Every sweet stretch of my blogging career aligns fully with my blanket decision to help people freely.
Every sour stretch of my blogging career aligns fully with my blanket decision to pull back on helping people, to focus heavily on helping myself.
The antidote to blogging failure is helping people.
Help people to indirectly increase blog traffic. Help people to indirectly increase blogging profits. Help people to directly increase blog traffic and profits.
In essence, every person intuitively knows how helping people is the secret to:
- freedom
- happiness
- blogging success
But the ego and its fears tries to obscure that part of the mind, from your awareness.
For example, new blogger me would write and publish one blog post. I helped people through my blog. But then I would sit around for a week before writing and publishing the next blog post on my old blog. I helped people a tiny bit. But then I decided to stop helping people through my blog until 7 days expired. I do not need to explain in vivid detail how much I struggled during those lean blogging days.
Mentally, I made the decision to stop helping people through my blog for 7 days because mental conditioning influenced me to help myself most of the time without care for helping others. My parents worked jobs to help themselves and to help our family of 5. My parents always taught me to get a job to pay the bills. Being programmed with this idea conditioned me to help myself first – aka, to get a job just to pay the bills – and to perhaps help other human beings, as an afterthought, but only after I helped myself, paid my bills, relaxed and unwound for a bit.
Becoming a successful blogger demands you to reverse this upside-down thinking common to the world. First, you help other people for a sustained period of time to increase your:
- skills
- credibility
- exposure
Then, as you open multiple income channels, you leave blogging failure in your rear view window, as all of the skills, credibility and exposure you gained goads fellow human beings to help you with:
- eBook sales
- course sales
- ad clicks
- endorsements
- promotions
- referral business
Blogging success goes like this: help people for free for a bit and gradually these folks help you with pay.
I cannot lie; the momentum shift from self-service to service feels maddening at times. Riding out uncomfortable fears triggered as you help people for a bit with no blogging income arriving for a while tests the patience of most bloggers. But you either sit with the panic triggered, feel your fears and proceed to help or quit and enter the cyber graveyard of bloggers who cannot take the blogging heat and exit the online kitchen, sooner than later.
Ways to Help People
Explore these ideas:
- write and publish a blog post
- write and place a guest post
- record and publish a podcast
- record and publish a video
- read a blog post and publish a genuine, thoughtful comment
- read a blog post and retweet the post, share the post on Facebook and share the post on LinkedIn
Helping people boosts your skills, exposure and credibility. Skilled, credible bloggers seen in many spots become highly successful over the long term.
Blogging is not some Herculean task of immense complexity but a simple, albeit longish, journey of helping people freely without expectation of anything in return. Releasing expectations involves training your mind but the less you need money and traffic in your mind the more people seem to buy your premium offerings, to hire you and to drive referral business to your blog.
Help people freely. Put blogging failure behind you for good.
