Blog for a living

Want to know the Secret to a successful blog?

Well, I’ve got news for you, both good and bad.

The bad one: there’s no secret. You know why? Because no one’s hiding anything. The key to build a high-traffic blog has always been right in front of your eyes! Where? Just read on!

Ok, then what’s the good news? The good news is there are infinite number of solutions. You can be popular, successful, rich, whatever you want in many ways. Here are some examples.

Different approaches, all seems to work

If you look around and examine the blogosphere, you’ll eventually find at least a handful of people who made their way to the top and now earn much more money than they need for a living.

The funniest thing is that most of them tell you exactly how they accomplished it. And if you take a look, you’ll find that they did it in very different ways.

For example, here is Gary Vaynerchuk, who works like a maniac, often more than 10 hours a day, responding to hundreds of e-mails daily like crazy, and I’d say he’s more than a full-timer. But he’s successful, right? He achieved the desired results.

Or here is Darren Rowse, or Maki, both successful bloggers who use a great mix of social media marketing and creating excellent content. But while Maki writes “only” 1-2 great articles a week, Darren writes an averages two daily. Again, different ways, both of them work.

Or take a look at the Cracked.com blog! They figured out how to make Digg-friendly content to the extent that they hit the Digg front page almost daily and people are literally competing to submit their articles. Sounds too good to be true?

On the other hand, here is Steve Pavlina, who’ve never spent much time on marketing, yet he’s one of today’s most successful bloggers, producing a huge amount of quality in-depth articles every week, sometimes working 10-15 hours on a single posts. But he also succeeded, on his own, and he loves what he does for a living.

As you can see, there are several paths to a successful blog, and these were only a few examples.
But I think you already figured out what’s the problem with these…

The problem with the various approaches

I can imagine how some of you grimaced on the thought of working 15 hours a day, or you said: “I can’t spend hours on promotion just to be popular! I have a job and I have to spend some time with my family too, I don’t have time for that! Besides, it’s not even my style, I don’t want to spend hours daily only to make myself popular on a damn social media site!”. And you’re absolutely right. Everyone’s different, and that’s why you can’t simply copy one of these people’s success. Even if you try to, eventually you’d understand that it’s just not your style, you’d become overwhelmed and realize you hate what you’re doing. And that would be silly. Isn’t it the same reason you started your blog to quit your job and earn money from something fulfilling?
If you started your blog for non-profit reasons, then it’s even more true: you don’t want to settle for doing something you don’t enjoy, do you?

Don’t get me wrong. These bloggers are fascinating and popularizing your blog on a social media sites or working 10 hours on a post is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a picnic. But only if you enjoy it. And it’s very important. You must find your own style and your own way to success, and enjoy every moment of the journey. Or else you’re going to fail.

No matter how many articles you read on leveraging social media traffic or about those little tricks to get backlinks to your blog, if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’ll either stop doing it do it poorly. And why would you waste your time doing an awful job anyway?

Honest blogging - an approach for you

If you look at blogging, what are those areas you can’t live without? What are the actions you have to take in order to run any blog?

You know, the basic stuff: writing content and some search engine optimization.

That’s all, you don’t need to join any blogging communities, run any silly “backlink-campaign”, or do anything fancy, you need to focus only on these two areas: creating content, so you provide some kind of value to others and some search engine optimization to make sure you get some visitors. And since some basic search engine optimization takes virtually no time, there’s one thing left: creating quality content.

What!? What about getting inbound links, commenting on other blogs, dropping those Entrecards all day long or buying some ads on other sites?

Nope, you don’t need anything else. With the Honest Blogging approach, what you basically do is concentrate only on creating content and spend almost no time on conventional marketing techniques.

How Honest Blogging works

Creating content is a vital area of blogging that every blogger have to do regardless of topic, his style or whether he likes it or not (if you don’t like it, why would you even start a blog!?).
This is the only thing that’s identical in every blog. You must create content.

And this is why the this approach is right for you: because it’s the same for everyone.

What about promoting your blog? Getting traffic? You must realize that creating content doesn’t equal to writing posts. It’s much more. I’m going to show you how to get vast amount of traffic using your content, and how to write unique, original posts to hook your readers onto your blog.
And guess what? You can still do any kind of other things you enjoy about blogging. Honest blogging gives you the foundation that you can complement in any way you want. But you don’t have to! And that’s the key. If you choose to build a successful blog focusing only on content, you can easily do it.
Now, let’s see the other benefits of this method.

Blogging for money

If you’re trying to make some money from your blog, it’s a well known fact (and common sense too) that the amount of money you make is in direct proportion to the amount of value you provide. Consequently, your income is based on your contribution to your readers. If you’d like to understand this concept more deeply, here’s a fantastic article about money and its true nature.

Having said that, guess what aspect of blogging provides 99.999% of the value you deliver? Is it your wonderful blog design? Perhaps your Plurk karma? Or the number of hours you spend farming Entrecard credits? Of course not!

The value you provide comes from your content.

Now you know the single most important area you must concentrate on to make the most money from your blog: your content. And guess what? The Honest Blogging approach does exactly just that! With this method, you’ll spend 95% of your time learning how to make outstanding content and creating it.

This ensures that you not only share the most value, but also that you receive the money you deserve for your work.

Blogging and stress

Ok, stress may be a little strong word, but I’m sure there are times when your head is just spinning because of the several tasks you should handle, all at once.

