6 Stages of Successful Blogging (& Where Most People Quit)
We are a restless family of four, looking for adventure, ways to increase our funds, and more educaitonal options for our littles. We have exchanged things for experiences. Join us!There are a lot of excuses we can tell ourselves as to why we can’t start an online business.
Heck, there are plenty of people out there that will look at you funny if you tell them this is your dream and they will think you will fail. I don’t think that way, all the big (and little) online successes don’t think that way, and you don’t think that way (if you did you wouldn’t even bother reading this post).
Creating a business that functions online is not that much different than creating a physical or brick and mortar business, except it takes a lot less money to get it started (so much less!), you can run it from anywhere (this is one of our biggest motivators as we strive to travel more around the world and offer world schooling to our boys), have flexible working hours and eventually you can often work part-time with a full-time income.
Getting to the Success Stage of blogging isn’t easy.
Those who have succeeded and those who have failed will all tell you this. What a lot of people don’t know, are all the stages that you need to go through before you can even get to the ‘Success Stage’ and that within each of these stages you have multiple aspects to prepare before moving onto the next one. Those who fail will also probably tell you that they tried to skip some of these stages, perhaps got confused and mixed them up or even got overwhelmed with all the information about what lie ahead and gave up.
This post will help you see the Stages in simple format.
It will not go into great detail (in an effort to not overwhelm you with too much information), but it will give you an overarching idea of what processes you might need to go through in order to reach the ‘Success Stage’. Once you read this post then I encourage you to narrow your focus to the Stage that you are currently in. Don’t go ahead before your ready/your business is ready and take it one step at a time. You will want to rush it, but like all good things in life, it can take a bit of time and it will happen in its own time (as you grow and are ready).
So, without further ado, brush up on the Stages of Successful Blogging, find out where most people quit…and then don’t quit, move forward and make your own success.
Stage #1: Pre-Starter
This stage is when you are working out what kind of business you want to start. It can be an intimidating time because you don’t want to pick the ‘wrong’ model or topic or you don’t want to pick something that you will later not enjoy.
But something to keep in mind for this Stage is that you should definitely take the time to pick something you are interested in, but know that you may not be passionate about it at all times.
I like to equate it to relationships. Perhaps it’s a ‘Hollywood soulmate’ situation, where you just love and have a deep passion for something in particular. If so, great, then you already know what do, now get started.
But perhaps it’s less Hollywood and more like most relationships, where passion may have an ebb and flow and that thing that really builds that relationship up is commitment. Commitment to find joy in as many moments as you can, commitment to struggle through the difficult times, commitment to continue to move deeper into your relationship. Your relationship with your business will have trials and tribulations, but if you stick to it and you give it your all, then you will find joy and satisfaction even when you aren’t feeling the passion.
Success Tip#1: Pick a great subject and commit to it!
We have materials to help you pick a great business model here.
Stage #2: Starter
This can be one of the most exciting stages. You’ve picked your idea and now your ready to build and create the website that will become your amazing journey to financial freedom. Entrepreneurs have lots of passion at this stage and jump into it with both feet. This is great, but what many of these people don’t understand is that this is one of the most time consuming aspects to building your business.
Think of it like opening up a beautiful brick and mortar coffee shop, like our friends Cait and Spencer at Cait’s Cafe. They leased a space in the downtown area and announced to the town that they were in fact opening up a new amazing cafe. With excitement everyone wondered what date they were to open, but it took them a long time before they could even give anyone an idea of that date. Why? Because they had to get an interior designer to design the space for them, order the furniture and kitchen appliances, strip and sand the hardwood floors, paint the walls, hang the lights, build the bathrooms, etc, etc.
They had to take months to build the interior of their cafe before they could open the doors to customers and launch their delicious specialty drinks and coffees with their popular croissants. It was months before they could actually make money for all that time and money they spent on getting the space ready. But because they took their time and made it amazing, their line ups are sometimes out the door and their customers keep coming back.
Before you can truly open your doors to the customers that are excited about your product, you need to have the space ready for them. This takes time, time that depends on you and what you can give to it. Full time, you might be through this stage in a few weeks to a month. If part-time, as you can find time, then it could take a few months. It can also take a bit of money (but far less than starting a coffee shop! It could start as low as $5/month for hosting and a theme).
Where you’ll spend most of your time is creating a easy-flow website with some nice graphics and populating it with great content. Sounds easy, but can take time. Doing this without making money can feel counterproductive, but remember the coffee shop, you can’t sell your product without a great space to do it.
