“Six Proven Secrets to Blogging Success” plus 1 more

Posted: 13 Jul 2011 01:02 PM PDT

This guest post is by Abby Larson of Style Me Pretty: The Ultimate Wedding Blog.

I write a wedding blog. Before you start running for the hills, now that you know I focus only on girly things, know that I also happen to have a smarty pants husband who is joining me here to spread some of his crazy blogging wisdom. I started Style Me Pretty about four years ago, after I sold a wedding invitation business that I developed. My husband and I were living in Palo Alto and he had just finished up his Master's program at Stanford in Computer Science. He was busy with his new start-up gig and I was simply bored, so I decided to take a seminar on blogging, something the rest of the creative community seemed to already know so much about.

While I don’t remember much from that seminar, one thing the lecturer said stayed with me. It changed my life. “You will most likely never make money writing a blog.” While he was right that most people don’t end up making a killing writing a blog, I took his words as a personal challenge and made the decision to prove him wrong.

Fast forward four years and here we are with Style Me Pretty. We get about 10 million pageviews a month, 680,000 unique visitors and about 35,000 RSS subscribers. We have 45,000 fans on Facebook and 35,000 on Twitter. And recently, we were featured in a CBS Sunday Morning segment about bloggers and their influence on the media and publication industries.

We’re proud to be living proof that you can make a living blogging about what you love. And although we've made plenty of mistakes along the way, we’re hoping that we can share some of our blogging know-how and help you avoid those same pitfalls.

Below are some of the blogging best practices we’ve honed over the years. They may seem simple but take them to heart. Follow these practices and you’ll have a much better chance of becoming a successful blogger.

1. Set yourself up right … from the beginning

This is really a two-part tip about branding and technology. Your brand and your blogging platform are hard to change later on, so get them right the first time.

First, give careful consideration to your blog name and domain. You don’t want to get two years into a blog, and then decide that the name doesn’t reflect what you do or the domain is hard to spell and should be changed. Launch your blog on a domain you own, not a subdomain of WordPress or Blogger.

Second, choose a common blogging platform. This is one decision where it’s okay to copy your friends. You want a platform that has a significant mindshare and therefore lots of plugins, themes, and competent developers that can help you. Whatever platform you start with, you’ll most likely be stuck with for a while.

Style Me Pretty was initially hosted on Typepad and moved to WordPress. While both of these platforms are popular, we felt that WordPress was easier to host ourselves, easier to customize and had more freely available plugins, so we switched. And it was painful. Migrating images, coming up with a new theme and making sure links did not break was not as straightforward as we had hoped.

2. Fill a void

Timing and topic are everything in the world of blogging. You need to either see a space for a new voice or you need to be better than the voices already out there.

When we started SMP, there wasn’t a good online source for edited, magazine-style wedding content. There were informative sites focused on the practical elements of planning a wedding, but these sites lacked inspiring wedding photography and creative event design. We saw an opportunity to do something different from our established competitors.

3. Speed is key to blogging sustainability

If your posts take hours and hours to write, edit, re-write and re-edit, you’ve got yourself a bit of a blogging problem. The faster you can get good content up, the better. Our advice? Post three hundred words of text at minimum, offer beautiful imagery if appropriate, and provide great links for readers to discover.

The majority of Style Me Pretty posts follow the same format: an edited intro, tons of gorgeous photographs, with a link to view more and a write-up from the bride. The wedding vendors provide the images. Often the bride develops those 300 words of text that we want, which saves us time on doing all the writing. By approaching content in this speedy, streamlined manner, we are able to push more out the door each day and open up new streams of content as we grow.

4. Know your audience

And know them well. Understand that as your blog evolves, so do your readers. Often times, we reach out to those readers who are totally committed, asking them for advice, for tips on how to improve, for thoughts on what their experience with SMP is, and even for initial reactions to new ideas. Even if their feedback stings, it’s a critical component to understanding how our blog is being consumed and how we can better improve.

We've used Facebook discussions as a means to solicit feedback, and we also recommend hosting surveys on Google Docs or Survey Monkey to help gain these valuable insights.

