How to Make Every Day a Big Blogging Win

                                                      Big Blogging

If you can answer all three of these questions in the affirmative, I guarantee you’ll feel like a blogging stud day in and day out:
Blogging is the business of content production. Don’t kid yourself into thinking it’s anything else. If you’re a blogger, your ability to succeed depends 100% on a) learning to produce a certain type and quality of content, and b) getting yourself to produce tons of it.
Don’t bother with a quantity/quality debate, because the fact is you have to produce a large quantity of high quality content if you want to succeed in blogging.
The good news is you are capable of high quantity/quality content production. It’s just a matter of repetition. When it comes to writing, I don’t know if practice makes “perfect.” But I know that practice makes you better and faster. And that’s all you need.
Keep this excellent quote in mind as you work to become a better, faster writer:

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beauty of our method is that it ensures that every piece of content you create has lasting, residual benefit. This is true for one of two reasons.
Either:
1. The content matches what searchers are looking for, allowing the search engines to send you traffic for days, weeks, months, and years to come,
Or…
2. The content makes your blog/website more “sticky,” helping visitors view you as an expert and spend more time on your site.
In fact, a good percentage of the content you produce can and will meet both of those criteria once you really nail down the method.
Producing lots of good content is hard work. It’s the work that separates those who succeed from those who quit and say “it didn’t work for me.”
You can do it. Take it one piece of content at a time, and trust me, it gets easier.
No matter how much I wish it worked, “If you build it, they will come” is still not a winning method for making money as a blogger. Just like the greatest brands in the world have to advertise, you need to get out there and promote your content.
You should never think of a piece of content as “finished” just because you published it on your site.
Your content isn’t finished until you’ve published and promoted it.
Whether it’s guest posting on other sites (our favorite ,for obvious reasons), sharing on Google+, tweeting, or linking to your content from Facebook, you have to give people a chance to see it so they, in turn, can mention it to others.
Give every piece of content you produce a chance to win by properly promoting it.
When I fail to consistently produce and promote content, 99% of the time it’s because of the same excuse:
“I don’t know what to write about today.”
Or the close cousin of that excuse:
“I have a good topic for a post, but I haven’t researched and outlined it.”
I feel lame when I make those excuses because they’re way too easy to remedy.
Here’s how:
Maintain a big keyword list you can always tap for post ideas.Develop the habit of turning keywords into post titles, and outlining (or “mind-mapping”) posts to match those titles.Acknowledge the fact that you don’t already know everything you need to know in order to produce top-tier posts. Maintain a steady schedule of research (interviews and reading) about your subject, as well as experimentation (living your subject).
If you keep a bank of keywords, post titles, and outlines, the content will flow.
A day in the life of the high-achieving blogger looks like this:
Grabs a post title and outline from his/her bank of ideas.Rattles off a solid post.Promotes that post in a few different places (guest posts, social shares).Replenishes the keyword/post title/outline bank with new ideas and material.High fives everyone in reach, proclaiming “I totally crushed my blog today.” (To which everyone in reach replies “You are so weird.”)
Get all of those things before you leave for work in the morning, or before your kids get out of bed, or whatever your primary daily responsibility is.
Easy? No way. But let me tell you – if you get all those tasks done before you head into work in the morning, you will literally float into work. Your feet will be three inches off the ground all day, and your co-workers and boss will be like, “Hey, check it out – David Blaine’s in the office.”
A tiny percentage of people will ever complete all these tasks, five days per week. I don’t mind saying I’ve never done it.
Am I cutting the legs off the advice by admitting that? No way.
The fact is all of these tasks have to be completed (and repeated) if you’re going to succeed. There’s no getting around it.
I’ve called it a daily plan for success, but the truth is if you got all these things done weekly you’d still be in the top 1% of content producers.
So call it a daily plan or a weekly plan. Or a “twice a week” plan. The point is to get into a rhythm with the right tasks, and win.
They’re right, you know. We online content producers are an extremely odd bunch. And thank goodness.
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