In a world of blogging filled with doubt and sometimes the self-loathing that comes with it, I offer this little nugget of advice. Always plan for the surprised element of success. Here are some reasons to stay positive even when your blogging or writing ventures don’t feel like they’re panning out.
The Moment You Get Discovered
Stay positive. You might just get discovered. You may, one day, either surprise yourself, or a piece of written material may suddenly take off. Or, you get discovered.
I woke up this morning with bells and whistles all over my phone. My blog was blowing up more than usual. Traffic was at a weird level of high so of course I had to wonder what was going on.
Nope, it wasn’t my ad.
A Reddit Post
The source was a Reddit post, where a lovely commenter recommended my blog to follow as one that they’d recommend to fellow Reddit users about how to make money blogging. The initial poster referenced that there are a lot of blogs out there talking about how to make money blogging in such, but called out the fact that most of those talking about blogging and making money from their blogs seldom actually do. At least, not enough to make an actual livable income from it.
It was SOOOOO lovely to read something quite positive this morning. I’ll quote:
“I have a blogger crush on Kerrie Legend. She’s the only “blogs about blogging” bloggers I follow and subscribe to. She could tell me to jump off a cliff and I’d happily mosey on down.”
THIS.
Ever Wonder if You Resonate with Your Audience?
There are days I wonder whether anyone values what I write about. My website has a super high sales conversion on it, so I know my sales copy works and people are interested in my courses and my books, so that was all great. But to have someone comment that they sort of value my advice and like my stories and experiences with things – that really made my day.
We sell ourselves short sometimes. Almost plan for failure. We as bloggers and authors often don’t think in the positive light that something positive might happen with our blogging efforts. And it’s days like today where I’m glad I have things set up a certain way on GoDaddy to accommodate massive levels of traffic so my site doesn’t slow and I have enough resources to accommodate hundreds of thousands of views a day. I always have a few thousand a day, but you just never know how high it may get, right?
What if Your Website Takes Off?
In fact, just yesterday, I was talking on the phone with an author about planning for success. I said, “What if your website DOES take off? What happens if you write something and all of a sudden it goes viral? We should plan for that kind of success – it could happen to you, too. You could write even just one piece – one post – and it could just take off.” And he agreed, even stated that of course, we should be more positive in our thinking when it comes to allowing for those kinds of successes to overtake our lives.
And I’ve seen it happen. I can’t remember the name of the blog, but I was telling this author about a blogger who wrote a piece, and it went viral. If I recall correctly, the blogger has a pin on Pinterest about it – mistakes she made or things she wished she had differently before her article went viral. Like, crashed her site viral. Her site wasn’t ready to handle that kind of traffic, she didn’t have any sort of email list set up, missed all sorts of conversion activities like signups, sales, etc. Simply because she wasn’t ready for success. She hadn’t planned on it, and she wished she had.
You Could Write Something… Good!
You never know what is going to happen with anything you write. So instead of loading your mind with all sorts of “no one is going to care about this” instead, plan for the reverse – the positive – the “this could potentially go viral” aspect of our blogging and writing world.
You just never know. Stay positive, my friends. If this isn’t a wake-up call to get your website sorted and resources planned in advance, I don’t know WHAT it is. Is this a get-your-$%#% together post? Hmmm…
Parting Thoughts
PS – Technological Dinosaur, whoever you are, stay cool and thanks for the compliment. You truly made my day.