Envy whoever you want, it won’t make you them

I see it almost every day: peo­ple who want to be a bet­ter, more suc­cess­ful blog­ger. I know I want to be a bet­ter blog­ger too. But I am unlike many blog­gers out there; I under­stand the costs and time it takes to become a bet­ter blogger.

Unfor­tu­nately, peo­ple are all talk and no work and will get noth­ing accom­plished. I hear blog­ging being described as sim­ply “upload your plat­form, add a theme, start writ­ing con­tent, and you’re all set!” which is 100% wrong. They for­got to men­tion the hours a day of pro­mot­ing, upgrading/managing/customizing, and pulling your hair out when your sub­scriber count drops.

The point of this post is this: to get you out of that “gim­mee, gimme, gimme” stage and get you into that “work harder! work harder! WORD HARDER!” stage.

Have a blog­ging idol, some­one who’s there to moti­vate you

There’s always a blog­ger out there who has some­thing you want. Whether it’s tons of com­ments on their posts, being con­stantly inter­viewed, or becom­ing a famous blog­ger there will always be some­thing you want.

Get inspired by the things you want

I see ProBlog­ger get­ting at least 30 or more com­ments a post, and I ask myself “why haven’t I got­ten that yet?”. I work harder on my arti­cles by pro­vid­ing a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion then what may be truly needed, and I will drop in some ques­tions here and there to get a bet­ter response. At times it works, and there are other times it doesn’t. But see­ing ProBlogger’s 30+ com­ment streak again the next day kind of gets me back into the idea that if he can do it, I can do it.

Be jeal­ous at times too, you never know what the end result will be

Jeal­ousy is a strong emo­tion, and it can lead to a lot of pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive things. I will admit that I have some jeal­ous ten­den­cies when I see other blog­gers get more atten­tion than I do when I don’t truly believe they deserve it, but going back the point of inspi­ra­tion: it only makes me work towards becom­ing a bet­ter blogger.

The best of what jeal­ousy brings out in you

• As I have said above, jeal­ousy makes me feel like I just need to work harder, so I do what I can to become better.
• You may be jeal­ous at first, but there are times where you come out of that jeal­ous stage and move into a more log­i­cal approach to some­thing and just like that you have some­thing to set you apart from that per­son you want to become so bad.

Then there’s the bad side of it all

• You want that suc­cess, but it’s not some­thing you can just get. You might get annoyed see­ing how suc­cess­ful some­one became, and you might not under­stand the work they put into it. Not under­stand­ing that will not help you become a bet­ter blogger.
• Do you think your mind would be as clear if you spent all that time try­ing to be like the other blog­ger instead of becom­ing the blog­ger you want to be? Spend­ing all of your time copy­ing from other blog­gers instead of cre­at­ing new inno­va­tions is a ter­ri­ble form of jeal­ousy and I hope it hasn’t hit you!

Don’t let oth­ers suc­cesses con­trol you, find your own system

Nearly ever blog­ger has copied (or as they will put it “got over-inspired) some­thing from some­one else in hopes that they will make their blog bet­ter. All of the time I see peo­ple try­ing to get other blog­gers to expose their secrets, and even more, I see blog­gers expos­ing THEIR secrets to you like it will actu­ally help you.

While some­times it can help you and pro­vide you a list of things you can try, are they really the solu­tions for you? A ‘suc­cess­ful blog­ger’ can tell you that you need to post once a day to get more read­ers, but maybe post­ing every sec­ond day is the thing you are more com­fort­able with doing.

You have heard it over and over, and you will hear it again: a suc­cess­ful blog doesn’t hap­pen over night. Peo­ple won’t strike you down for post­ing every sec­ond day. It’s not like all blogs explode with thou­sands of read­ers every night. Peo­ple also won’t attack you for start­ing out with a free/premium theme either. There are so many things new blog­gers are wor­ried about, (appear­ance, SEO, fea­tures, etc.) that when it comes down to writ­ing the con­tent, they come up short.

Just to fin­ish out the post, I have made a short list of ideas to be taken more seri­ously as a blog­ger, become more unique, and become the blog­ger you want to become.

Quick Fire Tips

• Free is nice, but free blog hosts aren’t. They are less cus­tomiz­able, and when it comes to being dif­fer­ent, it just won’t cut it.
• Find the theme for your blog, and not some free theme that has been used hun­dreds of times before by other bloggers.
• Work like you’ve never worked on a web­site before. Eas­ier said than done, believe me, but it will be worth it.
• Try to do some­thing you haven’t done before. Add a cou­ple extra images to each of your posts, try mak­ing your­self a cus­tom theme. There is always a pos­i­tive end­ing when you try to up the stan­dards for your­self in each new step of your blogs success.

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