The Biggest Trap of all for Bloggers

Time after time, while doing consultancy work, and just looking around at blogs, I see people who have fallen into the “now and next trap.”

“Right now, I’m focusing on building traffic to my blog. Next, I’m going to start to monetize it.”

“I want to get the design right and get some pillar posts up, then I’m going to start an email list.”

Let’s ignore the fact that those are weak and wooly objectives, and explore the root of the problem, which is this:

“What comes next?”

Ask that question, and many times you’ll get a vague response like “I hope to get a book deal” or “I want to quit my full time job.”

The subtext is that the blogger is planning and executing each stage of his or her development in isolation – it becomes a case of “I’ll get this part done, then think about the next step.”

And that’s when big mistakes happen. That’s why so many bloggers don’t set up an email list early enough. Why they don’t know what product to offer their readers when the time comes. Why the launch of their first products are often a catastrophic failure. Why you see experiments with advertising coming and going.

Why you see the same questions over and over again on forums:

“When should I monetize my blog?”

“What product should I offer first?”

The solution is to clearly know what, as our American friends call it, the end game is.

I’m not talking about some vague future dream here. I’m talking about a clear, concise plan – not for your blog, but for your business.

Start with the end, if that makes sense!

Create a really detailed picture of what your business will be doing at the point at which you are aiming. Learn all of the details of the traffic and income. Practice it in your mind until the picture is clear to you and almost tangible.

Once you’ve done that, you can begin to slot in all the elements for the time period leading up to that date. My favorite option is the five year plan – it means you’re working today, knowing exactly where you want to be in five year’s time.

That knowledge will inform everything you do, every decision you make. You’ll still get things wrong, and you’ll still miss some of your objectives, but you’ll know where you’re going.

Let me close off by giving you a real world example of this in action. I was talking to a friend yesterday who is MD of a car manufacturer’s UK division. He was telling me that one of his plans is to double their penetration of the corporate (fleet) market in three years time. I asked him how he was going to do that. Without notes he reeled off the following:

“We’re going to turn 30 of our dealers into fleet centres, recruit and train professional staff to start to build relationships with local businesses. We’re going to offer buy back deals on 500 cars a year to rental fleets, rising to 1000 in year three. We’re going to have a dedicated fleet of loan cars for businesses. We have a new model launching into the C segment next year, which has been created with this market in mind.”

I won’t bore you with more, but he then reeled off a series of numbers telling me how many cars they’d sell to businesses, in each segment, for the next three years.

It was clear he really understood where they were going, and how they would get there. And remember, this is only one element of his overall business.

The point is that none of that detail would have been possible, without a clear understanding of what the long term plan is.

This is routine stuff for most business people, but for some reason we bloggers have fallen into the biggest trap of all. We’re stuck in the now and next.

How will your business look in 3 or 5 year’s time?

Also have a look at:

1/ Learning American English

2/ The Difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 readers

3/ A conversation about paying for content

The Beyond Blogging Project