What is the power of blogging? Blogging can be super powerful over time because it can attract your target audience for free. This is something which initially will take a lot of work. At first, you might find there’s a lot to do and you’ll need to create a lot of content on a blog just to get the teeniest, tiniest bit of traffic! For businesses and affiliate marketers blogging can give you some leverage, and it’s especially useful if you don’t have a large marketing budget.
Blogging is free of course and you blog to attract traffic from the search engines such as Google. But there’s over 600 million other blogs out there too, all wanting free traffic. This means if you choose a particularly popular niche for your blog, you will have some stiff competition.
It can take weeks or months of work before you start seeing people coming to your blog for free. At this point, many new bloggers will see blogging as futile. But if you keep going, you will start to stand out among the many other blogs. When this happens, it can be magical!
The Power Of Blogging – Exponential Gains
Blogging is slow and labour intensive. You’ll need to publish a lot of content before the search engines (especially Google) takes any notice and starts to rank your content. If your blog website is new, there even may be a sandbox period of time where Google sidelines you. This means in the early months of blogging on a website, you may see nothing for all your efforts in terms of free traffic.
But that’s no reason not to do it. Long term bloggers have built up such a volume of content that they get customers through their blog completely for free. This is surely something worth working for if you own a business or are an affiliate marketer.
After a certain period of blogging, you should see an “uptick” in your number of visitors. This might be after a few hundred posts or a few dozen, depending on your niche and the competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages.
You might expect your blogging to give you gains relative to the work you have put in. But this is seldom the case. More likely you will see very little for your first hundred posts, particularly in a popular niche. This is why you need to promote your content yourself, and not rely on Google to rank it.
The Power Of Blogging – Effort Vs. Results
Bloggers all would like to have tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to their content every single day! It would mean more leads and more sales, if you are using your blog for business. But before this can happen, you need to put in a lot of work. Most people can’t sustain this effort if it doesn’t align with something they would do otherwise anyway, or that they enjoy.
So many bloggers will give up if they choose a topic which they don’t love writing about. I gave up on a blog I was writing for over 6 months because I had no interest in the topic. I only wanted to earn from a blog somehow and I had to research every post (because I didn’t know about the topic) and I had no passion for my topic either! It was a big mistake – but one I learned from!
Here’s a graph from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. I think it’s quite a good representation of the path of the blogger!
Where many bloggers quit is “the valley of disappointment”. This is where what you think should happen with a blog meets what actually happens.
I nearly quit too, thinking maybe I’m wasting my time blogging. But once you get to the place where these lines cross, you will experience traffic rising exponentially on your blog. When this happens nobody knows! It will depend on a number of things including your number of blog posts, quality of posts, other blogs within your niche and how Google perceives your blog posts. But one other thing you can control is what you do after you publish a post.
The Power Of Blogging – Blog Promotion
Yes blog promotion is a massive factor in getting people to your blog posts. Why do all that work writing a post and then just leave it to Google to decide whether you get any traffic or not! Promoting your blog posts gives Google (and other search engines) data on how people perceive your content. People may even share your content themselves once they see it. Plus, your blog promotion might attract leads and sales of course too!
I like to automate as much as possible when it comes to blog promotion. So I use social media plugins to enable visitors to easily share, and post planning software which syndicates my content as I publish it throughout my social media presence. Take a look at some of my recommended best blog plugins for WordPress:
- Revive Old Posts – automates post sharing on social media – both old and new
- Postplanner – similar software to Revive Old Posts.
- Social Media Share Plugin – puts share buttons on your site to help your audience share your content
- I also use Yoast SEO – to help me write SEO friendly posts.
- Push Engage – Alerts subscribers to your new posts
- Aweber – email marketing software lets you send people back to your newer content via email messages.
The Power Of Blogging – Why It’s Good That Blogging Is Tough!
Blogging is tough, especially at first. Google won’t give you a tonne of traffic easily. This is a good thing though because if new bloggers could easily rank and get traffic, it means that older bloggers would lose their rankings! Long term bloggers are rewarded with greater volume of free traffic because they’ve put the work in already – and continue to do so.
The greater volume of quality content you have on your blog, the more credible you are as an authority in your niche. Those who are committed to creating quality content over the longer term will get rewarded with free traffic. If you “dabble” with a blog and write a few posts and then quit, this is a signal to Google that you’re not creating regularly, or taking it as seriously as some other might be. So your content is less likely to get traction through ranking on the search engines and your competitors will get the traffic.
Finding The Low Hanging Fruit
New bloggers can get traction quickly though if they find the “low hanging fruit” and create quality content which out-performs what’s already there. This can be done through finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
These are the keywords which get fewer monthly searches, but also have far less competition. It can be easy to look for those short term keywords which get the most traffic when using Google’s keyword planner. But this is a mistake, especially for new bloggers because these terms are super competitive on the SERPS – search engine results pages. A newer blog simply won’t have the authority to rank for these competitive phrases.
By finding longer tail search phrases, you can more easily rank your content and get found. As you build a library of content based around these kinds of terms, you should find more traffic is arriving on your website for free.
Summary
There’s huge power in blogging and if you choose a subject you can create an unlimited volume of content in, you can keep going long after others have quit. This gives you an advantage over those who only want the outcome of financial gain from a blog! As one of my mentors said “The man who enjoys walking will go further than the one who wants to arrive”!
Initially though it can be tough coming up with ideas for a blog and getting traffic. To start generating traction from a blog might takes weeks, months or even years. Ultimately a blog can give you free traffic, leads and sales. This can give you complete financial and geographical freedom if you figure out how to earn from blogging.
But before you can earn regularly from a blog, you need traffic and a lot of it! This takes time and many will quit when nothing happens.