This is where most people quit. Many have a hard time seeing past this stage and lose momentum. It’s hard to continue on building something that isn’t bringing return and it’s hard to see that the return is actually coming sooner than you might think. With this stage complete, you are on the road to building up your income. ‘Building’ being the key, because it also doesn’t come over night.
So, don’t lose momentum, don’t be one of the many. Be one of the few that has the freedom they desired and complete this step amazingly so that your next step is ready to go.
Success Tip #2: Prepare an amazing space for your audience to come to so that they keep coming back for more.
Stage #3: Launch
The Launch. This is something that I didn’t always understand. Many people have the ‘If you build it, they will come’ mentality to online business. Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. With reinvigorated excitement over your beautifully crafted and awesomely populated website, you are ready to launch your online business to bring people to you and keep them coming back for more.
Before your actual launch you want ensure that you have:
- Amazing giveaways to build your email list
- Everything in place to sign people up for an email list
- Emails prepared for when they do sign up
- Links within your website that keep people reading
- At least one monetization method (but I recommend at least 2, you can read more about that in our blog, “How the Heck do I Make Money on my Blog”)
- Created a consistent schedule to live by once you’ve taken off so that you don’t get behind and always have good new content to give to your audience.
For Launch you will want to:
- Prepared to get your blog in front of lots of people
- Guest blogging
- Guest podcasting
- Setting up your social media
- Setting up your social media strategies
- Create viral content:
- Sharing your ‘Wow’ story(ies)
- Create a great video
- Make is hilarious: Dollar Shave Club
- Make it intriguing: Five Take Flight
- Make it a compilation: Project One Life
- Understand you full marketing strategy (up next)
Success Tip #3: Be active with other related bloggers, get to know them and their content. Build a relationship so that you can offer them a great guest post for your launch.
Stage #4: Marketing
Marketing kind of melds with Launching because you begin marketing your business as soon as you start to tell anyone about your business. But at this stage, I mean that now that you have launched your website, you can begin more asserted effort to market yourself and get your name out there. You can do this with no money, but you can also do this by putting a bit of money into Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, or even Google Ads.
You can market yourself through webinars, how-to videos and again guest posting or blogging for others.
Put into place the little things that get people to stay on your website, buy your eBooks/course, etc, sign up for emails. Create lots of great ‘Call to Actions’, where you ask people to take an action at the end of each blog (comment on your post, email sign up for a bonus worksheet, sign up for a free or paid course, buy/download an eBook, send them to an Affiliate for a sale, etc). Read more about this here: Keep Readers on Your Blog Longer with These Interlinking Tips (& How it Could Bring You More Income)
Success Tip #4: Amongst bloggers, you will hear about branding and it’s importance. This is true for both your entire business (website, social media, eBooks, etc), but doesn’t need to be as scary as it sounds. We’ve simplified this for you: Simple Branding: Easy to Follow Branding Tips
Stage #5: Success
Once you’ve made it through these steps, then you are much more likely to reach success. This is where you will begin to see your first dollars come through and you can begin your first income post….”My First Blogging Dollar”, etc. This is where you will get super excited and some of the really tough waiting times will be more in the past and you’ll be starting into your actual business. This isn’t to say that this part is easy, you still have a ways to go before you make that full time income or are able to hire VA’s to help take some work off your shoulders, but you will start to see some of the income come in and see the rewards for your work.
This is a rare occasion for so many who start out in blogging because they stop in the ‘Starter Stage’ or maybe some get to the ‘Launch Stage’, but if you have made it through the marketing stage, then you are in a much higher percentile of successful bloggers and much more likely to stick to it.
Stage #6: Build & Audit
If you start to see some dollars come in, then make sure you’re following that schedule, keep moving forward, find new and amazing ways to bring your content before your audience and you will rise to the top. You will become the expert and you will see the freedom and success that you’re longing for.
Make sure that in addition to continuing to build content that you are being diligent in auditing your website. This means that you go through your posts and pages to ensure that all links are updated, not broken and include links to new posts. Reinvigurate old posts. Combine posts for great eBooks, email opt ins, etc. Generally make sure that your website is always as optimized as possible.
Continue to build on your success, show the world that your business relationship is strong because of your dedication and the energy you put into it and then help them do the same.
What are you pumped about? How are you planning to get to the Success Stage? Tell us in the comments below!
