Blogging development tip: find a stone you can lift and lift it

So many blogs out there and so few really succeed in developing a business around it. In this article I will talk about one of the many causes that in many cases lead to failure. This is one of the most common mistakes bloggers do but sometimes it’s so common it gets unnoticed.

Here is what I’m talking about. You know how enthusiast you are when doing something for the first time? You remember how happy you are when you start your own business? Of course you do. But you also remember how you thought that the first day will bring you money and it didn’t?

The mistake I’m talking about is simple: to many of us start businesses and we have wrong expectations from it. We think that our product it’s going to sell like hot bread and after a while we are faced with the hard truth: nobody cares about you and your product.

And this is the part where things get a little strange: your product may be great. Then what happen? Let’s take a look at what a starting blogger does (in many cases). So you wanted to start blogging because you like to make money by writing things in pajamas and getting traffic and selling your product. As you can see I’m talking about a business blog for a business that has a product. There are so many that start blogging with no real purpose, no business and no product. In this article we passed that place.

After few articles published on your blog you “go hunting”. Find the most influential blogs in your market and you start posting comments there. At first you have no purpose in those comments. You just comment for the sake of the comment and you think that people will see your comments and rush to your wonderful blog.

Then you go and make another “great decision”. After two months of blogging you ask to write a guest post on a high authority blog. After a few months of blogging I asked Darren Rowse from Problogger for a guest post on his newly launched blog about Twitter: he politely refused. What was I thinking?

I mean, don’t get me wrong here, it’s good to try but it’s wrong to expect to get a positive reaction from the beginning. This is just one example of a thing that you’ll not be able to do from the start. Blog authority is built in time. People will start to trust you in time.

So don’t go for the biggest stone right from day 1. Don’t expect to be where other bloggers are after working hard for years. Chris Brogan has his own Independence day and he worked hard for it. Gary Vaynerchuk has a daily show on wine and for more than a year nobody care – but now he has thousands of viewers. Don’t expect your business to be at the highest point from the start. Realize that you have to work to get it there.

It is very important to acknowledge the fact that you have to start low. You can’t climb the mountain from the top: you have to start at the bottom. Too bad blogging is not like that. It would’ve been easier to realize the obvious.

I’m not saying it’s bad to comment on authority blogs and to try and establish relations with the well known bloggers in your market. In fact I strongly advise you to do it from day 1. But don’t expect to get something out of it from the start.

Instead, find some blogs that are just starters like yours or have more authority but are not in the top yet. It will be easier to get to write a guest post there. Those people will also be easier to approach because they’re not getting hundreds of e-mails every day like the big bloggers.

So, my advice is to take things one step at a time. Don’t rush into it because you’re excited about you blogging. There are millions of blogs out there and if you don’t do it the right way you’ll only be one of those millions.

Let me know what you think about this and if you have some questions, please let me know in comments bellow.