Blog Engage Community Blog – Page 11

5 Reasons Why You Stopped Blogging

I hope this is not the case, I hope you did not quit blogging! Blogging is fun, it should be fun and you should love every minute of it. I’ve been marketing blog content for 14 years and one thing consistent is bloggers come and bloggers go.

Many things can go wrong when blogging and the list of reasons to quit for many can be endless and over whelming, this is the sad truth. It’s in my opinion that in order to start a blog and continue it’s success online you must have the mentality of an entrepreneur.

Here are the top 5 reasons why you stopped blogging or why most bloggers quit.

Commitment Level To High

Many of us, when starting a blog have no idea on the commitment it takes to start and continue an active blog. Creating new content is not easy and takes much dedication. Users have issues balancing their blog with real life and slowly the idea and concept fades into what is only a memory. Never underestimate the difficulty of launching a successful online blog.

Not Making Money

Intentions for most bloggers is to start a blog, create content and make money. Well I’m sorry to say, blogging doesn’t make money… well not easily anyways. If your pure intentions are to monetize your blog and the goal right from the start is to make money, chances are you’re going to be very disappointed and you’re going to quit.

Making money is the byproduct of a great blogger or great content creator!

No Positive Results

Positive results can range from receiving comments, social media shares or likes and even as mentioned above, making money. When bloggers don’t see a direct response from their efforts it’s easy to simply give up. The easiest part about blogging is simply giving up, trust me in my 14 years online content marketing I’ve seen thousands of bloggers give up!

Content To Difficult To Write

Yes! Writing is difficult but not impossible. If you find yourself having difficulties producing new fresh content, see my post on how to keep your blog content fresh. It’s not hard but does require commitment and consistency. Like any successful business you need a plan and you need to be organized to help give yourself the best chance possible at success.

Set Obtainable Goals
Be Consistent
Complete Tasks
Set Milestones

Unrealistic Blogging Expectation

Maybe the blogger thought it was going to be easy. “My friend does it, how hard can it be?” I’m going to make money from blogging and quit my job attitude is not realistic. Perhaps you can work hard and make blogging a side income, a small passive income that substitutes your real life income but chances you will make enough to quit your day job, I don’t think so.

Have you quit or thought about quitting blogging? I would love to hear what challenges you face, and how you overcame them or how you didn’t.

Commitment To Quality Blog Posts

If you plan on creating a blog post, you best put the extra steps to sure it’s quality. If you find yourself asking, what is a quality blog post then this article is for you. Quality content comes in many stages when writing a blog post. Today we will discuss the steps you can take to ensure your next post is top quality.

What Can We Commit To?

First we must decide what we can actually commit to. How busy is our life and how many blog posts can we actually write per week or even month. What we want to avoid here is over committing and the result of that is producing low quality content for our readers or even worse, no content at all.

It’s ok to write once a month, if that’s your commitment level there’s nothing wrong with that. If committing to one blog post per month allows you to create high quality content on a consistent basis then set that goal moving forward. It’s important to be realistic and honest with yourself when you decided what your commitment level will be.

Stick To What We Know

Blogging on subjects we know about or have experience with is extremely helpful when looking to commit to quality blog posts. Its much easier to write about something we are familiar with. Blogging on subjects we know allows us to write with confidence and allows us to produce quality content much easier. “Only Write About What You’re Qualified to Talk About – Don’t Fake It”, Is what Search Engine Journal Says. I agree.

Understand Your Audience

Understanding the audience is key to writing and providing quality content. We want to ensure the topics we are posting on are of interest to the readers visiting our site. Providing targeted content that interests our readers will be key to providing quality content. Creating content that is too long can also have negative affects on your blog, stay on point and remain focused.

What’s our commitment level?
Blog on what we know!
Understand our audience!

Like any business blogging requires a detailed and outlined plan on how you intend to move forward and what your expectations are from these efforts. You need to ask yourself and you need to be honest, what is your commitment level, can you commit to the consistency and what it takes to make a successful blog site?

Tips On Keeping Your Blog Fresh

Creating a blog is not easy, in fact when installing WordPress it should come with a fair warning in bold. “Blogging is not easy, coming up with content requires a lot of work, commitment and dedication, blogging is not for everyone.”

