Learn to Achieve Your Goals with 5 Secrets of Great Bloggers
Dreams can become reality if you’re willing to work hard and take risks. Sometimes that means walking away and leaving your comfortable life behind for a time while you adjust to your new circumstances. Other times, it means starting to work harder now while you wait for the day when you can break from your routine and start living the way you imagine.
One of the best ways to create your own course for success is to listen to the advice of successful bloggers who already blazed the trail. Their methods of starting and becoming popular may help you as you start to see your dreams realized. A large part of being successful is knowing when to take risks, when to be conservative, and how to identify, connect and resonate with potential readers. These things are something that every truly successful blogger masters in time.
Connect with People
For example, Brian Clark of Copyblogger recommends understanding your audience. He suggests discussing a topic on social media before you create content about that topic. In this way, you can test ideas and see what is popular and what doesn’t fare as well. Sometimes having an idea of what your audience wants can help propel you to the next level in terms of views–which means you’re that much closer to earning a living from it. Connecting with readers can be hard at first, so don’t get discouraged if some of your posts miss the mark. Remember that you’re creating content that will build up and draw people to you over time.
Use Your Effort
But creating content and finding your audience isn’t a simple matter. You need to figure out who you’re speaking to and about what. Many potential bloggers start strong and then slowly lapse out of posting over time. The successful ones stay the course. One way to achieve that level of success is to do as Mark Cuban recommends and “follow your effort”. On the billionaire’s popular blog, he suggests considering how you spend your time instead of what you feel passionate about. Cuban argues that successful people use their time wisely to become good at something; passion doesn’t equal effort. You can look at this two ways. One is to become passionate about what you spend your time doing. If you’re involved in a car shipping enterprise, for example, and spend all your time working on that, build your dreams on it instead of another venture.
Take Risks
You can follow your heart and your passion at once if you’re willing to put effort into it and take risks. For example, Katie Hall decided in the space of a single conversation that she needed to leave the United Kingdom to see the world. Hall says that “Sometimes you need to take that leap of faith and follow your heart.” If you know that your current routine isn’t right for you, it’s okay to decide to change course. Not everyone immediately knows what they want from life. But after five years and many different countries, Hall found herself and her passion by making a change.
Start Small
You can also know what you love and apply your time and effort to that without immediately changing everything. Heidi Nazarudin was making a great living in Tokyo as the CEO of a company. But her love was fashion. Nazarudin couldn’t walk away from her primary income on a whim, so she worked on fashion in her spare time until she was known enough to take the risk and let go of clients for whom she was working. While you don’t need to pack your things, search for auto transport services, and get a passport to be successful, sometimes a change of location is necessary. Nazarudin moved to LA because that’s a popular location that allowed her to get to the cutting edge of her niche.
Add Value
Once you’ve got your passion and your workflow down, it’s time to figure out how to improve what you have so that it adds more value to readers. On their blog, The Minimalists say that the only way to attract and keep the kind of readers you want is to give them something of value. Whether that’s your experience, perspective, or something else original that you bring to the table is something you need to figure out for yourself, but it never hurts to look at what the competition is doing and see what you can add to what they offer.
Taking the advice of successful bloggers may make you more successful in turn. Always consider what people want, get started in the way that works best for you, and decide how you can add value to your niche. With time and effort, you’ll find that you become more successful like the already-established bloggers who followed their dreams.