
- It’s Okay To Quit And Try Again Another Time
I’m writing for the people who went through similar results like me. Because not only was I too hard on myself I just completely gave up on my dreams for 5 months… And those were the worst times for me.
When you are trying something out new for the first time, of course you are going to be bad at it because you don’t know what you are doing.
Maybe you weren’t prepared to handle the amount of discipline or how hard it really is and just gave up.
But you know…
When you do things a second time it’s easier than the first time.
If you have ever tried starting something new like studying for a test coming.
I bet the first time you hear it during class you may not have fully understood it.
But when you study for the first time by reading your textbook and notes it may be a bit overwhelming at once and may take 6 hours to understand it.
But then when you review it a second time I bet it takes a shorter time, maybe like 3 hours.
And I bet if someone forced a gun to your head to memorize for this test that you did 5 years ago it would be a lot faster than if you were studying on a brand new subject.
Even though we may have “forgotten” the material our brains are wired to process things faster for the things we already did making us start not at ground zero but somewhere further along.
Of course, if you don’t quit that’s even maybe since you can keep the momentum going.
Conclusion
There’s my rant of how I failed to make this blog successful in one year and hope this little motivating, somewhat useful monologue was helpful for you. Let me know if you have any questions in th comments below and I’ll answer to whatever problems you might be having.