Every day, thousands upon thousands of blogs are created. But a mere few of them actually become popular. The rest slowly wither and die along with their owner’s hopes and dreams. Unfortunately your blog isn’t going to become an overnight success.

Not unless you’re a celebrity or billionaire. Those guys are able to achieve overnight success, even I… a very successful online marketer, it took me a very long time. It all started with a bang…

I was up late one night reading some guy’s blog about online marketing. At the time I was really struggling in my business, was generating few leads and didn’t really know what I was doing. Within 14 minutes of reading the guy’s blog, I was inspired to start my own… And so I did…

I started my blog, setup WordPress and had almost everything configured. Then I worked day and night blogging away. I heard as long as I had keywords that were being searched in my title and throughout my post it would rank in the search engines and I would “GET” traffic…

…What a load of shit that was!

7 days and 7 nights later I thought to myself “It’s been a whole week and I haven’t generated a single lead, just 8 visitors”. So I searched the web, learnt a crap load of marketing stuff and finally started seeing results. Sure, it took 3 months but I saw GREAT results. Here’s how:

First, you have to know the beginning will be slow. Unless you magically get to appear on a TV show or get some other crazy exposure, it’s going to be a very slow and gradual process. As the truth is there aren’t any secrets. Growing a popular blog is about creating amazing content and promoting it.

Before we go into anything else, ask yourself “Is my blog worth reading”. In all seriousness, is your blog worth reading? Would you get out of bed early to read your blog? Or stay up really late to a get a glimpse at your content? If not, then you’re going to fail period. Your content needs to be second to none, it also needs to be helpful to the reader and be covered with YOUR personality.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Can your content be found elsewhere?
• How is your blog unique to the others in your niche?
• Why will people ever return?
• Are you spending too much time talking about stuff YOU’RE interested in instead of your readers?

Those are some of the key factors why so many blogs fail. They all have the same lame content, no hook or edge over competitors and most of the time no personality.

Make Sure Your Readers Know Who You Are

Most blogs out there are really generic and the majority of people will think it’s just “created by the Internet”. Created by the Internet, I think not…

That’s the sad truth. Most people figure all content online is just automatically there, created by the Internet Gods or something. Little do they know that hours of time and effort goes into everything they read online. So let your readers know who you are. Do videos, have pictures of you, talk informally and tell stories about your life. People love that! Don’t be a boring idiot.

1. Create about page

You’d be surprised how many people don’t bother creating about pages. It’s funny, like 30% of all people who come to this blog click on the about page. If people recognize the personality flowing through your words, they’ll realize there’s a person behind your posts and want to know more about you. Create your about page, talk about yourself A LOT. It’s really the only page where you can go crazy, talk about yourself, everything!

2. Create contact page

Again, not everyone has a contact page. They are very important as they make people realize that there’s a real person behind your blog. And… it allows your readers to contact you at will. Make sure on the contact page you say feel free to contact me, ask me any questions you may have etc.

Once you have a nice design and you’ve made sure your personality flows through your blog, it’s time to create amazing content. I touched on this, so just create amazing content… And create it on a weekly basis at a minimum. If you really want to accelerate your blog’s growth you need to blog daily and even accept guest bloggers.

Market Your Blog

Now this brings me to the second part of the equation. Marketing your blog and bringing targeted visitors to your posts. There really are a million and one ways to bring life to your blog. But I’m going to talk about the 4 main ones that will help explode any blog:

1. Social Media

Above every other strategy, social media is probably the fastest way to bring souls to your blog. It’s just so easy and fast, by posting a link on Facebook you may well bring in a few dozen visitors… Job done. To get started with social media you can start sharing your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. Also share them on any other social networks you’re a part of. Next create a dedicated Twitter account, work on building up its followers. Get a Facebook fan page and figure out how to grow that. Grow your networks and you’ll get more traffic when you share your posts.

2. Blog Commenting

This is a super easy strategy that a two year old could do. Just read the top 10-20 blogs in your niche and leave comments on them. In your comments you’re allowed to leave a link to your blog. When the blog’s other readers look at the comments, they’ll see yours and click through to your blog. Blog commenting is great for building backlinks, driving traffic and getting true exposure in the blogosphere.

3. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is ridiculously simple again…

You just have to guest post on other blogs in your niche. You basically tap into other blog’s subscriber bases. Obviously over time you’ll build up a bunch of followers and get your own regular readers. For now you can tap into other blog’s readers and hopefully steal a percentage of them. All you do is find other blogs in your niche that are already popular, write a post that you think their readers will like and send it in for review. Read more about guest blogging here.

4. SEO

Oh SEO, how much you’ve changed…. Yeh, SEO has changed a lot over the past couple of months but it’s still as reliable as ever for blogs and sites which bring real value to the web. SEO is such a complex strategy; it’s like its own thing, hardly “A” marketing strategy. Read about it here, here and here.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Let me know your thoughts, comments and questions in the box below. Also put your name and email in the form below to get more blogging tips, tricks and killer secrets!