After you come home from work, you’re tired, you sit in front of the computer, check your e-mail if someone has spammed your inbox on Blogcatalog, then you go do the daily “comment-campaign”, because you need to promote your blog, right?, then you drop something like 30000 Entrecards on affiliate marketing sites disguised as blogs, and then maybe you still have ten minutes or so to craft a short post. Sounds familiar? No? Well, I’m glad it doesn’t, I haven’t assumed my precious reader would do such stupid things anyway J.

But, you see, blogging is a complex job. You constantly need to focus on multiple things, and that’s fine and challenging to some extent, but can be very overwhelming above that line.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew that you need to concentrate only on a handful of tasks, and if you manage to do the most important (creating content), the rest doesn’t even matter?
You bet! And that’s exactly what you’re going to do with Honest Blogging. You need to focus only on creating quality content to achieve the results.

And besides that, remember the problem with the various approaches we talked about at the beginning of the post? If you follow the Honest Blogging philosophy, you don’t need to worry about the process becoming boring, or that you must do things that are against your own values.
That’s why I named it Honest Blogging. You can give yourself, always, and don’t have to worry about doing pointless, repetitive, heartless tasks.

Remember: content is King, and if you don’t believe it, then it’s probably because yours sucks. If you believe it, then why waste your time on unnecessary things?

Is Honest Blogging a superior approach?

As I’ve said, there are many ways to success. I believe it’s one of them. I don’t say it’s the best. But I say it’s a pretty darn good way.

I’m sure what I’ve written above is going to trigger a lot of resistance, and that’s fine. I don’t expect anyone to believe me everything. But I expect you to at least be curious and see how it works out. Because I’ve resolved to make my blog successful using this approach.
It’s a great challenge for me, and I’m sure my success will to inspire others as well to choose this path, create quality content, and make the blogosphere a richer place.

But hey, whether you become an Honest Blogger right now or you wait to see what happens, stay tuned! Because in the following weeks I’m going to share some great tips on how to write really original articles, how to master the art of promoting your website with your content, and some other insights on how to think about blogging in a very new perspective…

Hi there everyone! I’m sorry I haven’t posted for almost 2 weeks, but a nice mixture of 2 days of laziness, some time needed to think about what I’m going to do with this blog and the new design was responsible for the delay, not me, I’m absolutely innocent I promise

As you can see, the blog has a new design, which I don’t think is going to last forever, but I’m sure it’ll be used much longer than the previous one.
As I’ve mentioned in this post, no free wordpress theme can compete with the one you make for yourself. And it’s not because yours will be so awesome, but because it’s unique, and the feeling that you made it for yourself gives you the very special feeling that you really “own” the website.

I hope you guys like it too, I’m quite satisfied with it at the moment, although I still need to make some changes here and there, and maybe the colors came off a little strong, but I think it’s really not bad for first try.

Why?

The reason I created a new theme for the blog is that I wasn’t completely satisfied with the previous one, it bugged me every day, so I thought the best solution is to make the change early, so I can focus on writing after the design is OK.

I learned to love GIMP

All the images and graphics on the site are made or edited by GIMP. It’s a free photo- and image manipulation software, much like Photoshop except it doesn’t cost you 999$. I always wanted to learn how to use it for easy tasks, but over the past few days I’ve found that it’s much more powerful than I thought.
You can do literally anything you can do with Photoshop, you just need to learn how to use it. So I’m sure I’m going to use it intensively in the future as well with photo manipulation and stuff. It made for much bigger challenges than the calculator on the right for example

I learned to hate Internet Explorer

If you’ve ever designed a web template from scratch, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sure, I’m a total beginner in this area, but it wasn’t the only reason why I had so much trouble with IE. After you get everything in place and are very happy that it looks fine in both Firefox and Chrome, then you check it out in IE, and you wonder why it loads some kind of Picasso gallery rather than your blog. It’s just a big mess. Then you make some changes to clean up your code to be good enough for Internet Explorer (although I can’t understand if it’s good for all other browsers, why isn’t it good for IE..), but then I find that most of the errors are not even my fault, in fact they’re well-known IE display bugs that’s been existing throughout 3-4 versions. It seems ridiculous there are so many online discussions dedicated to help you solve IE bugs. Why haven’t they solved them yet if they know about it since IE 5? I can’t understand.
But after hours of work and some compromising I could solve all the problems, fortunately. Though in IE the site is still not the same… Uhh, probably this is the main reason I won’t redesign the blog for a long-long time.

New stuff

As you can see I’ve made a lot of changes including some ad placement optimization, with the banner at the top, I’m also curious how adsense backgrounds will perform, and the little calculator of course, so now you can bookmark my blog easier

But the biggest change maybe is that I “converted” the blog into a full site, with a home page, and some other pages as well, like the Blog For a Living Center, where you’ll find my biggest series, some contests I’d like to hold and other crazy stuff I make up.

I also changed my mind a little bit about how I want to and how I should write, I won’t go into details, you’ll see it anyway in the coming posts, but you should expect longer in-depth posts in the future.

I’m also going to promote my blog in other ways to make it more fun and less boring for me, you’ll see what I’m talking about in the Honest Blogging series.

Hmm, I think that’s it. Now you know what to expect, so stay tuned and don’t miss the next posts.

I welcome any suggestions on how to make the design or the blog better, and I’m very curious what you think about it. And be honest, I won’t be aggrieved