How do I have a successful blog?
Your blog, like anything in life, will flourish if you provide the right nourishment. A successful blog is one that reaches and enriches your intended audience. And that is true whether your intended audience is 5 people or 5 billion people.
I will use the analogy of growing a garden in providing the necessary ingredients for your blog’s success.
In summary, your garden needs seeds, water, nutrients, the right environment, and appropriate care and love to flourish. In the same way, your blog needs seeds in the form of rich and focused ideas for material; water in the form of regular and consistent written material; nutrients in the form of media content (images, video, audio as appropriate), and in the form of appropriate search engine optimization; the right environment in the form of an aesthetically pleasing and user friendly website; care in the form of spell checking your copy, weeding out spam comments, and responding to user discussions in a timely fashion; and your blog needs love in whatever way your heart feels it needs.
This last point is less subtle but similar to how you might intuit what a partner needs when you are in relationship. Often without asking you will have a sense of what to give and how to give as long as you are allowing yourself to listen to the unspoken words. In the same way, you need to ask yourself every now and then, is my blog giving something of value to its intended audience? …and if there was anything I could do differently, what would that be?
And as your garden grows, you need to let people know that it is there so that they can enjoy its fruit and beauty. In the same way, your blog will reach more people if you tell people about it. And the more you put into it and provide richness and sincerity to its health, the more naturally you will share it with others and the more others will share it with who they know.
To be continued…
