One Year old and the four "C's"

This blog is a year old. In some ways the time has flown, in others it seems a lifetime since I wrote the first stumbling words on here.

I’m happy. Thanks to you, the objectives I set out have been achieved.

• We’re consistently getting over 1000 visits a day
• There are more than 800 people who are part of the Mike’s Life community
• I’m earning a reasonable living from it
• It’s consistently climbing in the Alexa rankings, sitting at 130,000 today
• I’ve had loads and loads of fun

I wanted to share some thoughts with any of you who might be about to embark on a blogging journey – hopefully distilling what I have learned into a few pithy sentences.

I believe you need the four “C’s” to make a blog successful in a year:

• Courage
• Content
• Community
• Conviction

Courage

It takes courage to start a blog. The courage to believe what you are doing is worthwhile and might be valuable to others. And above all, the courage to keep going when things start to get tough, as they inevitably do.

It’s also about having the courage not to do certain things. With so many tools available to bloggers, it’s easy to try to do everything, and you can end up being mediocre at all of them. You can’t be a Twitter genius, and a Facebook rockstar and a Linkedin maven all at the same time.

Content

I’ve talked before about content, and I can’t judge the value of my own content, but I can judge the frequency. I set out to write an average of a post a day, and this is post number 384. I believe this is the area where most new blogs struggle. With the writer balancing a full time job with the blog, posting can become infrequent. In my view, your early relationship with readers is a tenuous one – something you have to constantly reinforce with more and more good content. Darren Rowse can afford to take a week off from blogging – I can’t.

Community

A blog is nothing without a community around it. People who will comment for you, write guest posts, and support your efforts in many other ways.

Building that community takes time and a lot of effort – the effort to check out and comment back to everyone who leaves one on your site, the effort to contact other bloggers and write quality guest posts for them, the effort to send out a regular, personal or value adding newsletter to your existing subscribers.

Conviction

Closely related to courage, conviction is needed to follow through all your plans and objectives. I’ve read my original objectives every single day of this year, and I’ve tried (and often failed) to inform everything I do based on those objectives. I’ve kept asking myself “Will doing this, right now, move any of my goals forward?” And if the answer has been no, I’ve forced myself to move on. The Brits call that kind of conviction “Bloody mindedness!”

Of course, there’s so much more that goes into making a blog successful, but those are the basic, underlying traits we all need for it to happen.

What would you add? How has 2009 been for your blog?

Don’t forget to download your free report “2010 and Beyond” over at the Beyond Blogging website.