Pro Blogging Tip: Never Skip Steps

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.

The blogger I am today is the sum total of 15,000 plus hours of steps I took from 2008 until 2020.

I did not skip steps because skipping steps would have led me toward failure and eventual quitting. Bloggers love skipping steps. Blogger enjoy taking short cuts. But have you ever skipped a step while walking down the stairs?

I once skipped a step before flying from the US to Oman. I suffered for the entirety of each flight because the pain of my rolled ankle throbbed dramatically as I sat cramped into my seat. My mistake: I skipped the last step of my stairs in the house because I rushed wildly down the stairwell.

Bloggers try to rush the blogging process, skip one or more steps and suffer the same pain. Picture the high volume of new bloggers who skip the flat out most critical step of buying your domain and hosting to establish some credibility with your blogging campaign.

Blogging intelligently, effectively and generously on a free platform for 1, 5 or 10 years almost always leads to failure because few humans deeply trust bloggers who fear spending a few bucks per month to invest in hosting.

Seeing a generic URL flashes a serious red flag. Why would a serious blogger brand a hosting platform versus branding themselves with a minimal financial investment?

Other bloggers take the proper first step of buying
their domain and hosting but skip critical steps like:

selecting a blogging niche they feel passionately about
solving problems related to that niche by listening closely to readers who follow top blogs in the niche
formatting blog posts effectively
networking genuinely and generously to engage in effective blogger outreach

Skip any blogging step to fall flat on your face. Or take all necessary steps to position yourself to go pro. Everything depends on your willingness to not skip any crucial blogging step or else you will pay the consequences.

Becoming a professional blogger requires your:

generosity
patience
persistence
trust in self
trust in the blogging process

But digging deeper than these basic mindset qualities, aspiring pro bloggers need to learn and follow simple but necessary, practical blogging tips to lay the foundation for their professional blogging career.

One odd step most bloggers skip seems to disqualify bloggers
from calling themselves bloggers: they rarely if ever blog!

A decent chunk of bloggers invest in their domain and hosting for years but publish only a few posts during that time frame. Enabling automatic renewals via your credit card for 5 years does not mean you have blogged for 5 years. Making automatic payments to secure your domain and hosting is quite different than spending 10,000 plus hours blogging over years.

Each one of those 10,000 hours you blog serves as one step you take on your blogging journey. The act of gaining blogging experience makes up a series of vital steps allowing you to become a professional blogger.

Respect the Progressive Nature of Blogging Success

I played a fairly large role in helping to raise my niece.

Now she is approaching 5 years of age in a few months. But I vividly recall the day she sat up on her own power for her first step toward locomotion. She took the next step by crawling. She took another step by standing up. Shaky walking followed. Eventually she walked with confidence. Now she sprints quite fast for a small child.

Picture the progressive nature of blogging success being similar to my niece’s journey, one familiar to most small children. Bloggers progressively become more successful by taking one step at a time.

My niece could not sprint until she mastered all prior steps. Her knees and elbows offered testimony for when she tried to sprint before she could even walk. Bloggers suffer the same traumatic fate by doing the ridiculous thing of trying to sprint before they can barely crawl.

Stop trying to write a viral blog post if you have yet to buy your domain and hosting, if you have not written and published a 600 word post yet and if you have no idea what readers interested in your niche want.

Baby step your way to becoming a professional blogger. Slowly, steadily, patiently and persistently respect the progressive nature of blogging success.

eBook