After blogging for a little while it can become very easy to get stuck in a rut, or comfort zone. The simple reason for this is that you lose some of your original drive that you had after launching. When you launch a blog you have to work incredibly hard to get your first visitors trickling in. Whilst this can be hard work, it’s also great for showing people what they’re capable of. Think of how hard you worked to get your blog off the ground… are you working that hard today? Many people will answer ‘no’, when in fact you should be working just as hard, if not harder.

There are several reasons why you should be working harder. I’ve outlined these below:

Now, with these things in mind, what exactly do I mean by being ’stuck in a rut’?

It is particularly useful to use your past blogging experiences to your advantage. I’ve learnt so much in a month of blogging, and so to not use this knowledge to my advantage would just be a waste. I hope that this post was helpful, and I urge you not to get into a comfort-zone mentality. ALWAYS work on improving your blog, it’s the only way to succeed.

Something that I see more and more is bloggers posting about content that relates to their own website, A LOT. Now, I’m probably somewhat guilty of this myself, but try to keep such posts down to a minimum. The bloggers that I’m talking about are the type to post a contest every week, and spend the days in between talking about the contest. They are the kind to post about every extra 10 RSS subscribers, every extra 100 unique visitors and every new blogroll link.

The problem here is that your readers ultimately won’t care that much about these facts and figures, they want useful content! I think that this kind of blogging mentality is closely aligned with the how-to-make-money blogs cropping up all over the place. John Chow’s page title is: ‘I Make Money Online by Telling People how Much Money I Make Online’. Now, I don’t actually have a problem with John’s blog, but I DO have a problem with his title. The truth is that it’s meant to be somewhat humorous, kind of playing on his success and creating a jokingly arrogant persona of someone who knows their stuff. It is however, incorrect. John may post income reports at the end of each month, but this is certainly not why he has over 20,000 RSS Subscribers! People read his blog because of his success sure… but because they want to emulate it. His title should in fact be ‘I Make Money Online by Telling People How to Make Money Online’. Now, obviously this doesn’t have the same ring to it, and would quite possibly be a worse overall title, but at least it’s accurate.

So if John isn’t doing anything wrong, and his title is largely ok, then where’s the problem? The problem is the small-time bloggers who take this title literally, or at least seem to. These are the people that don’t put in the work, and believe that their small successes thus far will draw in visitors. Firstly, they are probably hardly successful at all, and so this ‘visitors being drawn to success model’ (which does hold some weight) just won’t work. Secondly pro-bloggers like John have established themselves as experts in their fields through YEARS of hard work. This is what draws their visitors in.

This brings me to my next point… I feel that pro bloggers are often not giving people the full picture. Many are so busy posting about their ongoing success, income reports and rising traffic that they completely obscure their path up to that point. I find it really inspiring when pro bloggers take the time to stress that money/expertise takes a lot of time and effort. However, far too many pro bloggers want to appeal to the demographic of wannabes who will do anything to make a quick buck. Whilst I’m sure that some bloggers such as myself appreciate posts covering their initial steps blogging, the majority of bloggers seem to lap up the images of massive cheques and posts about expensive restaurants. All this is going to teach you is what you DESIRE to achieve, but not really how to achieve it.

Often the techniques suggested by large bloggers simply won’t be applicable to small-time bloggers as they won’t have the online persona and respect to back up some strategies. This is further explored in an older post of mine: ‘Pro Bloggers Have it Easy’. Please don’t think that I have something against pro bloggers by the way. I really admire their success, but do appreciate it when they get their head out of the clouds and think of their roots (any everybody else’s).

Blog commenting is important sure, but I’m not sure that every blogger realizes quite how important. The main reason why I value blog commenting so highly is the QUALITY of traffic that it can drive. A blog comment won’t drive the traffic levels of social networking sites, but it’s a lot easier to do and will bring you far more worthwhile traffic. Below is an example of what arose from me spending 10 seconds commenting on a fellow blogger’s blog:

“Thanks, Tom! Really nice website you’ve got there. I’ve subscribed!”

Notice the difference from your average 5 second social networking visitor? I’m connecting with a fellow blogger in a personal one on one way, and they are doing the same to me. How many 5 second visitors will bother returning or subscribing to your blog?

In my eyes commenting produces not only great traffic, but in fact the absolute best quality of traffic. More often than not it will be the blogger who’s blog your are commenting who will return the gesture and come and check out your blog. Bloggers as a rule are less fickle than the average internet user, and so will be the people to stick around, learn a little about you and leave you a comment.

Now, the problem soon arises of time management. It can be very time consuming searching endless blogs to read/comment upon and often bloggers get stuck in a rut of commenting on a very small number of blogs that they are familiar with (I’m guilty of this myself). However, a great idea hit me the other day… I figured that why not utilize the power of RSS to boost your commenting productivity? If you begin to view commenting as a form of marketing rather than simply ‘chatting’ with fellow bloggers you will become more efficient at doing it.

