Blogging Secrets: The End Depends on the Beginning

I’ve received lots of questions about blogging over the past couple of weeks.

Primarily, the questions involved getting a blog to do something or other, after the blogger’s been blogging for weeks or months.

The short answer is: it’s hard.

Your blog’s success or otherwise lies in its beginning. You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, to coin a cliche. You need to know what you want a blog to do, the more specifically, the better, BEFORE you create it.

You can’t get the results you want unless you know what you want. In this post, Power Blogging: Achieve Your Writing Success | Angela Booth’s Fab Freelance Writing Blog I said:

For example, don’t write:

“I want my blog to make money.”

Instead, write something like:

“My blog will educate and train potential clients for my writing services. My clients will self-select themselves, and by ___________ (a date three months from today) I will get five new clients each week directly from my blog.”

To repeat, be SPECIFIC.

Write down what you want your new blog to do. Once you’re in the throes of blogging, if you haven’t written it down, you’ll wander off-track. This is very easy to do, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

I own hundreds (literally) of blogs, and most are set-and-forget.

Now, let’s look at setting goals for a current blog to get it to do what you want.

Setting goals for a blog after you’ve been blogging for a while

Let’s say you’ve created a blog, and have been blogging on various topics. It’s hard (heck, impossible) to get good rankings and traffic for a blog which is a mish-mash of your thoughts and ideas. You need to be a celebrity to pull it off.

Start by setting a goal for this blog, as in our example above.

WRITE DOWN the goal — somewhere you’ll see it often.

Then:

1. Create a blog post which says something like: “My goals for this blog have changed. From now on, I’ll be blogging about _______, _________ and _________.”

(Make sure that you do a little keyword research, and general research, so you can be sure that people care about your new topics.)

2. Create a post a day on your new topic(s) for two weeks.

Creating these new posts will enable you to do a U-turn in your new direction.

3. After you’ve created these posts, you can slow down the frequency. Post once a week, or whenever you choose.

Blogging is easy. Too easy. You can get caught up in the idea of blogging, without having any clear direction in mind. If this has happened to you, take a moment. Pause. Stop blogging, until you’ve set some clear goals for your blog.

Remember, your blog’s end depends on its beginning, nothing else.

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