Getting Blog Traffic and Still Doing It My Way

A lot of people dream about being a writer. While you're dreaming about it, it's easy. When you do it, it's a bit of a shock, especially if you do it on the internet! You enter this arena of massive competition, plus everybody's got an opinion on the right way to achieve success. A lot of them contradict each other. All of them are absolute authorities.

Many insist you must figure out what people want, and give it to them. Search adwords.google.com to see how many people are looking for specific things. Look up, for example, "Oprah" and you'll see 2,400,000 people search Google.com with that word every month. So then, write something about Oprah. You want the readers, give them what they want.

Is it the only way? What if I don't want to write about Oprah? The people who actually stand out, and achieve notoriety, or fame or fortune – aren't they the ones who say or said "I want success, I do, but I have to do it my way"? Elvis Presley, The Beatles, J.K. Rowling, to name a few.

Being so totally adaptive doesn't work for me. What have I got an individual voice for if I don't use it? I can't imagine getting to the end of my life and never having actually said what I really wanted to say. On the other hand, I don't want to be just writing things that nobody can relate to, because I can't much see the point of that either.

I love it when people say "I enjoyed what you wrote", who wouldn't? I also love it when traffic to my blog or my articles is high. It's amazing to know that tens of thousands of people have read something I've written. I'd be a liar if I denied it. And then there's the financial aspect too. If I have good traffic I can make decent money. I want it all, I like chocolate cake, I want to have it and I want to eat it.

And maybe I can. A top art dealer said to me once "there's a market for every piece of art, no matter how good or bad it is. You just have to identify that market". So here I have been writing a blog for a year. The traffic has increased, but it's not off the charts. What am I saying – it's barely on the charts! A lot of people say "change what you write then, get real". The hell with that.

I was puzzled, though, because I'd understood that if you go to Google.com and type in the title of your blog, and your blog comes up on the first page, you should get a ton of traffic. But I type in Stepping out of History, and 87,000,000 million people are writing on the topic – it changes every day. My blog shows in the first 4 searches. Sometimes I have the whole page. I'm not getting any traffic from it, though. Absolutely zippo.

Then I discovered that the thing about your blog title is whether anybody actually uses those exact words to look for anything on Google. Duh. So off I went to adwords.google.com, typed "stepping out of history" - and nobody's using that term!! So it's not about the content of my blog, it's about the title. The words mean nothing to people. Clearly I have to use a different title – one that means essentially the same thing, but that people use in their searches on Google.

How about My Way? 1,500,000 people use those words every month to search Google. It means the same thing as my blog title. It's about claiming your life. About 64,000,000 writers are using the words "my way" in their title, but that doesn't bother me. I succeeded in competing against 87,000,000 writers with Stepping out of History. All I did was write a blog post every day – for a year, admittedly – and submit articles to Searchwarp that have a link to my blog. I don't even flood Searchwarp, I submit every week or ten days, sometimes more, sometimes less.

So maybe I'm right, maybe I can have my cake and eat it. Yum. I can write what I love, and get traffic. I just have to be smarter about my title and use words that the world knows about. Then carry on doing what I've been doing, and get my blog registering on the first Google search results page for "my way" instead of "stepping out of history".

I could get anything from 35,000 to 100,000 people reading my blog every month. It'll take me a while, but I'll get there. I remember seeing somebody say on Oprah that it took her two years to get it together with her blog. So I'm one year down, one to go!

In conclusion, when people tell you that you have to adapt yourself totally in order to succeed, it's bollocks. It's one way of doing it, that's all. But if you're one of the people who says "I have to do it my way" maybe you can. I'd place my money on it. Oh that's right, I haven't got any at the moment!