MBA1120 Q&A Wednesday: Do you have any crucial advice you’d give to a fresh blogger?

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Hey O welcome to the Hunter $B a show the answers to your business questions every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday Episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Aaron and Aaron asks, do you have any crucial advice you'd give a fresh blogger? Wow. I actually do because I wish somebody gave me this advice that I'm about to give when I started blogging. Blogging is a great way to find your voice, to build a brand, to get traffic to your website, to be an SEO driver. It's also one of the best ways to cultivate your communication skills. But it's also a lot of hard work and it can be demotivating at times. So so if you're new at blogging like Aaron is or you want to get into it, today's episode is for you. The things I'm going to be sharing with you today are things that when I look back at it, I'm like, man, why didn't anybody say this to me? This is so important. Instead, I got a lot of advice, like, keep on going and work hard and keep your head down. That's good and all, but, hey, I need specific advice. What are the things I really need to focus on to increase my possibilities, to increase my chances of success? And that's what I'll be sharing with you in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, let me read out Aaron's full question for Q and A Wednesday. He says, hello, my name is Aaron. I am the owner of the Risky money blog@riskymoney.net he says, if there's anything that you should take from this email, it's thank you. Your work has been incredibly influential in my personal and professional life. I also wanted to take a chance to reach out to a prominent member of the blogging community. I'm wondering the following. Do you have any crucial advice you'd give a fresh blogger such as myself? Don't hold back any punches. Well, Aaron, first of all, thanks for writing in and emailing me, and thank you for your kind words. I'm flattered, and I'm honored to have influenced you in any way. I must also say, I'm still learning. I'm still growing. I'm still trying to become a better blogger and a better content producer. I'm no way a master at this. And that's kind of where I start. It's a lifelong pursuit. It's something that you just get better and better at. You know, Stephen King, when he writes books, he doesn't think like, okay, you know, I've written the best work possible. Now I'm just gonna maintain it. No, every time he writes a book, he tries to make it better than the last book he tries to improve. And that's really the mentality I want you to start with, that. This is a journey. This is gonna take my whole life, and it's never gonna end. Because really, blogging is just a art form of communication. It's a way for you to communicate with your audience via the written word. And blogging in particular, you're trying to communicate information in a digestible way, in a way for people to take that information and take action. Not an easy task, something that you have to cultivate, something that takes a while, and you got to do it in your own style, in your own brand. So that's my first piece of advice to you as a new blogger is. I would go back and tell myself, this is that, hey, this is going to take some time. This is a long journey. Don't expect to be fantastic and great and like your favorite bloggers and your favorite writers within six months. If I'm going to be completely honest with you, it took about two and a half years for me to start to feel comfortable as a writer, as a blogger. Up to that point, like the first two and a half years, I was like feeling horrible. I felt like I'm not good at this. This is not easy. This is hard for me. I feel like a fraud. All this stuff was happening in my head, but I knew that it's not going to get better. I'm not going to feel better if I don't do anything. I had to keep on at it. I had to on producing content. In fact, my first couple years of blogging, I was writing as much as I can. I was publishing three, four articles a week so I can get my reps out, get as much work out of me. And to be honest with you, the only reason why I kept going is all the best blogs I was reading were blogs that have been around for, you know, 5, 6, 7, 10 years plus. I mean, at the age of the Internet, basically. And it kind of just made sense to me if I'm gonna be one of those blogs that are gonna be around, you know, you know, in five or six years, I gotta keep at it. I gotta keep on trying. I gotta keep writing. Now, again, just saying that is not enough. You have to have a plan of action. I highly recommend that you create a publishing schedule. That means putting in your calendar when each post is due, when you need to publish each post, you need to hold yourself accountable and make sure that each of these blog posts are published on time. Whether you're publishing one blog post a week or two a week or twice a month or whatever it is, you have to have a publishing schedule and stick to it. One, you want to create the habit for your readers to come back to your site and look at the latest post or, or check out the latest post, whether they're, you know, hearing about it through an email or they just frequent in your website. But once you become inconsistent, once people lose trust and don't really know what to expect from you. So make sure whatever your publishing schedule is once a week or whatever, that you stick to that schedule and you publish, regardless if you feel like it or not. There are plenty of times I can say I didn't feel like it, but I wrote a blog post and it wasn't perfect and it wasn't my best work, but the consistency was important. So publishing schedule, stick to it. Next. I wish somebody really emphasized how important the quality of the blog post is. A lot of people just emphasize word count and keywords. And again, consistency, which is important. When you write an epic post, that's what gets shared. That's what gets it to go, quote, unquote, viral and takes your blog to the next level. And if you write enough epic posts, it keeps pushing your blog up a level each time, and then it just becomes momentum, a domino effect. So every time you write a blog post, you need to start with the intention that this is going to be the best post ever in this subject. Whether it's a roundup post, whether it's a post about your opinion about something, whether it's a project you're working on, an announcement, whatever it needs to be, of the quality, as if you were going to make this post a book that you're going to publish and try to make it a bestseller. I know that sounds like a lot of pressure, but you need to come at it with that intention. Now, not every post is going to be that great. But again, like they say, shoot for the moon, and if you come up short, at least you'll be amongst the stars. You want to make sure that you have high aspirations when it comes to the quality of your posts. Now, I talked about opinion posts. You need to have an opinion. A lot of us, when we start blogging, we just try to appease to the audience and just try to