Creating new and fresh content for your blog will become difficult, but the good news it’s not impossible. Today I share a few tips and blog posts that have helped me understand what I needed to do!

Expand On Your Topics

Breaking down your content into smaller sub categories can help create more blog posts for you in the long run. Perhaps every headline can be expended into it’s own blog article. For example when creating a post that showcases the top 10 ways to start a blog, perhaps each of those 10 ways can actually be their own blog post. Expand on your ideas to help keep the blog fresh with new but relevant content.

Creating The Business Plan

Every successful business has a common theme, and that’s having the proper plan and goals set to help you achieve success. Setting small goals, achieving them and continuing to repeat this behaviour will help you maintain the consistency that’s needed to create fresh new content.

Set Obtainable Goals
Be Consistent
Complete Tasks
Set Milestones

Follow The Trends

Make sure to follow trends if you can and blog within the season. This will help you come up with fresh content and topics that people are more likely to be interested in. No one is talking about winter jackets in the summer time right? Stay on point when it comes to seasonal content and stick with the trends to engage your audience and their interests. Read Darren’s latest post on ProBlogger, Is Your Blog Ready for the Festive Season?

Attract With Visual Elements

Creating a visually appealing appearance can help engage your audience a bit more than without. Try to add fun, exciting but meaningful visuals to your blog posts. Infographics can also help stimulate your reader and bring excitement to your content. Adding visual elements to your blog post can increase the chances someone remembers up to 65% according to John Medina from Brain Rules.

Allow Guest Posts

Allowing your readers to sign up and guest post on your blog can bring fresh and new content to your readers. Keep in mind it’s very important to only allow real bloggers or readers to guest blog and to not promote the idea of selling links. Creating fresh new content from a guest blogger is great when the content is quality and targeted to your audience.

Guest Blog With Blog Engage

Let me know some of the ways you keep your blog fresh with new content. I would love to hear your tips and personal tricks on how you continue to create fun and exciting new content for your readers.

Little Things Make A Big Difference

When blogging, it’s the little things that will make the biggest difference. Sometimes these can be goals you have set for yourself, short term or long, big or small. Obtaining, reaching or achieving these millstones will help keep your attitude positive and your motivation high for continuing to move forward in blogging.

There’s something special about seeing results from our hard efforts when blogging. A lot of hard work goes into setting up our blogs, purchasing domain names, creating our hosting and so much more. The to do list for starting a blog is huge and we set out to accomplish everything needed in order to help with our success.

Your First Comment

Nothing feels better from a bloggers perspective then when we get our first sincere blog comment. Everyday we log in, moderate and delete spam comments and trust me when I say the task becomes cumbersome. There’s something special about writing content and having someone interested enough to leave a comment. Social engagement, in my opinion is a huge part of being a blogger.

Your First Re Tweet

Nothing beats seeing someone re-tweet or tweet one of your blog posts. There you are, writing a blog post every week for weeks, feeling alone and out of no where, boom your first social engagement on social media! These are exciting times for any blogger! It’s time to build connections and it’s time to expand our reader base.

Being Consistent

Many bloggers may find blogging consistently part of their regular routine and that’s great, but some of us struggle and have great difficulty being consistent with releasing new blog content. If you set a goal to write blog posts with some form of consistency and you reached that goal, good on you this is a big deal and brings forth great motivation. Continue to set these goals and to reach these new millstones, never stop challenging yourself in life and in blogging.

When we add up all these little things we realize they amount to one amazing thing and that’s us blogging, having fun and crating something that is special to us. Success is measured in so many ways and the relevance is typically based on perspective so don’t let anyone tell you, you are not doing amazing because you are.

You are doing amazing things!

What Matters Most When Blogging?

Isn’t this an interesting question ? What does matter the most when blogging? If you ask one person perhaps content will be the suggestion. If you ask another they may claim consistency is key to success. If we continue to get different suggestions on what matters most when blogging, then perhaps it’s a matter of perspective.

Perspective plays a big role in our lives everyday. It determines how we react to specific situations, what we like or dislike and perhaps what we would consider to be most important when blogging. Let’s have a look at some of our different blogger types and what we may assume is most important to them when it comes to blogging.

