Writing

What Is the Key to Success?

What is the key to success? Is it AdSense or Writing?

The key to success is not thinking about money right away but providing a strong product and website to your readers.  The first step is looking at the content of your work and choosing to redo much of it to allow a reader to continue to want to read it.  It also means allowing the search engines better access to your blog.

The simplicity comes from the ability to publish a good blog post which in turn makes a reader want to come and read, be it a book review, or a tech review or something to do with blogging or writing.  The focus of the website need to be broad enough that a reader can find the information they are looking for while being narrow enough that it is the start of a brand.

While you need to consider SEO (search engine optimization) you need to be human.  You need to write to your potential audience.  That audience can come from social networking sites, and from direct traffic where they have been long time readers.  They can also come from search engines of all sorts, Google, Yahoo or Bing being the larger ones at the moment.  It takes a vision and a lot of leadership ability to grow on the Internet.

One thing to avoid is a common statement like this “once I have the steady traffic, I will focus on SEO.”   You have to work with both, you need traffic, but the type of traffic you need to have success and earn more profitable income is using SEO.  By taking a moment to learn the basics will allow you to focus on your content correctly.  A blog is not inert, but it needs a solid foundation.  Simple steps will help.

Take another example: the key to success is the ability to admit failure.  What happens when a website doesn’t do as well as you had hoped? Or, what happens when it’s all going right, and one move can change all of it?  Knowing that SEO rules will change (see the Panda Update by Google as an example.) Many people assumed success but didn’t plan for failure.

How do you make money with Google AdSense?

I could come up with a witty answer, but that’s not needed.  What is needed is time, and effort, and a few quick victories, which is where getting traffic comes into play. Then the money will come through the efforts I’ve made.

If you can’t get traffic, the key to success is not writing more, but updating stale and poorer posts on your website. It still means updating but it means revamping.  Most search engines need to see some revamps, most readers want this as well.  Success might be something you are used to, and this can be a challenge to go back and change the small details, such as post titles, or too short posts.

I enjoy writing on Living a Life of Writing, and I enjoy the process of writing. For a long time it didn’t matter much about traffic, as long as it was there, which in hindsight was a disaster. I didn’t want to dig deeper into my writing because I felt my success was great.  After all, who really needs to actually quantify success when it comes to blogging?  It was lack of leadership and a willingness to play with ‘success’ when it was simply a lack of engagement on the website.  I assumed things would not need to be changed.

I was wrong.

The impact, the success, wasn’t there.  The growth wasn’t there unless there was a lot of social media and social networking involved.  The income only came through direct efforts.  While this was good, it wasn’t anywhere near the concept of passive income which many marketers talk about.  If you are working full time at getting readers and views and income- this is not passive income.

The answer was right there, to make money, and to become a better writer change, and learning is needed.  Learning that a short post won’t make a reader stay is as important as learning that a personal post won’t allow the reader to want to come back or purchase a product.

Make something different get some new writers, or buy a book on Search Engine Optimization will help in the writer who doesn’t know much about the basics.  The concept of success will change over time.  What was good enough three months ago won’t be now.  What the search engines wanted from writers and websites will change.  Accept both the learning experience of failure and of success.The key to success? Define it, aim for it, and then grow from there to make money and improve on your blogs.

The key to success is both AdSense and writing with a good deal of willingness to learn.