5 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging When I Started

I've been blogging for about 2 years, and it's amazing how much you learn at each stage in the process. There's a bit of a self-fulfilling process where you believe you're an expert, and then look back at yourself six months later and realize/understand that you really didn't know much at all.

While I'm no Seth Godin, I've developed a decent amount of success, clients and work from blogging, and these lessons are things that I learned most about how to transfer blogging into whatever one defines as a primary metric of success for writing online.

1. Start an e-mail newsletter, now. Something I did late was start a newsletter, and I wish I had started a lot longer. Having access to someone's e-mail inbox is quite the privilege, and that text access creates a deeper connection that some really don't understand. The longer you wait, the harder it is to build that list, so do it now.

2. Create a focus, and stick to it. I languished for about six months on my blog just writing about whatever I thought about. When I decided what NOT to blog about, I truly started taking off. By having a focus and showing dedication to that one subject, I created an audience. Turns out, there aren't that many people in the world exactly like you, so your diversity of topics rarely reflects well.

3. Get client leads by showing intelligence, but difficulty. For my consulting business, I generated the most leads when I wrote an article that showed I was smart, but still was hard for the other person to implement. This creates a mindset of "oh I want to do this.. but I'm too lazy, I'll hire you". The quick hit tips create respect, but rarely clients.

4. The best blog posts have nothing to do with post length. But they do have to do with hours put in. You have to be thinking about a subject constantly to have a "spark" idea that is worthy of being spread despite being 400 words. I've forced 1500 word posts just to write something, but when I thought of something fresh because I'm in the trenches each day, I got huge spread. There is no steadfast rule on word length - but there is one in terms of time spent working on your focus.

5. Always be building equity. I started not caring about SEO for my blog, but the ability to do something with it was always there, and it was really wasted effort not to try it all. Now, any keyword I try to go after will potentially dilute my brand, but if I had tried a little bit harder, I could have potentially gotten a lot more leads, a bigger network, and overall have been more successful.

Everyone learns different things, but these are my lessons blogging for 2 years somewhat successfully in the internet marketing space. I ope you can take something from my failures.