Yesterday, one of the luminaries of digital marketing, Avinash Kaushik tweeted:
In his Google+ post Avinash shared that his blogging strategy has been to follow these 4 principles:
1. Staying focused
2. Publishing only original stuff
3. Sticking to publishing only what’s “incredible, relevant, of value” to your audience
4. Obsess about discovery
The above made me recall a post he wrote on the 5th anniversary of his blog where among other things he shared how he went from publishing 10 posts a month and just a few thousand people reading them in early 2006 to writing just 2 posts a month in late 2010, and having some 90,000 loyal blog readers. Now his “secret sauce” is out [source], and it makes complete sense to me.
I myself made it my 2009 New Year’s resolution to publish at least one blog post a day [it wasn’t clear from the wording here, but that was exactly what my plan was]. During the first year I haven’t missed a day. In 2010 I missed only a couple. In 2011 I started having weekends… Yet, regardless of pacing myself, I too kept increasing my readership, as well as business opportunities (consulting, training, speaking, program management, etc) coming from my blogging.
Based on the things that I’ve learned in the course of 1,001 days of my blogging, I’d like to add a few points to Avinash’s above-quoted four; and these would be:
5. Be concise
6. Be practical/actionable
7. Be authentic
8. Don’t pretend you know things you don’t
9. If you aren’t solving a problem, at least entertain [lesson learned from Jim Kukral]
10. Stay open to learning from your readers (from their comments, emails, etc)
I hope you are blogging too. It is extremely rewarding.
Thanks for sharing these tips. Very useful for bloggers.
Glad you’ve found of them of use and interest, Chad.
Writing is a very challenging task and trying to apply these pointers will certainly help amateur writers to polish their skill in writing.
I agree, it isn’t always easy… Glad you’ve found these “pointers” of help.