5. Reach out to other bloggers

When we look at blogs nowadays, we very rarely see comprehensive blogrolls. And yet the blogroll was one of the blogosphere’s features that drove our early growth.

When Style Me Pretty was just a few months old, we’d contact other bloggers, introduce ourselves and ask if we could be included on their blogroll. It generally worked and we were instantly introduced to new crops of readers. However, we don't suggest sending out automated emails asking for a link. This lacks a personal touch and can make a blogger distrustful of you and your site.

Email a select list of bloggers with similar sites and ask to get added to their blogroll. Blogrolls are perused by people looking for something “more” to read about. These are the very people who you want stopping by your site.

6. Involve your readers

The best part about writing a blog, rather than writing a column in a magazine, is that your readers become a part of your journey. They get their hands dirty with you and thus they become far more invested in your growth.

In our early days, we crafted inspiration boards for specific reader dilemmas, held Wedding DIY project competitions, and did periodic Q&As. These opportunities for involvement turned casual readers into loyal followers as they saw their work being incorporated into the content of our site. These readers also felt more comfortable leaving comments on posts and participating in the SMP conversation. All this contributed to making Style Me Pretty a thriving, yet intimate, online community.

What blogging success tips can you add from your own experience? We’d love to hear them!

Abby Larson is the editor of Style Me Pretty: The Ultimate Wedding Blog. Abby launched the site in January 2007 after selling her wedding invitation business as a way to stay close to the wedding industry. Today, Style Me Pretty receives over 10 million page views per month and employs six full-time writers. Abby and husband Tait also write about their lives running a blog at their behind-the-scenes blog, Backstage.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Six Proven Secrets to Blogging Success

3 Reasons Why I Don’t Worry About the Competition

Posted: 13 Jul 2011 07:01 AM PDT

I was recently asked who my blogging competitors were. I struggled to find an answer to that—not because there’s nobody else blogging in my niches, and not because I’m not aware of other bloggers in my niches, but because I don’t really worry much about them.

Image by ElMarto

There are three main reasons for that.

My main “competitor” is myself

I’ve always been much more interested in beating my own previous performance than beating somebody else’s. This isn’t a recent thing—when I started blogging, I felt the same way. I remember creating monthly spreadsheets of my traffic and income and always aiming to beat the previous months’ efforts. I’d also try to keep the monthly increases going to beat previous good streaks.

The benefit of competing against yourself rather than other people is that you’re always attempting to keep the momentum moving forwards—you never become stagnant. When you compete against others, if they go backwards or even give up, you’re given an excuse to take your foot off the accelerator. When you’re competing against yourself, there’s always a record to beat.

There’s not enough time to be defensive and competitive

There are only so many hours in the day, and I simply don’t have enough headspace to spend that limited time worrying about what somebody else is up to and how I can beat them.

I see the online publishing space as having so many opportunities at the moment that there is enough room for more than any one player. To get defensive about staking your claim takes your attention away from expanding your own business in a positive way.

That’s not to say that I’m not watching and taking an interest in what others are doing in (and outside) my niches. But I’m not doing so looking to block them or stop them growing. I’m doing it because there are opportunities to partner with them and grow the niche to everyone by doing so (more on that below).

I’d much much rather spend my time and energy building something positive and useful than spend my time and energy worrying and getting defensive about what others are doing.

Competitors are potential partners

The other reason that I don’t concern myself a whole lot with competitors is that in this space there is always opportunity to partner with competitors. With this approach, everyone achieves much more than they could alone.

I guess in some ways I could see blogs like CopyBlogger as competing blogs, since some of our content overlaps at times. But the reality is that by supporting and even promoting what Brian and his team have built, and at times giving them a leg up, I’ve won a lot too. Our niche has grown and so, too, have our profits. It all started very simply (from memory it was Brian sending a link for me to promote … which led to him doing a guest post … which led to a long-lasting and mutually beneficial and profitable friendship.

What’s your attitude towards your competitors?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

3 Reasons Why I Don’t Worry About the Competition