How To Find Your Blogging Path

January 20, 2015 Content Marketing, Self-Improvement 0

Do you sometimes ask yourself ‘why am I blogging’? Have you ever felt lost when deciding what to write next? Do you have no idea what your future plans are for your blog? These are the exact same questions I have been asking myself recently. Fortunately I came to an answer and if you read on, you may too.

A blogging path is something that has long eluded me. I’ve read about the importance of finding your niche but only truly come to appreciate it’s importance now. I’m currently in the process of creating a video course (that’s a sneak peak for you) that will teach bloggers and small businesses the importance of content marketing as well as practical solutions to get you started with a content marketing campaign.

It’s a large project that will be finished in the second half of 2015. During the initial creation process of this video course I realised the importance of concentrating on a specific problem, for a specific visitor.

While creating the script for my video course I realised I had very little relevant content already on the blog to supplement the course or repurpose. This means I need to create even more content to supplement the course on top of the huge task of creating the video course itself.

Where Was I Going Wrong?

I first created this blog purely as an experiment and because I enjoy blogging. For the first few years (which saw huge gaps in activity purely because I had lost my interest in chasing google algorithym changes) I created content on random topics.

Most of the content I wrote fit into one of the following categories

Topics I was genuinely interested in.
Topics that I thought I was going to rank highly.
Topics that were going to make me money (affiliate articles, reviews etc).

un-organised-blogging1

The problem was the content didn’t really follow any plan and as such I didn’t have much thematic content that I could repurpose or attract the same type of visitor. Essentially, my blog was highly unorganised.

An ideal situation is for a visitor to come back and consume more content. The more content they consume, and like, the more they will trust your brand. The more they trust your brand, the more likely you are at converting them to a customer.

Not everything has to be thematic, I’ll still write on random topics purely because I enjoy doing so from a personal perspective. However, most of my efforts will go into creating content that fits my goals.

How To Find Your Path

It took me a while to see where I wanted to take this blog and over the last few weeks I know what direction my blog is heading in. It’s a wonderfully enlightening experience and something that some people discover immediately and some a little while longer.

The one thing that helped me obtain a new path is reading. I read blogs, forums, Q&A sites, books, watched interviews, webinars. I absorbed as much information on marketing as possible. By doing this I started to naturally find topics I was interested in and topics I wasn’t.

During December some things started to click and I decided it was time to concentrate on ONE THING. I wanted to learn more about content marketing as I feel it’s the strategy that closely matches my ethos to life in general. It’s what I have used in the past (to some success) for my personal projects as well as client projects and is definitely something I want to master.

Stay Positive

Some of these mistakes I have made myself. Don’t feel bad about admitting it. Mistakes show progress. My favourite quote on failing comes from Thomas Edison. When asked about what difficulties he had when creating the lightbulb he said: