One great article away from fame

One of the things I enjoy about working with my business partner Nathan is that he often comes up with show stopping phrases. And in a post in the Beyond Blogging Project forums, he hit us with this one:

Don't get caught in the trap of thinking you're just one great article away from fame.

Image: Chris Sharp / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And I see bloggers, indeed I've been one, who are busy writing great content every day on their blogs.....and getting nowhere slowly.

I once read that "If you write great content, people will come." Well sorry, but that's bullshit. At least it is nowadays. There are simply too many blogs, with equally good content, competing for those readers.

The only way to achieve a real breakthrough - escape velocity - is by spending more time promoting your work. Doing what Gary calls hustling.

Commenting on other blogs in the niche
Writing really excellent guest posts on a variety of blogs
Working hard on Twitter and Facebook to promote your work, whilst connecting sociably at the same time
Doing interviews for other bloggers
Having a long term plan for your business and how to promote it

Look around you at the people who have achieved a real breakthrough and you'll find they invest much more time in promoting their work than they do in writing the content.

Take Josh Hanagarne as an example. His blog is only a year old. His posting frequency is around one a day over that time. But he's been noticed by Seth Godin, he's landed a book deal, written and launched his first book, he's attracted advertisers to his site and is fast making his name as a strength expert.

Why has Josh achieved all this when so many blogs that were started in April 2009 haven't done anything? He hasn't written more content than others, and although his writing is good, it may not be any better than some.

He's done it by promotion, by being everywhere, by being noticed, by working smartly in the right places. He accelerated past all the other blogs that started at the same time, not by focusing solely on content, but by focusing on promoting his brand and his work.

It's time to really start to analyse your blog working time and break it down into three areas:

Writing content
Promotion
Everything else

Think back over the last week, and honestly try to attach a percentage to each - what are you seeing? When I do it, I see something like 10%, 40% and 50%, and that really isn't good. Effectively, I'm wasting half my working time doing stuff that isn't directly productive.

So I'm shooting for 10%, 70% and 20%. What about you?

These are also quite good:

1/ Are we really leveraging the power of the internet? (Video)

2/ Eight essential tools for bloggers

3/ Using anchor text when linking to other blogs