Do You Blog from Ego or Actual Intelligence?

This is a guest post by our top contributing author and travel blogger Ryan Biddulph. He is the founder of Blogging From Paradise, his course 11 Fundamentals of Successful Blogging and the author of more than 126 eBooks.

Pros like Anthony Gaenzle know; blogging intelligently promotes success.

Blogging from ego creates failure.

He published a comment on Blogging From Paradise a few moments ago explaining how 50,000 monthly visitors who bounce from your blog within 30 seconds doesn’t mean anything because they do not talk about your brand.

Ego makes blogging tough because it seeks:

big numbers
vanity metrics
meaningless markers of alleged growth
untargeted alleged success

50,000 monthly blog visitors sounds impressive but numbers cannot do anything. Imagine 50,000 humans walking past a brick and mortar store, spanning one month. Perhaps 50,000 humans stop for 30 seconds to do some window shopping. But every single person moves on without:

buying anything
noting the store name
referring the store to a friend
browsing around the store for a potential future purchase, based on their keen interest in what the store offers

The store owner’s ego celebrates such a fabulous milestone; 50,000 humans forming such massive store foot traffic sounds inspired! But actual intelligence knows 50,000 untargeted humans with zero interest in your store do not increase:

referrals
significant foot traffic
business
brand awareness

Brand-wise and business-wise, 50,000 untargeted, disinterested people who visit your blog equates to zero humans visiting your blog because casual traffic does not build business. But 1, 5 or 10 highly targeted people who visit your blog daily do everything for your business because the 30, to 150, to 300 highly targeted people who visit your blog monthly:

become brand advocates
promote your blog tirelessly
buy your eBooks, courses, audio books and paperbacks
hire you
comment genuinely on your blog
lower your bounce rate
increase time spent on site
improve your Google ranking by boosting critical SEO factors

Tap into your limitless, clear-thinking, powerful intelligence. Think this through! I learned this lesson of hyper targeting readers versus chasing worthless metrics the hard way. Big numbers are as useless as zero if none of the people seem interested in your blog topic, brand or business.

Stop chasing big metrics. Publish highly-targeted, helpful content designed to solve one specific problem originating in a single niche. Stick to that niche. Give readers a chance to see you as the authority in that niche. Become a niche authority. Intelligently draw a highly-targeted collection of human beings to you who love your blog content, want your insights, buy your stuff, hire you and promote you.

Think targeting over chasing big numbers.

Targeting readers grows your quality traffic, brand advocate base and business. Big numbers do nothing.

One of my harshest blogging lessons consisted of spending years working hard to attain big numbers but struggling blogging-wise because few to none of those human beings seemed interested in my blog, brand and premium offerings. The ego imagined some lofty number of blog visitors as being the answer to blogging struggles but numbers cannot:

promote you
endorse you
buy your offerings
hire you

Feeling the sting of failure and being fed up with working like a blogging beast alerted me to using the power of intelligence to think through my blogging campaign. I slowly but surely began to target my readership by writing and publishing blogging tips themed posts on Blogging From Paradise.

I also began guest blogging mainly on respected blogs from the blogging tips niche. Thinking through my blogging campaign to laser target a few highly interested, loyal readers changed my blogging trajectory. People who loved my content and business offerings began to follow my blog.

A small group of loyal people do the work of a disinterested, largely unengaged, 50,000 subscriber email list.

Bloggers often scramble to gain 30 to 50 email subscribers daily but struggle because the numbers 30 or 50 cannot do anything. Hyper targeting your blogging campaign to attract a few highly-engaged, loyal humans does everything for your blogging campaign because these folks promote you, endorse you, hire you, buy your offerings and grow your business.

Plus, hyper targeted readers add a strong passive element to your blogging business. My loyal, targeted blogging readership promotes me around the clock whether I am online or offline. You cannot beat that!