The basic idea is to get a feed reader, and then start subscribing to EVERY SINGLE good blog that you come across that is relevant to your audience. No more subscribing solely to your friends blogs, I’m talking EVERY worthwhile blog you come across. Then, devote a set amount of time each day going through the new posts for ALL these blogs and leave a comment on each one. This task will start relatively small, but will grow as you subscribe to more and more blogs. This should effectively cut out all the worthless time you spend surfing idly around the blogosphere. You’ll become a commenting machine, systematically going through your list of new posts every single day.

Of course I’m not encouraging you to use this idea to spam people. This is absolutely wrong. Don’t even say something ‘friendly’ like “Hey nice blog! Check out mine”, or “I have a similar contest check it out”. You want to be leaving the BEST QUALITY comments that you possibly can. Try to build on the original posts, or give constructive feedback as to what you thought was good/bad about their article. Don’t be afraid to disagree with other blogs, as long as you are polite and constructive they’ll probably appreciate the feedback.

The thing is, once you get into a systematic and practiced routine you’ll be surprised at how little time it consumes. Most wasted time occurs in the time between reading posts, that is to say just surfing around/between various websites. By going DIRECT to each post, with the view to leaving a comment you’ll be able to quick pick up on the key points of the article and leave constructive feedback. If you increase you subscriptions by say 10 blogs per day, you’ll soon be leaving hundreds of quality comments on a variety of blogs relevant to yours, and DRAMATICALLY increasing your exposure in the blogging community. You’ll also be making a name for yourself as someone who knows what they’re talking about - an expert in your field.

Please let me know what you think of this idea, and if you choose to use it how it works out for you. I’ll post the results for Push Standards soon hopefully.

It’s great to diversify your content. That’s what I’ve learnt from a month of blogging. Since writing photoshop tutorials as well as articles about blogging and marketing I’ve received a huge amount of new visitors to the site (in the thousands actually).

If you have just 2 minutes spare please read this article, as I really feel that this is some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever given…

Throughout this post I’ll be using the analogy of a tree to represent your blog or website. Think of your main topic or ‘niche’ as the trunk, and any forms of diversification from this topic as branches. Now, you want to grow your tree (or website) to it’s full potential, which means making it as large as possible - i.e.: a lot of branches. A lot of branches carry a lot of leafs, and a lot of leafs capture a lot of sunlight. I think you see where I’m going with this one - diversifying will increase your website’s traffic.

However, before you raise any objections to this I’m not talking about writing for every niche out there. Your diversifications should all be of some interest to your original niche’s audiences, but at the same time capture new audiences effectively. If a tree grows too many branches too far out sideways it will fall over. Just look at this website, my audience is primarily bloggers, yet I also appeal to entrepreneurs, designers and promoters. The important thing is that I’m not losing any real traffic from my original audience by doing this, in fact many of my blogging audience appreciate the variety in content.

Now, back to the tree analogy. The key reason why diversification is so effective is the idea of branches. By diversifying to a new niche you are creating a huge growth potential. Try to think of your potential markets. In this case my market is huge: bloggers. However, by appealing to those interesting in photoshop tutorials I’m able to reach a second huge market. This will increase my overall chances for growth, as it’s very hard to make a significant dent in any large market. I’m not going to be talked about my all bloggers anytime soon, so why not get talked about my a number of bloggers, a number of photoshop users etc… Looking again at the photoshop tutorials this site offers - I can submit these to say, 5 of the largest tutorial websites. This will drive me thousands of visitors, and quite often people will blog about tutorials featured on these websites. As you can see this creates a kind of exponential growth, which involves very little effort on my part. I’m simply taking advantage of the success of larger websites.

Suddenly I’ll be able to post in niche forums for a variety of topics, again increasing my blog’s exposure. I can comment on other blogs in a variety of niches, networking within a variety of niches and so on…

Some ‘branches’ may start to steal light from others, so it’s important to consider which branches are benefiting your tree the most as a whole. If you’re losing saying 50 visitors from one niche due to your diversifying into new topics, but gaining 200 then surely this is a worthwhile venture.

Another great reason for diversifying is that it gives you more to talk about. Every writer gets stumped for content from time to time. However, by having more topics to discuss you should find it easier to come up with fresh, exciting content for your readers. I find it a lot more rewarding to blog about a variety of subjects than simply going on about the same thing over and over.

I’ll be researching marketing my diversifications properly soon, and trying to gain the maximum possible audience for each niche that I write about. Try and consider your blog for a second. Are you maximizing it’s potential, or are you blogging about the same topics day in day out?