Blog Yourself Rich: The Magic Numbers

I’ve said before things don’t grow linearly. For example when working out there are weeks where you can increase a main lift by a ten pound jump and another when a two and a half pound jump is a struggle. The universe is chaotic, it is not a simple formula. The same is true with blogging. Some posts will net you more readers than others. Some will go viral. Some especially in the beginning maybe less than one hundred people will ever read. Things are not created equal. This applies to the growth of your blog as well.

The traffic jump from month one to month two is going to be different from the traffic jump from month two to three. If you follow all outlined in Blog Yourself Rich you will keep growing traffic by larger and larger percentages as the months go on. Meaning if you had a twelve percent increase in traffic from month two to month three we want to get you a thirteen or higher percent increase in traffic from month three to month four. Eventually this will hit a snag when you get into the millions of readers but by then you won’t care anyways as you will have such a large reader base.

There are certain numbers in both writing and blogging the function as “magic numbers”. Meaning when you hit these numbers generally you success has almost always been assured. Granted that you are following other rules such as writing quality content and giving value to others. Follow those rules and hit these numbers and it is almost a gurantee that your blog will be a success. Focus on hitting these magic numbers.

Magic Numbers: Writing

Writing books is a great way to make money off of your blog. Books that have blogs as platforms have a far greater chance of success than books randomly released on a book selling website. Not to mention blogging warms you up for writing and keeps you writing consistently everyday. And as all good writers know consistency is the key to being a successful writer, more than creativity, talent, skill, or anything else. Blogging keeps you dedicated to your writing and helps prevent you from getting caught up in things such as “writer’s block”, as you will be focused on producing content and not have the luxury of making up excuses for why you cannot write.

Blogging also offers you the unique opportunity to blog your book. Meaning taking old blog posts posting them in a word processor and using them as a base to modify, edit, and add to so that each post can essentially become a chapter. Look at your posts as lumps of clay that can be refined and shaped into book chapters. So whenever you publish another article you are adding another potential chapter to a book based on your blog topics. Now with this being said there is a magic number in writing that once hit writers of whatever shape tend to do well.

For writers the number is one million words. Once a writer has written one million words in book form they will generally start seeing the success that one can live off of. There is something magic about hitting one million written words for your books. This isn’t one million written words published and refined in book form nor is it one million written words written over a lifespan. No, this is one million written words written in relation to your writing. So a essay done in high school doesn’t count but every outline, article, and rough draft of a book chapter counts. If you want to be a successful author don’t expect to write one book and hit big success. Keep at it, consistently, and for the long haul. The magic number for writing is one million words.

Magic Numbers: Blogging

Blogging functions a little differently from writing books as the numbers are measured differently. Again all of this requires that the content that you are producing is quality content and gives value to others. Don’t do those things and you write ten million words and it isn’t going to do much. All of this relies on following the other rules lain out. With blogging like I said before things don’t grow linearly. Publishing your first one hundred posts is going to give you different results from publishing you second one hundred posts and so on and so forth. Now part of this will be because you will grow and mature as a writer (not to mention person) as you progress but even if you didn’t the results would still be different from the first hundred posts to the second one hundred posts.

The magic number for blogging is one thousand posts. When you have one thousand well written, content rich, value filled, at least a little SEO and keyword optimized posts your blog is almost guaranteed to be a success and bring in enough money for you to live off of it. Now obviously there are no guarantees in life but it’s a good bet that hitting those numbers will result in you living off your blog is you so choose to pursue the life of your dreams. Of course this is granted that you have a product on your blog your selling but nevertheless one thousand well written posts is the goal to shoot for.

So if you are sitting there pecking away at your keyboard wondering when your blog is finally going to hit success do yourself a favor and look over at your total post count. Does it say one thousand or higher? If not, you know what you need to do. Keep your nose to the grindstone and keep on writing. Until you hit one thousand posts writing more quality value giving content should be your number on priority in regards to your blog. Do marketing, have a product, but when those things are complete crank out quality content until you hit the thousand post point then you have a bit more freedom to look into other things but until then. Keep at it.

Summary

So both writing and blogging have magic numbers that when hit almost gurantee that the writer is going to have success. Doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be making millions but that they will have created something that they can live off of and live the life that they want to live. Do the work. Put in the hours. There is no way around this. Writing one million words or one thousands posts or both takes time, effort, and above all a workmanlike attitude to the craft of writing and blogging. It’s doing the same things over and over again until you achieve success.

Fill yourself with good information and good experiences. Put that knowledge on paper so others may benefit in some way, shape, or form. Edit it. Then publish it. Then repeat nine hundred and ninety nine more times for bloggers and a lot more than that for writers. The great thing about blogging is that those words written on your blog count for the total written in your book. Even if they are different subjects. Regardless of what you do get to work. Don’t delay. Don’t sit around and procrastinate. Do the work and put in the time. Do those two things and you will reap the rewards.

Click here for the rest of the blog yourself rich series.

If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it. You can follow me on Twitter here.

-Charles Sledge