Write more, publish less
How to become succesful as a blogger
How do you define blogging success? Is it about reaching the maximum amount of people? Is it about money? Or is it about having a meaningful conversation that adds value to others’ and your own life? A discussion of quantity versus quality and de-cluttering the internet.
What is blogging success? Is it posting everyday and gaining more and more followers, likes and responses because online platform algorithms like it when you post more often? Is it crafting amazingly strong content and only posting once every month or so? Is it gaining enough traction with your blog by using traditional online marketing tactics, so you can sell product or services and gain enough income to live a good life?
What are succesful bloggers doing?
Let’s have a look at what some other, by various definitions succesful blogger-types here on Medium are saying on the matter:
The implicit definition of success here: being featured in the platform’s Top Stories; reaching a lot of people. Tim Denning’s advice broken down really quick: Be real, leverage publications, be nice to people who contact you, collaborate with other bloggers and publish at least three times per week.
The implicit definition of success here being: being featured gaining a lot of followers and reaching a lot of people. Tom Kuegler’s advice broken down: spend one hour on Medium each day: respond to a few posts with a thoughtful comment (15 mins); read stellar content and analyse what makes it stellar so you can learn (15 mins); write and publish one post per day (30 mins).
Interesting pattern here; reaching a lot of people is important and to do this you must publish every day.
What is blogging success?
But what really is blogging success? As a corporate blogger that would be defined by the number of visitors my writing attracted to the websited of any of my clients. Or the number of whitepaper downloads or newsletter signups or sales they lead to.
Next to blogging professionally, I also blog on a personal note, which I do here on Medium of course, and here at Frankwatching [Dutch].
My personal posts that have had the most impact in the sense of being viewed, shared and back-linked to were very well researched, often long-form (2000+ words), showed off my personal style and/or played into a hype technology of the moment.
But what is more important? Over 40.000 views (within the relatively small Dutch language area) or 1 coworker saying she read something I posted and it had her thinking all week-end? 700 shares or 1 contact form filled out?
Of course it’s not an either/or question, between reach and meaningful impact. But if you have to choose, of course the most important is making a meaningful connection with someone.
I think I’d rather have one of my friends or coworkers say they were moved or inspired by one of my posts, than anything else. Let’s drop the obsession with vanity metrics and analytics alltogether. It’s really about real impact, isn’t it?
What it means to blog
I think each of the above could be a valid definition of success for a blogger. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, lately, and this is what I believe blogging should really be about, for me:
Blogging should be about impact. It should be an avenue for sharing original, personally created or combined ideas or insights – value- with an audience that is able and willing to validate or criticize your thinking. In a business-oriented setting, adding value first like this can easily lead to increasing your brand reach, brand value and capturing leads.
Approaching blogging this way improves your thinking, and hopefully the lives of others improve because you have offered at least some people valuable insights and knowledge with each post. Or gave them something to think about.
This way of thinking also places blogging right in the middle between just capturing fleeting thoughts, ideas and other brainfarts and posting them on a platform like twitter, and refining and crafting your thoughts, stories and writing toward condensing them into a book, a screen play, an essay or whitepaper.
Now, that does feel pretty intuitive, doesn’t it?
What about content, content, content?
The Gary Vaynerchuks of the world have a point. Of course there’s the law of large numbers and your odds of being discovered by anybody increase with every piece of content you push out. So do the odds of you making a meaningful and mutually beneficial connection.
But, what if everybody thinks and acts like that? And there’s already so much stuff available. There’s a complete tidal wave of content being unleashed upon our eyes and brains every second of every waking day. A lot of that content is quantity-over-quantity crap.
What’s the problem with blogging a lot?
“It’s only one straw — said 8 billion people.”
And it’s just one more blogpost, said all the bloggers and marketers reading this right now. We’re absolutely drastically littering the internet. We’re adding to the tidal wave of content rushing over a lot of peoples’ brains each day. This doesn’t only apply to blogging, mind you; this applies to marketing and content in general.
Next to that: we’re devaluing our own work; our own words and content, and those of others.
Write more, think more, publish less
Let’s all make a push toward treating people’s attention with more respect. So read, research, reflect, and write more – to make what you publish when you publish that much more powerful and impactful.
Which in turn means that it’s fairly unlikely that each one of us that wants to blog, has some unique and well enough thought-ought insight to share every single day. Let’s be honest with each other.
Be great, be found: screw the platform algorithm
Yet that’s what algorithms and business models of platforms that facilitate blogging are wired to reinforce, and yes that definitely seems to be the case for Medium as well. But we have to make a choice to value our own and our readers’ time and attention more, and more appropriately.
Also, remember that a lot of your traffic is going to come from other sources: being backlinks from relevant articles and web pages, and search engines. I promise you you’ll have an easier time making a meaningful contribution to and connection with someone who went looking for what you wrote.
A lot of my most viewed, commented and shared articles had a lot of traffic come from organic search and backlinks, which reinforce each other. Applying basic SEO strategy is a courtesy, both to your audience and to your own efforts.
Refine, refine, refine!
So, my fellow blogger, my fellow writer, my fellow content marketer. Screw the algorithm. Write more; journal, — please by all means do; it’s a great way to become a better you, especially for people who love to write.
Polish your thoughts and throw away what you can easily identify as useless simply by googling if anyone else has written something of the sort on the matter at hand. Or by having a smart friend proofread.
And please, publish less. But when you do publish, make sure your work stands out because it is well written and well thought-out and/or researched. There’s too much content screaming for everyone’s attention as it is.
Let’s think of blogging as more of a “cuisine tasting of what a michelin-star restaurant has to offer” and less of a “I’ll just chuck a different variety of dime-a-dozen cheeseburger bites at you every single day and see if anything sticks.”
Proof of the pudding: I contemplated on writing this piece for about three months, and if you look at my history here on Medium you’ll see a gap between may and august of this year. Now you tell me if my theorem makes sense, and if this post was indeed valuable and/or makes you think.
I greatly value and thank you for your attention. That’s why I try to bring value. I’d love it if you would let me know how you valued this article, by clapping or in the comments below.
Finally, if you know anyone who you think this article might be valuable for, please share it.
