Coca-Cola recently flew me to Shanghai business class and treated me like a queen because they “liked the tone and topics of my blog.” It seems incredible, even to me, but it’s true ~ check out my Shanghai slideshow if you don’t believe me.
That trip to China practically saved my blogging life because it took me a while to kick start my blog and it’s been a roller coaster ride.
I set up my blog as an experiment in the vague hope of finding a literary agent for my fiction manuscript. At this point I need to confess that I was a bit smug. I thought that if anyone could succeed at blogging it had to be me with my 15 years of web design experience and a proven track record with web copywriting.
But them I fell back to earth.
Unfortunately, with all the excitement of starting my blog, I didn’t draw on the web design experience my clients benefited from when it came to my own blog. In fact, my blog was a case study in how not to blog:
I had no real plan.I threw the design together myself in 30 minutes.I changing topics three times.I changed my domain name three times too.
In retrospect it’s no surprise that six months after I started blogging my blog was tanking.
Check out this graph of my RSS feed subscribers and you’ll see what I mean. Six months into my blogging journey I still had less than 100 subscribers.
But I’m a proud and stubborn woman. The one thing I did know was that blogging’s a long term plan and in the short term the benefits will be quite limited. So to make sure I stuck at blogging I set myself a challenge of getting 1000 subscribers after the first year. I like a challenge and I work well to deadline so that helped me pull my finger out and really assess how I could do it.
Having tried just about every other method known to blogging for getting new readers including, but not limited to forums, networking, commenting, Facebook, Twitter and begging my friends to sign up I eventually saw the light and started guest posting.
Fortunately all that commenting, retweeting and networking with other bloggers paid off and I was able to persuade Darren Rowse at Problogger and Leo Babauta at Zen Habits into featuring my posts on their uber-popular blogs.
The first time my one of my guest posts got published on a big blog I thought my stat counter had broken because it was rushing up at such unprecedented speed. Check out this spike:
I was still naive at that point but I quickly twigged on and started guest posting as much as I could, cutting down blog posts on my own blog so I had more time to write guest posts.
During this time I was constantly tweaking my blog, trying to improve the conversion rate of new readers into subscribers and praying that I could reach my goal. If I didn’t I’d promised to hang up my blogging hat for good but I really didn’t want to do that, I’d fallen in love with blogging and there was no looking back.
Suffice to say I met my goal of 1000 subscribers after 12 months of blogging and am still blogging. In fact after all the chopping and changing I’ve only had my blog at the current Get In the Hot Spot domain name for 10 months and now have a grand total of around 1,400 subscribers – about 60% of them to the RSS feed and 40% email subscribers.
These days my blog is focused on entrepreneurship, blogging and success, three topics that are dear to me and increasingly overlap in the real world too.
But it wasn’t until Coca-Cola contacted me and took me to Shanghai for a social media conference with bloggers from Australia, China, Singapore, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan that I began to appreciate the real opportunities that can come from blogging.
And these days I’m more interested in developing my own ebooks to sell through my blog than I am in finding a literary agent and I’m spending more and more time researching the relationship between bloggers and brands.
Bloggers and Brands
While the popular press remains sceptical about blogging big companies like Coca-Cola are taking bloggers seriously. That’s because one influential blogger has the power to sway their readers that an advert never will.
As social media grows blogs are becoming our preferred means of getting information.
These days we want advice, including product advice, from real people, people who get us and who we can relate to, not from adverts or boring experts.
So blogging is becoming a lucrative business and a new found testing ground for marketers with smart companies following social media developments and forging alliances with bloggers.
But no matter what perks are offered bloggers need to remain true to themselves and their readers first. It’s a precarious balance where bloggers need to make sure they don’t sell out while also making money from their blog.
The best part is that now bloggers can talk to large corporations and be listened to. Instead of being voiceless consumers, bloggers are being empowered and asked to share our opinions and play a part in shaping the future of products and how companies do business.
Money is power and big businesses are powerful but they need bloggers to help them maintain that position so that makes bloggers powerful too.
That’s and why I’m proud to be a blogger. At the moment blogging’s still spurned by the general public and the media as a fad, a waste of time and a sad activity for friendless geeks.
It won’t last. We bloggers are in on the secret already but one day I predict that everyone will agree: bloggers really do rule the world.
Do you think bloggers are getting more respected and powerful? How do you plan to use your influence as a blogger?
Annabel Candy motivates people to succeed in life and work. She writes about self employment, blogging and self improvement at Get In the Hot Spot. If you check it out and subscribe for free updates by RSS or email she promises to keep you motivated on your road to success.
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Filed under: Motivation, Bloggers, World
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