Hey, what’s up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a blogging question for you, for those of you that are interested in blogging, creating
your own blog you can always check my free course on how to Create a Blog to Boost Your
Career.
Go ahead and click there and you can get access to that.
It’s totally free, delivered by email, lot of good information there, but I often get
questions related from that course and I’m going to read you one of those today which
is about the best way to get your blog out there.
This is from Ted and Ted says, “I’m having problems advertising my blog.
I’m usually only getting 1-2 clicks on my blog when I create a new post.
I created a Twitter account and I advertise my posts on there.
I comment on other blogs once a week.
I’d like to do more but I’m having trouble finding posts to comment on.
I’m trying to find more Android Developer blogs.”
Well, you’re going to find some now.
Leave a comment below if you’ve got an Android developer blog.
“Are there other ways to advertise my blog?
Or communicate with android developer bloggers?
I just gave you one.
“You send me an email and I’m going to put you in contact with a bunch that are going
to leave comments below with links to their android developer blog.
Also, would it be acceptable to put my blog on a resume?
Or talk about it in an interview?
Let’s start with the obvious question.
Yes, of course, definitely put it on your resume and talk about it during an interview.
In fact, if you do it right that should be the main thing you talk about in the interview
because that’s going to be interesting.
Your blog is essentially your resume.
I’ll tell you what, if you apply for a job, the very first thing that the company is going
to do, or the person that’s going to interview you is going to do is they’re going to Google
your name.
If your blog comes up and it’s an android development blog and you’re applying for
an android developer position, guess what they’re going to do?
They’re going to click that link and they’re going to read your blog and they might spend
hours reading your blog if it’s got good information on it.
When you show up for the interview they may have already decided to hire you just based
on that.
Some of you think I’m kidding about this, but I’ve gotten jobs that way.
I have literally talked to hundreds of simple programmer community members that have gotten
jobs that way.
It works—that’s why, again, I’ll put the link one more time.
You need to sign up for this course and create a blog if you haven’t already.
It’s really, really critical.
Now let’s talk about how to advertise the blog and the fact that you’re only getting
1 or 2 clicks per day on your blog.
I’ve talked about this a lot of times.
I definitely talk about it in that blogging course.
This is something that you have to do for the long haul and it takes a long, long time
to build up an audience and to build traction.
There’s a really good book on this actually called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.
He’s the editor of Success Magazine.
It’s called the Compound Effect.
Go check that out.
I actually did a book review on it as well which you can—you want to check out my book
review playlist, you can check that out.
Basically he talks about this idea, and I think this is an important concept is that
you’ve got this long slog, I was talking about the grind.
There’s this long period before you’re not really seeing any traction.
If you think about this he used an example in the book which I’m sure you’ve heard
of.
If you have a penny and everyday it doubled.
In the first day you have one penny, in the second day you had 2, then 4, then 9, then
16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 5/12, 10-48.
How many is this at?
That’s like 8 days in and you don’t have much.
30 days in it was like—what was it like, $10 million or something like that, I can’t
remember the exact number.
But do you see what I'm saying, is that that is the compound effect.
That’s this idea.
You’re running a blog post and you do a blog post and you get 1 to 2 clicks.
You comment on a few blogs.
You’re doing this for months at a time and the year passes by and you’re like, “Gosh,
a year?
I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been trying to promote it, nothing is happening.
Two years pass by, you’re starting to see a little bit of an improvement but you’re
like, “This is still not traction.”
Bam, on the third year all of a sudden you get traction.
You look at this YouTube channel, right?
Look how long I’ve been doing videos on here.
My pace has increased, but I’ve been doing it for 3 or 4 years by the time that I’m
recording this video.
If you look historically, if you use like SocialBlade, go check out SocialBlade and
look at my site, you can see historically that it took me a long time to get to a thousand
subscribers on YouTube.
It took me a long time to get to 2000 subscribers.
