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Are you dreaming of starting a blog? You probably have a picture in your mind how your life is going to look like as a blogger: Sitting at home or in a fancy Café with your laptop on your knees hacking away on your newest awe-inspiring blog post. Once you hit publish, you see numerous people instantly visiting the new post and reading it. Comments flooding in of people thanking you for the post.

You offer some products, and you have read some of the income reports flooding the web. That is the kind of money that is going to buy you a house, fancy clothe, lets you travel where you always wanted to go.

That can be your life – but the path that you have to take to get there is going to be rocky. It is going to cost you a ton of sweat, some sleepless nights and some self-doubt when things are not turning out as you planned.

It all sounds so awesome once you get there. But you know: You have to work your butt off all the way!

Because there are some rules of blogging that no one is openly talking about.

1. Blogging is a marathon – not a sprint

Be prepared for an endurance race. Don’t jump in head over heals and invest all your energy in the first couple of days – or weeks. You have to stick to it. And keep going, steadily.

You will get frustrated. You will face writer’s block. You will see success. And some disappointments. It’s all part of the game. If you get through all of it and go ALL the way, you are headed for success!

Image Source: Ghost Blog

2. Writing is only a small part of it

I hear it ever so often: I would love to blog but I am not a writer. But that is so utterly wrong. Why don’t you complain that you are not a marketer or a salesperson, or that you cannot teach other people, or have no clue what kind of product you can offer?

It is not your writing that is going to decide over success or failure. There are far too many other things you have to master and that can go wrong. Writing can be learned!

3. Distribution wins

The most important step on your blogging journey (apart from making money) is to find an audience for your blog. Most bloggers fail at distributing their content.

It starts with being afraid to let people know that they started a blog. But even some more matured bloggers simply fail at marketing.

Without a valid distribution channel and a growing audience for your blog, your blog will always stay your hobby and never turn your life around!

4. Blogging is a series of small tasks that you have to do regularly

Blogging is not at all exciting all day long. Some tasks are recurring tasks, that you simply have to do every day:

• Do your social media.
• Answer comments
• Check your Analytics – develop strategy and tasks from the numbers
• work on your products
• write guest posts
• network with other bloggers
• oh – and write some new posts for your blog, too!

And you have to do these tasks yourself, at least if you are starting out as a one-person business with a limited budget.

Are you looking for a list of tasks to get started with your blogging? Check out this list.

You need to develop habits and a blogging routine that you can stick to. I for instance to my Twitter management early morning with my first cup of coffee – even before I take the dog to the forest. That’s one of my daily routines.

5. Without traffic (an audience) you don’t exist

Well, your blog might exist but not in the minds of any other people but yourself. You need an audience – and you write your posts for that audience. Keep that in mind.

Some bloggers think blogging is about writing what the want to write about. And, sure you can do that. But if you want an audience, a successful blog and eventually make money from it, you have to think about your audience first – and all the time actually:

• what would they want to read
• where can you find them
• how can you make them aware of your blog
• what can you sell to them…

6. Not every piece of advice is going to work for you

So, you found that blogger who is making awesome money from their blog. You bought their course on how to copy their strategy. And then? nothing! Because not every strategy is for every niche, for every personality, country or even your content.

Also, some strategies may simply be outdated and not apply anymore – or at least not be as easy to execute as before.

Choose the advice you follow with care. Test, analyze and adjust everything you do. Rules, processes, and strategies are not set in stone. A simple tweak might just be what it needs.

7. You cannot simply copy what others successfully did

They are them and you are you.

It is your blog, your audience, and your content. Not every success process applies to each and every situation. Sometimes the original situation differs – without you knowing it.

Many bloggers give you their success story and process. And that is not bad. But it does not guarantee success.

The key to your success may be something totally different – or simply a variation of the success process of some other blog.

8. You need to identify your most effective distribution channel

… or at least you have to make one distribution channel work – and scale. The key to your success is to succeed in reaching your audience. And you have to reach them in a place where they are active and open to your reaching out.

Once you found this one distribution channel that works for you and your audience, you should see how far you can scale this distribution channel. Because scaling what works, in this case, can prove much easier than identifying a second distribution channel and making it work, too.

9. Niching down can kill your chance of success

Have you read that you should find your niche and that this niche should be very specific? That can easily kill your chance of success.

Too much niching down may simply narrow down your market – and the piece of the cake that you could get in the best -case scenario – so much that it leaves you without any chance of making a business out of it.

If your niche is big enough, even if there are already other blogs writing about it, you can still have enough success to make a living from it.

And let’s be honest, some very successful blogs do not have a very narrow niche – and still, attract a huge audience.

10. In the end, it’s “sales” that is going to make the money

Many bloggers are more of an introvert and do not feel very good at selling stuff. I count myself into that group, too. I rather want you to WANT what I have to offer than having to promote it to you.

But that only works so far. Because if you don’t promote your products the larger part of your audience will simply read over them and not notice them or not make the final decision to buy.

Selling is part of the game. The better you become at selling the bigger will be your monetary success!

11. Blogging starts out hard – it gets easier with time

I saved the most important rule for last: Even if it starts out hard, it gets easier. If you are stuck once in a while, simply remember that all the other bloggers have been in the same situation.

We have all had our days when nothing worked out as planned or something that sounded easy in our minds turned out to be rather complicated to get up and running.

Blogging and the blogger life is awesome if you make it work. But it is hard to get there. Because: if it would be easy, everybody would do it, wouldn’t they?

Are you active in social media marketing? Then you are probably looking for traffic from social media to your blog or website.

Do you want to see results fast? Do you want to scale your traffic and grow your business?

That can be a lot easier than you thought.

You can follow the exact process that we used to grow our traffic to a new blog from zero to 50k visitors per month in just 6 months. And you can get easy to follow step-by-step instructions to see the same kind of traffic success – all with free traffic, no advertising involved.

Check out “The Social Traffic Code!”

With this book, you will get the chance to build your own success and get huge amounts of targeted traffic from social media to any website.

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