There is a tipping point in blogging, where your previous work culminates in a steady growth in traffic. Ultimately there becomes a “tipping point” where it goes supersonic. More traffic means more shares and backlinks and this in turn can “tip” your traffic upwards so you experience exponential growth very quickly.
Here’s what it looks like on a graph.
The Tipping Point In Blogging
When I started blogging way back in the early 2000’s I struggled to get anyone at all to visit my blog posts. I admit, I wasn’t very good at it and most of the stuff I shared wasn’t particularly useful for anyone. My intention was simply to make sales back then, and it was before I knew I should be adding some kind of value through blogging. So my posts were full of affiliate links and not much value.
Plus, I was new to blogging. I used free blog platforms which didn’t rank well on the search engines. So getting traffic was a difficult thing to do (for anyone) on those platforms, especially someone with only a handful of blog posts!
But I persevered with blogging because I wanted to learn how to earn an income online and I had very little spare money for advertising. It’s been a long journey and my hopes of getting a post to “go viral” were never realised!
I jumped around a lot too, from topic to topic and I must have created several hundred websites overall before this one! That’s not a great plan because you are spreading yourself very thin. My advice is choose a topic you can stick with for the duration and don’t deviate from it. Write content which is helpful to your audience and find an affiliate product you truly value. Once all that is in place, get blogging and never quit!
The Tipping Point In Blogging – Get Back On The Horse
Having recently been through a breakup and house move, I fell out of my blogging habit for several months. As a result, I watched my traffic take a big dive! Despite all the work I’d put in previously, I’d lost momentum. In addition, Google has somehow penalised my website and it fell from the rankings.
There’s over 800 blog posts on this website, so I took that pretty badly! After my pity party, I decided to start the habit up again, but this time I’d create longer and better posts. I knew from experience that the peak of my traffic had come from a long, sustained effort at building content on a regular basis and promoting it too, every day, or at least most days. Some days I simply couldn’t write a blog post though. I lacked inspiration or I had been blogging all week and just needed a rest!
The fact that I still had any traffic at all was promising. Especially as I hadn’t even looked at my website for a few months.
The Tipping Point In Blogging – 1 Post At A Time
I went through a lot of procrastination about blogging of course: “Is it worth bothering with?”, “Will I make any sales?” “Maybe I should do something else, such as paid marketing?” These were the questions running through my mind.
The endless procrastination led me nowhere and, since I was short of advertising budget, I was led back to blogging once more! After all, it’s free, cathartic and I quite enjoy it really!
Now I’ve covered a lot of topics already on this website. Just have a search using the search bar at the top of this website and you can find posts in pretty much any affiliate topic you care to think of. So I wondered how I was going to come up with yet more content for affiliate marketing!
The answer was simple: I would inspire myself back into the habit! So my last few posts have been on the topic of my own personal battles. Here’s a few of my latest posts:
You can see at the bottom I’ve written a post on overcoming procrastination!
Intrinsic Motivation Vs. Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation comes from within, extrinsic motivation is wanting something on the outside. I realised that my affiliate sales from my blogging habit didn’t come about through wanting those commissions alone (although I did want them of course!). No, it came from a rather arbitrary motivation – getting my content ranked and getting FREE traffic.
“The man who likes walking will go further than the man who wants the destination”
So in the first instance, my motivation for this website was to get free traffic from the search engines. Although I only had some modest success with this strategy, I did get free traffic ultimately. However, what came about from my attempting to rank my content on Google was the habit of blogging that was formed as a result.
It is this habit which resulted in the traffic I obtained and of course the habit of sharing my content with my email list and on social media, too.
Simple Daily Habits Vs. Goals
If you’re not a fan of goal setting, which many people aren’t, consider formulating a daily habit ritual instead which leads you to your desired outcome. It is the ritual of a daily blog post which has made the most impact for me in my life and not just on my affiliate business. The process has given me structure and discipline, without which my life would be more chaotic than it is!
I was always focused on the outcome (of the affiliate sales, for example) rather than the journey. But when you consider the journey, and how you would like to live, if you can find a strategy to enjoy your days while working towards your outcome, you’re on to a winner. Many people quit with affiliate marketing simply because they only want the outcome, rather than the journey. Those who succeed, enjoy the process and the personal growth which comes with that process.
Blogging is no different and it’s a long journey. But if you choose a topic you’re passionate about, and enjoy writing, there’s no reason you can’t make it work if you stick with it!
Summary
When you’re so busy enjoying the process of creating and sharing content, you’re definitely on track for reaching a tipping point. For so long I was checking my traffic, unhappy about my sales, desperate for “success”. When you look for the result before you do the work, the outcome is to feel disappointed, frustrated and inadequate. But wanting isn’t an inspiring emotion.
When you shift the desire to “get” into the desire to give and find a purposeful way to create, you’ve already arrived because it’s a joy to do! When you can tie that in with generating an income you have found your “groove” in life.
Ikigai is a Japanese word meaning “reason for being”. I always struggled with it because I was too focused on “never enough”. When I realised that I was carrying the belief “I’m never enough”, I was able to work on it and find simple joy again in being, without “need” or “wanting” attached to what I was doing. See also my post on overcoming limiting beliefs about money and poverty consciousness.
I believe the tipping point in blogging comes after you have realised this in your work. Find something you love writing about and you can write forever without the need for approval or reward! That’s the kind of intrinsic motivation you need to “tip” your blog posts into the stratosphere!
