Do you ever feel like you’re living in an Episode of Lost when trying to find an audience for your blog or website? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who feels or has felt this way at some point in their publishing career. All webmasters experience a sense of their efforts leading to futility, generally within the first 6 months to year of developing a website. The truth is, great websites are not built overnight and to achieve success in this competitive marketplace you must have patience and perseverence and never give up. Here are a few tips and motivational ideas I’d like to share with those of you who might be feeling the old webmaster blues.
1. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new methods of attracting an audience to your website. If you’re results are not meeting up to your expectations, you are obviously not making the right efforts to attract your audience. Don’t waste time spinning your wheels with the engine in neutral, put it into gear and take a drive down a new unexplored road. Whenever you feel you’ve exhausted all possibilities, try something new and keep trying and then try some more.
2. If you are “niche marketing“, read other blogs and visit websites that are outside of your “niche market” to gain ideas and inspiration. Don’t just focus on blogs or websites that you consider competition, look outside the window and think outside of the box. If you are targeting keywords in the search engines, try targeting phrases and search patterns rather than targeting the obvious.
3. Remember that your audience is a worldwide audience. Unless your publishing efforts are focused to a specific demographic, the chances are your readers will be from all over the world. The beauty of the internet is that it allows people who would normally never have an opportunity to meet in real life to meet interesting people from all over the planet and exchange ideas. Devote some time to exploring other cultures as part of your marketing research and use the experience to foster a global audience to your blog or website.
4. Be helpful and courteous to your fellow bloggers and webmasters. If you have a particular strength, freely share it with other bloggers and webmasters. This could include helping somebody on a forum who has a question about Wordpress themes, or just leaving helpful comments on another blogger’s blog. This may seem obvious, however many webmasters make the mistake of not taking the time to do the simplest things, such as leaving a nice comment for somebody who has taken the time to write an article that has inspired or enlightened you.
5. If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Most of us learned this lesson from the movie Bambi, however on the internet people seem to more often than not take advantage of the anonymous nature and use it as a soapbox to dish out negativity. Unless it is absulutely necessary, negativity is best to be avoided because not only is it counter-productive, it is also infectous and can spread not unlike a virus. If you wish to be successful, keeping a positive mental attitude is essential and negativity is to be avoided.
6. Be yourself and get personal with your audience. Many of the most popular bloggers take the time to get personal with their audiences, and if you’re authoring your site as if you were posting robot your efforts will seem mechanical and people will not bother to bookmark your site or add it to their favorites. We all have different experiences in life and sharing bits and pieces of your personality with readers will allow them to get to know you and will keep them coming back to see what you have to say.
7. Never give up. This is my most important tip for you. The old adage “It’s always darkest before the dawn” certainly rings true in the blogosphere and webmaster world. Many times when I’ve felt like throwing in the towel and giving up on my dreams, something positive happens to rekindle my spirits and reawaken my sense of creativity and spontaneity. Think where this world would be if Dr. Jonas Salk had given up on developing a polio vaccine or if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had given up on the dream that everyone would have a computer some day. You don’t have to be a guru or a visionary to achieve success, you just have to keep plugging away and never give up your dreams.
Well, I hope if you’ve read this article, you might have taken away something inspirational from it and if you were feeling the webmaster blues, hopefully this has cheered you up a bit.
Happy Memorial Day to everbody !!
thanks for this!