7 Secrets That Successful Bloggers Don’t Share

Many bloggers have read articles where bloggers are making 4-5 digits a month or even more. Even though that is an impressive income from blogging, it’s hard to know where to start. For starters, it’s essential to set up a blog and start writing. However, things may not work out right away for various reasons. Following excellent tips such as writing great content, using Pinterest to promote content, focusing on a niche, making products, and more is vital for success, but what happens if none of these ideas work? Well, it turns out that rich bloggers may be holding something back, which they don’t do intentionally, but some don’t care to admit why their blog is a success. That’s why we decided to crack open the secret vault and share how to develop a successful and money-making blog.

Talk to Your Audience

Sometimes it takes some time to get to know your audience, but that’s an integral part of blogging and connecting with everyone. It may take some time as well, so if it takes a while to gain an audience don’t get discouraged – Beautiful Dawn recommends talking to your audience and genuinely connecting with them.

When I launched my blog, I thought that every single blog post I wrote would be a hit. Well, that wasn’t the case. However, I did have one post gain a lot of traction, and it was the one that I least expected. However, the success of that one post helped me to better understand my audience.

As I get to talk to more and more people in my audience, I gain a better understanding of their problems and how I can help. The clearer the picture you have of your audience the easier things become. You start to write content that resonates with them. You know what type of products they are willing to buy. You begin to run a business that provides value to the world.

All of this only happens when you start to talk to your audience.

This might mean you have to break out of your introverted shell. I’m an introvert, so I know this isn’t easy, but it’s something you have to do. You don’t have to go door-to-door taking surveys. Start off with email conversations. I use ConvertKit to keep in touch with my email subscribers.

A great method that I’ve used for getting to know my audience is asking them to tell me about themselves in the first email I send to them when they sign up for my mailing list. Not everyone responds, and everyone doesn’t have to for this to be a success. What you want to have are conversations with people that are willing to reach out to you because these are the people that desperately want help in solving a problem.

Take Advantage of Technology

Technology is essential, and using it correctly is vital for a blog as well. That’s why Chris Brogan from Writtent recommends finding a good balance between adequately setting up a blog and not going over the top.

One of the smartest bloggers on the block, Chris Brogan, recommends that “technology should serve your community and your content, not just be there.” This means your blogging platform should walk a balance between not being too technical, and being just technical enough. Minimalist designs are great, but totally eschewing call-to-action buttons will result in a nonexistent conversion rate. Consider Brogan’s tech tips:

Evaluate Your Widgets: Do your buttons and apps slow down your blog’s loading time, or enhance your readers’ experience?

Don’t Force Registrations to Comment: People may just bounce when they see you require an official account to join your community.

Know a Little Bit: You don’t need to learn Ruby on Rails, but you should have enough technical prowess to understand basic HTML, and how to optimize your blog effectively.

Forget Original Content

No, we’re not recommending you plagiarize, but you should find compelling titles and ideas on what to write on and analyze what made these particular blog posts stand apart from the rest. Then you write on the same topic but make it even better, as Billionaire Blog Club discusses below:

When you start off blogging forget about trying to come up with unique content ideas.

Instead, see what content is kicking ass in your niche and write better versions of it.

Every popular blogger’s most popular post is a rehash of another similar post.

You can have two options when you start blogging:

Just wing it and hope your content attracts people
Write content that you know is already successful in your niche
But that content has already been written!

So what?

You think every person in your audience has read that content elsewhere?

Every blog that I start begins with me writing down 20 post ideas that I’ve seen do well with my audience. Then I write those 20 blog posts.

You know what happens?

The Rich Bloggers like to think they are writing original content but it’s only original because they are putting their perspective on things.

That’s all you need to do.

This post idea came about because I saw another blogger write about the secrets of blogging. Of course, they weren’t really secrets but sometimes you have to embellish things I suppose.

Blogging is a Journey

Another tip from the Beautiful Dawn blog is enjoying the blogging journey and also writing quality content. That means being real with your audience and starting to write – you have to start somewhere to do what you love!

Blogging is more than just finding a niche and writing quality content. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes that people don’t talk about. It’s much easier to focus on the success of making a blog than it is to talk about the actual process.

So if you know that you want to be a full-time blogger now or in the future, the best time to start is now. You might catch yourself getting caught in a research wormhole because you want to do everything perfectly from the beginning, but that never happens for anybody.

Start writing, start publishing, start promoting, and start interacting with your audience today.

You’re Going to be Staring at the Computer a Lot

Depending on how much time you plan to dedicate to your blog if you plan to write day in and day out then you’re going to have to get used to sitting a lot. You’ll also be staring at your computer screen a lot too. Of course, it’s important to take breaks, so you don’t get burned out, but Raelyn reveals that not only does blogging take a lot of work, but you’ll be spending a lot of time in front of the computer.

The thing about blogging?

You will end up spending an awfully long amount of time in front of the computer. You definitely need to be comfortable with long hours of screen time.

Online businesses don’t build by themselves. You do need to reach a certain level where you are comfortable outsourcing your work and building automated funnels… until then, get ready for long hours of quality time with your computer.

Nobody quite talks about this, but I feel that it is such an essential thing to know. If you hate sitting long hours in front of your computer you probably should think twice about starting an online business.

Post Titles

Lifewire discusses how coming up with fantastic blog post titles is a great way to drive traffic and make a profit. In addition to appealing titles, don’t forget about keywords, SEO, and other factors when writing blog posts.

Top bloggers know that great blog post titles can help drive both search traffic and social traffic to their blogs. That's why The Huffington Post spent so much time and effort into A/B testing its blog post titles until the team could identify within seconds which title would drive the most traffic and instantly switch to that title.

People will see your blog post title on Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, and more. You need to consider keywords, curiosity, and interest when writing blog post titles. Use a web analytics tool and trackable URL shorteners to track and share your blog posts in order to learn which types of titles work the best at driving traffic to your blog.

Be Aggressive With Selling Something

A lot of bloggers have a hard time being an “aggressive” salesperson, but Billionaire Blog Club says that’s the name of the gave if you want to be successful. Consider a sales funnel to pull people in and of course, don’t go too far or you may lose your audience. However, think of creative ways to incentivize people to sign up for your newsletter and then figure out ways to sneak in and sell products.

This is the hardest one to swallow, even for me because most people don’t want to be annoying. Most people I know don’t want to send 100 different sales emails but at the end of the day that’s what is necessary.

Why?

Because it’s hard to get and keep people’s attention.

When a big blogger is going through a product launch you’re going to get at least 5 emails from them and at least 3 emails on the final day.

They don’t do it to annoy you, they do it because it works. Maybe not on you, but on enough people in their audience to make what they make.

Say a blogger mentions that they make $120,000 a month. In your head, you might think that must mean they need to sell a ridiculous amount of stuff but what if they have a product that costs $999?

They just need to sell 120 of those and they’ve reached their number. On their 50,000 member mailing list that means they need to get just 0.24% of the people to convert and that requires the annoying emails.

You aren’t going to make money sending an email on the first day and the final day of a product launch.

You’re going to make money when you have a whole sequence of emails lined up for your audience.

Yes, you will annoy some people but that’s the game. You can play it or you can sit in the bleachers.

Sources: Beautiful Dawn, Writtent, Raelyn Tan, Lifewire, Billionaire Blog Club