Once I hit about 2000 or 3000 subscribers the inflection point started to go like this.
All of a sudden I had traction and bam, 10,000, 20, 40,000.
Right now we’re at like 42,000 subscribers.
That just went up in the last 6 months.
I’ve had more growth than I have had over the last few years.
That’s how things work.
Most people don’t stick it out long enough.
Your number one problem is sticking it out.
You just need time.
You have to keep on producing, keep on grinding, keep on putting out stuff.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to change your tactics and try to figure out
what works, but you’ve just got to realize that time is the biggest equation.
It’s the multiplier.
It’s going—just like compounding money, compounding things in that momentum effect
is going to have the biggest impact overall.
Now let’s talk about a few tactics.
Twitter, Facebook, social media that’s not going to promote your blog, I’m sorry, unless
you’ve got hundreds of thousands of followers.
I’ve got like maybe 40,000 something followers on Twitter.
I send out a blog post and like 5 people click on it.
It’s just not effective.
There’s too much noise in those channels.
You might be able to find other channels that don’t have as much noise.
Again, come up with a list of android developer blogs, really search for this.
Go onto Fiverr and hire someone to come up with a list of android developer blogs for
$5.
Let them do the work for you.
Farm out some of this stuff that you can do real easily and then make—have a systematic
way that you’re going to comment on so many blogs per day.
Put a system in place.
Putting systems in place is really critical.
I’ll give you a really good book about putting systems in place which is Scott Adams’ book.
I did a review on this one as well on—what is it called?
It’s called How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big.
I think that’s the title of the book.
It’s a really good book but he talks about the value of using systems.
I use systems all the time.
Develop some systems.
See what’s working for those and then—that’s really—that’s the thing.
You’ve got to write good content.
You can look at SEO and things like that and that may help you, but overall time is the
biggest factor.
Constantly research, constantly figure out some kind of system that’s going to work
for you, but there’s just no magic formula for getting people to come to your blog.
Now some people have success, some people start writing a blog and then 3 months later
they get a post that goes viral and all of a sudden they’re like Mark Manson and they’re
getting millions of paid views per month, but that doesn’t happen for most people.
That might happen for you, but don’t count on that.
Count on being in it for the long haul and consistently producing.
If you’re producing quality and you’re getting better at it and you’re persistent
and you make it through that curve, eventually that inflection point.
I know this is true because this has happened to me in multiple areas from blogging to podcast
to YouTube.
I have watched these inflection points as I’ve taken on new projects and then all
of a sudden, bam, it starts to hit traction.
There’s a significant risk involved.
I won’t lie to you.
Some people—I know one YouTuber who unfortunately has produced like I think something like 2000
videos and he doesn’t have a lot of subscribers.
I know some people that have created blogs.
There is a small risk that nothing happens, but that’s part of being an entrepreneur,
baby.
It’s never going to be 100% certain.
I can give you the 90% path that you could follow.
You could definitely waste 5 years of your life, it won’t be a waste if you write a
blog post, trust me, it won’t be a waste.
You may never get the traction and get the audience.
It’s a possibility, but chances are if you’re persistent and you’re adapting and you’re
working hard towards it and you don’t give up that you eventually will.
Success—it’s really hard to not find success, I would imagine in blogging if you do it for
5 years and you write a blog post at least once a week for 5 years, you’re going to
build an audience.
You’re going to have at that time, most likely at least 10,000 paid views a month.
I can’t imagine how—unless circumstances just conspire against you.
You’re just writing about topics that no one cares about that that’s not going to
happen.
Anyway, keep going.
I appreciate your question.
If you want to get more videos like this, if you like this video, if you’re interested
in learning more about blogging and boosting your career, personal development, fitness
and all that kind of stuff I talk about here on this channel click that subscribe button
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I do like 2 to 3 new videos a day.
That’s right, a day, and yeah.
So anyway, I hope you like this video and I’ll talk to you next time.
Take care.