When one starts a business, the goal is to earn money.
When one auditions for a play, the plan is to be a star.
When one creates an invention, the mindset is to be known for a contribution to the world.

With any venture you delve into, obviously you want to succeed. I’m sure just about any person in the planet would agree on this, and it would only be a matter of what an individual perceives success to be.

So when you start a blog, what would be the objective? Serious bloggers can have a variety of reasons why they choose to blog, such as: to promote, to educate, to be heard, to brain wash, to empower, Fame, Fortune, Glory, Power… Well, whatever the case might be, it is certain that to achieve any one of these things, the primary objective is to make yourself known.

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It won’t be easy, but once you know what you are getting yourself into, and exactly what you’re doing; it sure would be a lot easier to reach whatever your goal might be.

So here are some things that I believe any serious blogger should keep at heart if they want to succeed at this particular venture:

Make Remarkable Content

Seth Godin actually has a good explanation of what he deems as remarkable. Basically, you make a good enough post that people would want to make a remark about.  You can make it engaging, appalling, uplifting, controversial, enjoyable, adorable,  or whatever you’re good at that will make people connect to what you say, and feel like telling their friends about.

So basically you don’t talk about the third time you had meatloaf for supper or the time you saw a normal house spider in your ceiling. Think about it this way, would you want to read about those things in some other random blog? If the answer is no, then best not to blog about it.  It’s clichéd advice, yes, but sadly, a lot of people are still not following it. But if you have grasped this first point well, then we can move on to the next step.

Befriend Social Media

So now you have remarkable content, but let’s face it, you’re not Seth Godin (at least, not yet), so you don’t have thousands of followers at your disposal to share your remarkable content.

But you know how many twitter followers all the big shots have when they started? You guessed it, 0. That twitter base was built by long hours of hard work, and it definitely did not happen overnight. You slowly gain your twitter followers by gaining their trust. Share only the best stuff, give good insights, reply, retweet, communicate.

I’ve been mainly talking about twitter, but obviously, you can also use a lot of these tips for other forms of social media like facebook, and bookmarking sites.

Don’t be Scared of SEO

Some people read a small bunch of SEO articles and automatically write it off as a foreign language. You might even go as far as to say that people who understand these things belong in their own SEO world. But I’m positive that if you gave it a shot, you’d find that there is nothing to be scared about, and only much to gain from.

If you ran away from that lesson you could not understand, would you have gotten a high grade? If you shied away from a particularly impossible task, would you have been recommended for a promotion? Of course not! To expect outstanding results, you should face these difficult challenges head on. And SEO is another hurdle you have to overcome to finally cross that line and be recognized… then be well on your way to your own definition of blogging success.

John manages the nursing scrubs website NursingUniforms.net, one stop online shop for branded lab coats, scrub tops and all kind of medical uniforms.

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