Do not lose sight of your primary blog topic - focus is key to successful blogging

Today I want to spend a little time on blog topics and the importance of staying pinpoint focused on your topic, and primary keyword selections.  Because it is all too often that I see blogs that are all over the map.  That the author has been unable to stay focused.  There are many reasons for this.  But the reason I believe is the most common is the lack of information about the blog topic.

Many people, who are beginning to blog, do so because they have an interest in expressing their opinions about a specific topic.  The problem with this is, once your opinion is out there, you have nothing left to talk about.  You can mindlessly drone on about the same thing over and over again, but this doesn’t solve anything, this will actually start to annoy your readers.

So how can you find something that you are knowledgeable about, something that you can obsessively write about and consistently have something new to share with your readers?  You have to focus on things that you are more than just interested in; you have to focus on things you truly have a wealth of knowledge about.  You have to spend hours learning and reading and improving your own basic knowledge in order to take that information you have learned, and jumble it all up in your mind, put your own spin on it and spit it back out on your blog.

Now, don’t get me wrong, what I just said sounded a bit like I am telling you to read what others write and just regurgitate it.  That is not it at all, I am telling you to learn, to practice what you learn and to put your own spin and level of importance on it, then tell others.  Having a unique spin or opinion on what others are constantly repeating is what will set you out in a crowd.  This is what should be your primary goal when writing your blog posts.  This coupled with the fact that you are staying with your primary topic.

Like this blog.  I am always going to write posts that will be informative and will give my readers new insights on what it takes to become a successful blogger.  I am never going to write an article about celebrity gossip or ant reproduction.  Although the ant reproduction thing is kinda an interesting thought.  Anybody who finds me on this blog is not looking for that, and that is not what I want him or her to find.  If they stumble onto an article that has little or nothing to do with my primary target, there is a very good chance I have just lost that reader forever.

So, even though I am here talking about remaining focused on your primary keywords and topics, I have to admit something.  The very thing that brought me to the world of blogging is the one thing that makes blogging so difficult for me.  See I have the attention span of a three-year-old.  Staying focused is my weakness, but it is what made me start a blog.  I saw one, thought it was neat, realized I could do it for free and went at it!  It was a complete failure.  I wallowed through it, writing about this and that, with no real direction and do you know what happened…absolutely nothing!  Nobody came.  I gave up on it.  I lost hope.  But being the type of person I am, I started learning.  Learning about blogging, reading blog posts much like the ones I am putting here on blogging for beginners.  I started building up my knowledge base, and I tried again.  And do you know what happened…Almost nothing!  Yep, second attempt is still up and running and I post to it at least once a week, but the topic is so wide ranged that I will probably never rank well for any specific keywords.  But I know that, I write on that blog in a way that it will just not get the traffic.  And I am ok with that.

So after that, I started my third blog…It took off.  I was getting more and more hits every single day, and I was writing and writing away.  Things were looking good, but then a crazy thing happened.  I ran out of stuff to say.  I even pleaded with my readers to ask me questions or give me suggestions, so I could find more things to write about. But I got NOTHING! Nobody was commenting.  The blog was not interactive, readers were there with the sole purpose of finding information and they were using the blog as a way to find that information, often that information was on other sites.  And all I was doing was linking them to the other sites.  Chalk it up to a bit of a failure.  And why?  Because I didn’t have the adequate knowledge to stay on topic.

First attempt was lost because I could not stay on topic

Second attempt will remain what it is because although I do a better job of it, I do not always stay on topic
Third failed for lack of knowledge about the topic

So understand something from this.  And this is key.  Laser like focus is of primary importance when you decide to start to blog.  If you want a blog that is successful and that brings a bulk of your readers from search engines you need that focus to be sustained over a long period of time.  This is not a process that will happen overnight.  This is not even a process that will happen in a couple of weeks.  But an ever-consuming process that has to be maintained over the lifetime of the blog if you truly want to see your readership constantly moving in the right direction.

It is really funny to me that I think a couple of times within this post; I lost focus and went off on a tangent…. What can I say, I never really learn!

Thank you for reading blogging for beginners and I hope you come back soon!