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| Photo used courtesy of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas |
We live in a statistics and performance-driven society. The blogging community is not immune to that. In fact, the “blogosphere” is practically dominated by numbers.
How many visitors did your blog receive today? How many unique pageviews did you get? What about comments?
There are countless blog posts and website articles about how to drive more traffic to your blog. As a new blogger, it can all be overwhelming.
It can be intimidating when you look at some of the websites of the “rockstar” bloggers. You hear about their statistics, and it feels daunting. These guys (and lovely ladies) have more people tweeting individual blog posts than you have visitors in an entire week.
It’s humbling, at best.
In light of all this, I want to try and help you avoid a mistake I made when I first started blogging. If I’m being honest, it’s a mistake I’m still guilty of, from time to time. Here’s the blunder that I often fell prey to when I first began as a blogger:
I resented the “rockstars” instead of learning from them.
I want you to let that sink in for a second. Think about it. Are you guilty of begrudging bloggers who have had more success than you? Even if you’re not a blogger, it’s a massive temptation to be jealous of those who have moved up the ladder faster than you have.
We tend to make excuses. We rationalize and tell ourselves that those people were just lucky. To an extent, that may be true. But for the most part, people make their own luck.
The big name bloggers didn’t trip and fall into a huge following and an active community of loyal readers. They wrote thousands of posts. They used social media to engage. They guest posted and allowed others to do the same on their site. They worked and worked and worked and worked and WORKED.
It isn’t avoidable. There are no shortcuts. I wish there were. If I ever find out this is the true, you can be assured I will be back writing a guest post titled: “How to Become Successful Overnight with Little to No Effort.”
But in the meantime, let’s be real. It takes time. It takes being rejected, over and over again. It takes learning how to deal with limited success, as well as learning how to stomach those days when you write a blog post and you’re pretty sure your mom is the only one who read it. (She’s definitely the only one who left a comment!)
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Outliers, the author discusses the “10,000-Hour Rule," which is based on a study done by Anders Ericsson. To summarize, the study attempts to prove that greatness requires an enormous amount of time.
Do people get lucky? Sure. But a lot of overnight success stories actually take years. You just don’t hear about that part of the journey.
It’s not glamorous to talk about the failed auditions, rejected manuscripts and the other countless shortcomings that ended up catapulting various celebrities to greatness.
In her book, Along for the Ride, Sarah Dessen had the following to say about struggling for success:
“Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be so easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder--if not impossible--to lose.”
The struggle makes the finish line mean more. It makes the food taste better. It makes the applause sound louder. It makes it all feel like it was worthwhile.
Maybe it’s your ambition to be a “rockstar” blogger. Maybe you just seek to grow your audience this year. Regardless of your end game, the truth remains the same:
There is no substitute for hard work.
Write until your fingers grow numb and your wrists become weak. Read as many books and blogs as your free time allows.
Stop resenting successful bloggers and authors and reach out to them. There’s a reason why they’re on top, and if you’re nice, they might just share some of their secrets with you.
Are you ever guilty of resenting “rockstar” bloggers?
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