The Money Maker

If your goal is to acquire blog traffic and convert it into sales, what’s most important to you as a money maker blogger is making the sale! You can measure what’s most important here by setting an expectation that for every 100 unique visits you get, you need a specific percentage to convert into sales. If you can accomplish this goal, you would be happy and we can consider this to be what matters most for the money maker blogger.

The Social Blogger

I’m going to suggest what matters most to the social bloggers is the ability to have interaction with other bloggers or blog readers. This can be in the form of blog comments, engagement on social media but bottom line this blogger will tell you what matters most is building new relationships and meeting new people. Though this blogger may be influenced by potentially earning money, without the social engagement aspect they will not obtain what matters most to them.

The Educator

This blogger thrives off providing high quality educational content for its readers. Regardless of social engagement, comments or money, this blogger takes pride in producing stellar content for all their readers. The content will be extremely accurate with infographics, detailed statistics and examples to back the article. This blogger, when producing high quality content would suggest that is what matters most when blogging.

The Creative Blogger

This blogger in not only unique with the blog but also in life. The artistic beauty flows into their content creation creating a fun and exciting blog post to read for all. Pictures will be predominant throughout the article, colourful and creative will be what matters most. The post will be fun, exciting and uplifting leaving you desiring more.

What matters most to us as bloggers plays a key role in finding continued success and happiness when online blogging. Do you enjoy your blog? Are you having difficulty creating content and keeping things exciting and motivating for yourself?

Perhaps you still haven’t found what matters most for you as a blogger.

Finding Inspiration Wherever We Can

Blogging everyday must become cumbersome. Finding ways to be motivated and inspired is fundamental to maintaining any type of consistency with your content creation. Personally I’ve never successfully blogged on a daily basis, so I’m only assuming it becomes more and more challenging to write new content.

Where Do We Find Inspiration?

Inspiration has to be all around us right? I think it’s safe to say any topic, title or story headline that engages our mind to wonder or question is a direct form of inspiration. If we put even the slightest amount of energy into something it means we have an interest and we have, to some extent been inspired.

Surrounding our self by things we enjoy or like will increase the probability of becoming inspired. We have to follow our interests, hobbies, habits we have to find places of interest to us. When trying to write new content I find myself being inspired by reading other blog sites. I find posts that grab my attention and make me want to know more, this is when I know I’m starting to be inspired.

https://efektasgroup.com/2018/05/04/find-inspiration/

I find most my inspiration from social media websites that allow and promote the idea of self promotion. This meaning sites that6 are blog marketing social media communities such as Blog Engage, Blokube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Viral Content Bee etc.. I tend to find blog posts that interest me and proceed to read them in hopes to find inspiration for my own next post.

So, the next time you find yourself struggling to write new content, make sure to spend some time on your favourite social media sites to find inspiration, open your eyes it’s all around you. Read content that is targeted to your specific niche, get engaged, connect, meet new bloggers. Find your motivation and use it to your advantage!

Hootsuite; A Prospecting Tool For Twitter

Creating sales for your blog requires you to find and funnel targeted blog traffic back to your own blog! Twitter has become a valuable tool for sales of products and services. Twitter is undeniably a rich market of potential customers waiting to buy from us.

Thankfully Hootsuite allows us to easily track and monitor key hashtags specific to our desired audience, in my case for Blog Engage I would be tracking shared content specific to the following.

Blogging
Bloggers
Blogger

Follow the Links

What I do with the above streams is follow the links to engage and meet a new prospects for myself. My goal is to visit the site with one purpose in mind, take an action that directly results in the author following me back to Blog Engage. The method is not full proof, finding blogs that are worth commenting on can be difficult, I want our community base to remain a specific level of quality regarding customer content.

It’s Time To Engage

Once we find a site worth spending our time on we engage by leaving a comment, creating the start of what can potentially become a sale. The comment is an important step in the sales process. Leaving a genuine well written engaging comment will increase the chance of the author visiting your blog. If we cannot lure the content creator from our comment then we will have to try another comment and perhaps some social engagement, tweets, likes, shares!

