3 Changes To Make Your Blog Worthwhile
This blog used to be a waste of my time.
I spent years churning out posts that frankly, only I wanted to read. And that’s essentially what happened. Only I and just a handful of friends were the only ones who visited this blog on a regular basis.
But in the past 18 months or so, things turned around. Traffic went from an average of 20 visits per day to 300 and climbing. These aren’t earth shattering numbers, but it’s a distinct change over a relatively short period of time.
So what happened?
I made three meaningful changes. If you’re struggling with gaining traction on your blog, the way I did for the first 4+ years of this one, you might want to consider making similar adjustments:
It’s not about what you will do.
It’s about what you’ve done.
This was a conscious shift in my approach to deciding what to write about on this blog. In those early years, I usually wrote about things I plan to do and lofty goals I aspire to achieve.
Here’s the thing. Nobody wants to read about that stuff. People only want to read about things that they aspire to, if the thing they’re reading will help them get there.
And frankly, it made me feel like shit when one of my forward-looking posts didn’t materialize the way I had hoped. So I decided it’s time to stop doing that.
I made the conscious decision to write only about things that I’ve done. It turns out, after-the-fact case studies with tangible lessons, tactics, and takeaways, are much more attractive to readers. Who knew?
By the way – I still write about my future plans, goals, and ideas. Only now I write those in private, in my journal (I use Day One app for this). I’m my only audience for these entries. In fact, this allows me to be even more open and clear out my thoughts since I know I’m writing just for me.
Write about your experience, but position it as a lesson.
This was another shift, which happened at the same time as the first. As I started writing more about the things I’ve done, I found that I’m constantly talking about myself and my experience.
In personal conversations with friends, I rarely do this. I hate talking about myself. Actually, I’m not sure most of my friends and family even know what I do for a living (no, guys, I’m not pulling a Walter White).
But through my writing, podcasting, and lately some video, I do open up about what I’ve been up to. But I can’t simply write about “here’s what I did today”. At the end of the day, it needs to provide real value to the reader.
My preferred way to do that is through case studies. The less abstract, the better. I always learned best by watching exactly what someone else has done, and adapting their methods to my own situation. Then fill in the gaps by actually doing the thing myself.
It’s the tried and true method of Do, Learn, Teach.
So I start by taking a close look at something I recently accomplished in my business. Then I focus on what exactly made it successful. Then I craft the case study around a group of actions and steps that I took — and that you can take too — in hopes it will put your on a similar path.
The tricky part is getting the timing just right.
If you follow the Do, Learn, Teach method too quickly, covering something you only just started doing yesterday, then chances are you haven’t uncovered the lesson yet. You’re jumping the gun. It’s best to wait until you’ve done the thing multiple times, refined the process, seen real results, and have extracted the lesson.
But if you wait too long, months or years after the fact, you’re too far removed from all the ins and outs that made the lesson work. The best, most insightful, case studies, are the ones packed with gory details. It’s best to write about something while it’s still fresh in your mind.
For example, a few weeks ago I posted about my method for recording and tracking metrics. Metrics had been something I had struggled with for years. So I knew the pain very well, which made the solution even more rewarding. The solution — a weekly routine/process and spreadsheet pulling in all key data — was something I had been designing, refining, and running for about 8 weeks before I wrote about it. By the time the post published, I had refined it to the point where it was ready to delegate to my team, and now it’s fully engrained in the business. A perfect point to extract the lessons and share on the blog.
Start an email newsletter… And treat it right.
In early 2013, I started my email newsletter, where I send only my best content. The newsletter definitely had an impact on the number of returning visitors to my site.
But the newsletter isn’t just a tool for promoting content. It actually helps me craft better content.
For some reason, pressing “Send” on an email blast makes me much more nervous about pressing “Publish” on a blog post. Every time I send to my newsletter, I’m hit with a brief moment of fear. “What if they don’t want what I’m sending them?” There’s a lot of pressure when you’re blasting something into the inboxes of your audience.
That pressure forces me to deliver only the things that I truly think my subscribers will find valuable. If I don’t think it’s up to that standard, I don’t send it. But I want my posts to be newsletter-worthy, so I work harder to craft them. I find I trash many more posts before publishing than I used to. I also find I’m spending a lot more time writing every post. I used to write one in a morning, now each post takes about a week.
Another cool byproduct of staying in contact with my list, is reading their responses. I get much more email replies than I do blog comments. These are great for a few reasons:
First, I write for people who are like me, so it’s always enjoyable to engage with like-minded folks.
The real benefit of engaging with subscribers is the feedback they give me. They tell me which posts resonated, and they tell me what their burning questions are. The more I listen and process those, the better I’m able to serve them with content that they will find valuable.
So there are 3 ideas to help your blogging efforts:
- Write about what you’ve done (not what you will do)
- Form teachable case studies
- Make it count with your email newsletter