Wanna be a great blogger? Be a turtle!

Does being persistent help you to be a great blogger? Maybe. One thing I know for sure, being persistent is one of the “must-to-do” thing for a serious blogger. You’ve probably heard everywhere that writing good contents is THE king. Well in order to write good contents, you need to have persistence.

Yesterday on the church, the sermon was all about being persistent and it made me wonder: how persistent am I all this time in blogging? Am I being persistent enough? The sermon talked being persistent in Christianity life but I can totally relate them to blogging.

Some of you probably see me as a great blogger, I thank you for that. But did you know that I only had around 20 visits a day on my first few months of blogging? 7 visits from Google and that’s about it. Today, I get around 700 visits from Google alone. Now it may not sound much to some of you. You’ll probably get much more organic traffic than I am but that’s not the point here. How many blogs out there died on the first 6 months of blogging? How many of you got discouraged and didn’t get back up on your feet?

Being persistent definitely has its reward from my personal experience. Take a look at my traffic comparisons here.

Back in October 2007 when I wrote my first few posts:

My blog traffic in its early days

On 7th March 2009:

From zero to almost a hero

Need more proofs? At the moment this post is written, I have a PageRank of 3 (was 4 previously), Alexa Rank of 61,965 and this blog is ranked number 11 in Australia. Now those statistics didn’t come out of the blue just like that. Just be persistent and you’ll see the reward.

Being persistent is highly tied with laziness, goal, and skill.

Laziness in Blogging

26 drafts prove how lazy I am at times...

Sometimes I can be so lazy to write even a single blog post for a couple of days. Heck, I try not to write any blog post during the weekend. I feel that I deserve a break. Sometimes you feel that you deserve a break. Taking a short break is not wrong but taking a long one is!

Have you also heard a ground breaking news but you feel too lazy to write about it? A few hours too late and other bloggers already take the credit! If you want to have a great blog, then keep your readers updated all the time and be the first to tell them about it before the others do!

Being persistent without a goal

So maybe you consider yourself a persistent blogger. You are persistently writing blog posts and market your blog. Do you have a goal for your blog however? If not, all the hard work is for nothing. Maintain a goal and a vision to your blog and then work persistently to achieve it!

Improve your skill

To be a great blogger, you also need to improve your blogging skill (writing, marketing, money making, etc). There is no point of being persistent without “evolving”. You need to be aware of trend changes. You need to improve your writing skills. You need to try when a new marketing trend comes into the market. Ask this question: Are you the same blogger as you were a year ago? Are your blogging skills improving at all?

Being persistent is like a turtle: it has a goal (a destination) and it’ll try to achieve it no matter how hard the terrain gets. Err okay, I’m having a hard time to relate the “skill” part with the turtle, lol. I guess I should have picked a different animal…

So, how “turtle” are you?