Hope you had amazing holidays this year! As you might’ve seen, we just celebrated The Blog Market’s 2 year birthday. Last week we shared our top posts for bloggers in honor of this milestone, and today we wanted to share our top blog success strategies—what’s helped us build a loyal following! When reading our tips, remember that we’ve not only been at TBM for years now, but we’ve have had several blogs before we started it. We’d both been blogging for YEARS, so when we got together we combined our and skills. After all this blogging and two years running The Blog Market, here’s our 5 best success strategies:
Be Your Authentic Self
We seriously do mean be yourself. Not be what will get followers, be what’s trending, be what sells. These are all strategies we’ve seen employed 1,000 times over and succeed on other blogs. But that’s not what worked for The Blog Market. Authenticity has. This is what we’ve done from the start, and readers have come to expect our style. Sometimes what truly reflects us IS trendy or does get us that $2 commission on an affiliate link (yay!), but what comes first is creating content that will inspire, based on our own experiences. That’s it!
Spread Knowledge
Of course, you can always learn new things, which we often share here, but most of our content is based on what we’re skilled and experienced in—blogging, social media, and freelance life! We live this life every day. When starting a blog, think of what you know most about, what you want to continue learning about, and what you truly enjoy talking about, and make that your primary topic. Some people are afraid of sharing their secrets for fear they will either be criticized or the opposite—copied. But we’ve found that sharing our best tips and advice keeps readers coming back for more.
Find tools that work for you
When we started The Blog Market we decided to keep our resources in a secret Pinterest board. From design inspiration to the links we plan to round up in our weekly resources posts, it’s all there. It’s kept us inspired and connected (which is especially important if you go into business with a friend), and I’ve found this to be our #1 organization tool. We’ve gone in and out with various tools over the years, and this definitely contributes most to our consistency and success as a blog. Find what works for you and stick to it!
Be selective with who you work with
Recently we collaborated with a couple stationery brands we love and have been using in our roundups over the past two years. To us, it made complete sense to work with someone we’d been promoting just out of pure love of their brand. Being selective doesn’t necessarily mean denying yourself a chance at an income, but it does mean setting boundaries. For example, if your branding and authenticity is important to you, you might only work with brands that allow you to photograph product yourself. Or if you want to keep your voice consistent, you may opt out of content exchanges and guest posts. There are a ton of ways to monetize a blog, so be selective about those income streams and it will keep your readers interested.
Get the timing right
A a lot of times a blog’s success comes from the simple fact that they got the timing right. When Jennifer dreamt up The Blog Market, she KNEW the timing was right. In fact, she had a feeling that if we didn’t launch within a couple months, blog world would soon be littered with 5000 other blogs that share similar content in different ways. Was she right or was she right?!
Every blogging niche and topic has its own timing. You have to be on top of news and trends in in order to sense if you’ve got it right. It’s not even that you might be too late—sometimes the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to new and amazing ideas (if you were a nerdy crafter before DIY was cool you know what we mean!), giving you more time to hone in on your passion.
Lastly, don’t just get the timing right—give it time. Do you have a list of blogs you admire? It’s a good idea to check that list and see how long they’ve been around. Chances are the blogs you’re aspiring to have been hard at work on their websites for 5+ years.
Thanks to everyone who has read our posts over the past two years! We can’t wait to see what year #3 brings! What would you like to see us cover in the new year?
Isabella says
This is really helpful, thanks!!:) x Isabella
http://just-stuff-i-like.blogspot.nl
Monica says
Great tips! Thank you so much.
http://clossest.blogspot.com/