How to be successful

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to avoid success, not only to make money blogging, but to blogging in general terms.
Ok now today let’s be a bit more optimistic and write about how to success with your blog.

Before starting, let me tell you that this isn’t a magical formula nor a “Do it and get it” step by step.
These are tips I’ve done while blogging on my spanish blog and took me to the next level (#3 on Google for make money blogging / online within a year).
These tips, combined with your enthusiasm and passion, will help you to succeed.
I’ll start by saying that there are two kinds of factors that will make you succeed:
1) Controllable / Predictable factors: The goals on this category are easier to achieve than any other, because it depends on you, on how you do it and how you want to do it.

2) Uncontrollable / Unpredictable factors: The hard ones to get. You can try to achieve them, but it doesn’t fully depends on how you do it.

Now let start from the uncontrollable factors:
1) Social media: As I always say, social media is the most powerful tool a blogger can use. You really can’t succeed if you ignore them. One of the main points is because I don’t like to let the traffic comes only from search engines, because they are a bit unpredictable. So word of mouth is the best, and all of that comes from marketing, that comes from social media optimization.

2) Updating: Having dead social accounts not only is useless, but they’ll give you a very bad reputation. If you’re not willing to spend a bit of time to have some decent social accounts, don’t set up ones.

3) Learning SEO: Although I advice not relying your traffic only on organic traffic, SEO is a must nowadays. There are tons of free ebooks that have great SEO tips and advices. Apart from that you can check Matt Cutts blog to get additional info about Google and general SEO tips. To finish, keep visiting this blog, as I’ll start a SEO tutorial for the very beginners that will gradually increase its difficulty.

4) Listening your readers: Another must if you want to succeed, both blogging and if you want to make money blogging. I think listening to readers is fun. You learn from them, get ideas to new posts, you make friends… Blogging is a two way communication, so listen to your readers, both will benefit from this relationship.

5) Maximizing income sources: As you should have various traffic sources that feed your blog, you need, in order to make money blogging, various income sources to feed your pocket. That’s one of the goals I want to achieve with this blog : providing my readers with proven ways to make money blogging.

6) Trying: But in order to maximize your income, you must try different strategies to take the most out of each and every source.

7) Relationships: Apart from building relationships with your readers, do it with other bloggers on your niche, you’ll learn from them and will get known. It’s very important to be known amongst all bloggers.

8 ) Participating: On forums, answering on Yahoo Answer… Helping on every way possible is always something positive, as people will remember you, and if you show a link pointing to your site, they’ll visit it and probably stick with it.

Now, uncontrollable factors:
1) Luck: You need luck. How to be lucky?
- By finding a four leaf clover. (I’ve one, but haven’t noticed any changes so far)
- Here in Spain it’s said that if you walk on to a dog’s poop, luck will get to you. (I’ve done this, accidentally, but haven’t noticed any changes so far)
If somebody knows it, please send me a message or kindly leave a comment.
2) Meeting: You need to be at the right place at the right time to get a profitable relationship. It’s obvious that nowadays it’s harder than before, but it’s still profitable.

3) Mojo: Everyone needs their own mojo. Some will like it, some won’t, but you need something different. Your mojo will help you to market yourself. Carl Ocab as an example, is known as the KidBlogger, Darren Rowse as the ProBlogger. I’m a Spanish blogger who makes money blogging in English… Get to know your mojo.

To sum up. Success is tricky to be achieved, but possibilities will increase if you put your effort onto it.
By the way, do you have more ways to try to achieve success? Drop a comment and I’ll link to you on the post.
Thanks for reading.