cater to everybody's needs and likes and wants. It's very important for you to make a stand and to believe in something and to have a value system and to have an opinion when you write. Yes, it may be controversial at times. Maybe people will not agree with you, and maybe people will agree with you. But the point is, is that when you're kind of in between, you're vanilla. You don't evoke any emotion, and you're just not worth reading. It's not worth sharing. Now, I'm not asking you to be controversial on purpose. No, do not be disingenuous. I'm asking you just to have a strong opinion about things. That's what makes news. That's what makes a post worth sharing. You know, often I'll read books or blog posts that I don't agree with. I think that they're, like, on the other side of my opinion, but they make me think, they make me challenge My thoughts and my opinions. And it makes me, you know, say, hey, this is a good book or a good blog post because it made me think and I want to share it. So even if I don't agree with you, intelligent people will still like the post because it challenges them. So the bottom line is, is that when you write, have an opinion, insert your opinions, insert your personality. And this is really better advice than saying, be yourself. No, just insert your personality. Add your personality and your opinions in your work. That's a more practical piece of advice than, hey, be yourself and the rest will follow. No, being yourself is nebulous. It's not something that you can really understand, you know, offhand. But we all know how to share our opinions. The next piece of advice I would give a fresh blogger is edit, edit, edit, edit. Editing is your friend when it comes to writing. I believe it's Abraham Lincoln that once said, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time. Meaning it's much easier and faster to write a longer letter or a longer piece, to be concise and to use minimal amount of language to get your point across. That takes time. It takes editing. And a well edited piece of writing or blog post feels good. It just reads well. It's economic. It doesn't waste people's time. It's more conversational. And it just gets to the point people just really appreciate it. They may not know it's the editing, but they'll just say, that was a really good post, that was well written. But really what they want to say or what they don't know is it's really well edited. So if you don't have an editor, which is totally normal, you know, I didn't have an editor for a very, very long time. What you do is you write your blog post and you step away from it, you know, come back to it at the end of the day or the next day and then start to edit it. Have your editing hat on and just say, hey, let's see how we can make this sound better instead of trying to add to it. How can we, you know, remove certain unnecessary ideas or words? Another huge piece of advice I wish I was given when I got started is writing in your blog. You know, publishing every week, writing great content, doing all the things I mentioned is just not enough. I know that sounds. Oh, what really, what you need to do is you also need to market your work. You have to market your blog. Many people fail in blogging and in business because they forget this element which is marketing. Gotta get the word out about the things that you create, whether it's via social media or. In my opinion, I think one of the best ways to market is to guest post, is to post a blog post for other publications, for other blogs. They'll love your writing and check out your website. If you have a marketing budget, you can boost blog posts on Facebook using Facebook ads. I would capitalize by having some sort of call to action at the end of a blog post where you collect a name and email address so you can add them to your newsletter and your email list if you're going to go the paid advertising route. But the point is, you got to get the word out about your blog. You have to market it like it's your business, like it's your website, because it is part of your website. It is part of your business. Thy ticket, lady Jennifer of Coolidge.

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To wrap up today's episode, I want to share a few smaller tips to help fresh bloggers. Number one, don't worry about comments at the start. A lot of us, we worry, hey, nobody's commenting on our blog posts. Maybe people don't like it. Don't worry about that. Just worry about the process. Keep writing, keep focusing on quality, keep marketing. If people post comments, great. If they don't, no worries. There's even like WordPress plugins where you can turn on and off comments if you like. If you want to shut them off at the start or maybe shut them off after a week or so after you've published that article or that post, it's up to you. If it's a distraction, if it's bringing you down, shut them off. No need for them. There's lots of blogs that don't have comments. The point is, don't worry about it so much. Number two, keep your blog clean. Don't fill it with clutter on the side panels and all that stuff. Don't worry about making money on AdSense and things like that. If you're going to put something on, you know, the right or left column, put your own content and your own business stuff your latest posts or things that you want to promote, but keep it minimal so it's not distracting. And one last tip. Separate planning from writing this has helped me a lot and that's having a spreadsheet filled with your blog post topics. I find it much easier to have a spreadsheet just with the titles or the topics I want to write about. And every month I will write a few new topics and I'll have the spreadsheet handy also connected to my phone via Google Sheets. And if I think of a topic just offhand, if I'm, you know, doing something else, I can open up that app and, you know, jot down that new topic that's in my head by having the planning or having all the topics written out. I don't have to think of topics when I have to write a post the topics already there and I just go down the list and write about the next topic. It allows me to focus on just writing a great piece rather than focusing on know what to write about and writing it. It eases the pressure a bit. Well, Aaron, I hope that answers your question and I hope everybody else who's listening love today's episode. Thanks again for writing in, Aaron, and being a listener. We're honored to have you as one of our listeners and one of our community members. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net so you can get that question answered right here on Q and A Wednesdays. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. After that initial struggle of a couple years getting used to blogging, I started to really enjoy. It became like a form of therapy, really writing and expressing myself in a great piece, sharing it with the world. Total became addicted to it and started to really enjoy it. So see that as the prize. Enjoying the process. You'll get there if you stick to it. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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