This process is continued daily and never stops. Sales never stop and for that reason we continue to search out and meet new prospects. Target your Hootsuite streams for your specific audience niche and start engaging potentially new customers today.

Finding Your Blogging Consistency

We are all creatures of habit and one thing consistent, we do not like change. Regardless if change brings forth new opportunities and successes we as humans simply do not like change.

Naturally being consistent with content creation on your blog has a direct impact on retaining your current readers and growing your future reader base. Being consistent with content creation has a direct impact on the success of your blog.

What is Consistency?

As a blogger we can break consistency down into two fundamental elements. We first have consistency with content creation and secondly with content topic and relevancy. Please do see my previous post regarding giving your readers what they want.

Content Creation

As bloggers we can focus on consistency by blogging on a specific day. For example, every Friday your blog will release a new post. If you can be consistent with this Friday post you will start to gain readers who actually visit your site every Friday anticipating your next post. Consistency in content creation on specific dates is extremely important to the success of your blog.

Content Relevancy

Creating consistent and on topic content will be key to the success of your blog. Remaining on topic will allow you to funnel like minded blog readers and increase the success of your blog. I do my best to stay on topic here on Blog Engage keeping our blog posts relevant to blogging for you, our blog readers.

I am a terrible example of what it means to be consistent as blogger, and perhaps you are as well. With that said I do have the knowledge and experience from my 14 years of online marketing to say consistency is key to success with blogging. Some of the greatest and most popular bloggers have found success by following these simple but effective strategies for blogging.

Ways To Remain Consistent

Prepare multiple blog posts in one sitting
Write and schedule the content ahead of time
Be committed and serious
Write content on the go
Schedule and manage your daily tasks
Set smaller obtainable goals

As I sit here writing this post, I truly believe I have never once been an actual blogger. I have grown Blog Engage into a great community with thousands of members, but not once have I truly engaged the audience with blogging content. It’s time for that to change, I have a wealth on knowledge that I want to share with you, to help your blog have a better chance of success.

Give Them What They Want Blogging 101

One of the easiest ways to create a successful blog is to give your readers what they want. People love content, and even more so love content that’s engaging and on topic to the readers interest.

The most successful online bloggers give the readers exactly what they are looking for, perhaps you’re curious as to how they do this everyday? Creating on topic and engaging content is not easy but it is possible.

Start The Research

Understanding your readers is key to creating engaging and on topic content. For example I’m not going to write about sports cars and the manufacturing design that goes into the process. I know my readers are bloggers, hello we are on Blog Engage right ?

Typically when starting a blog you’re going to pick a niche in which your blog will create content for. This can be anything from sports to social media marketing. The challenge to stay within this niche and to provide content that is consistent to one topic for your readers is difficult.

Blogging Burnout Is Real

Lots of bloggers face a point in blogging where they become exhausted of the content they are required to create. Let’s face it, blogging about sports everyday for years can become quite cumbersome. In fact at times, blogging can start feeling more like a job rather than a hobby.

Regardless of these challenges you need to remain focused and on topic. Your readers demand this of you and as mentioned have expectations of the content they will be reading on your blog, try not to sway to far off topic.

Creating New Opportunities

Perhaps its time for you to venture into a new niche? If you find yourself exhausted and lacking motivation to create new content you may benefit from starting a second or even third blog! Expanding the topics you can cover can easily be achieved by creating a new brand new blog.

This is one of the most wonderful things about blogging, you’re never limited to one topic when it’s so easy and affordable to own multiple blog sites! Don’t limit yourself, expand into new ideas and new topics, let your mind grow and reach for success.

How Blog Engage Markets Content for Upgrades and DTFP Clients

Hello my blogging friends. Today I bring you a short, well relatively short video on how Blog Engage helps you our blogging customers market your blog content. If you “Upgrade” your blog post, or sign up to our DTFP marketing package in the video below is what I will do to help market your content.

I use my social media accounts and subscriptions to multiple platforms to help distribute your content into several social media websites, pages and groups. If you don’t have time to push your content our into the world wide web then hire me to do it for you!

During the content distribution I do my best to ensure hashtags are using specific to your content, facebook pages are tagged to help build more awareness for your content and brand.