With the daily increase of blogs on the internet, a lot of lies are also sprouting up leading people astray. There are too many blogging myths right now spiraling up the Internet ladder.
Yea, blogging is no longer a new thing and even though it’s not as old as Methuselah at least, it has been there for a considerable number of years and even decades. However, not minding the fact that it’s been there for decades, people still harbors lots of misconception for it.
You know what a myth is right? (A widely held, but false belief).
There are lots of different myths that people still have strong belief on but, what you might not have known is that blogging and internet marketing equally have their myths, in fact, blogging myths spread more like wildfire and travels more than other industries because of its mode of digital communication.
Interestingly, most of these myths start with an iota of truth, and if you’re not careful, they might bring about the demise of your precious blog.
As someone who has spent an enormous amount of time in the blogosphere, I often spot them everywhere and in this post, I’m going to debunk some of these myths and lay them to rest once and for all to prevent you from losing your blog.
Without further ado, let’s get to it.
Top 7 Blogging Myths Busted For Good
1. Blogging Is a Fad
The truth is, I don’t know where this lie originated from. From today, whoever tells you that blogging is irrelevant, tell him to “go pound sand”, but say it in a friendly way.
Blogging has been here for a long time, it has made a lot of people millionaires. Blogs drives business I mean, it’s one of the best customer acquisition tools you can ever use.
According to a study carried out by HubSpot, B2B companies that blog only 1-2X per month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog.
Bottom Line: Blogging can have an enormous impact on your business, therefore; figure out a way through which you can start using it for your business if you’re not already doing that.
2. Build it And They Will Come
Yea, this is true but, that was 2 decades ago when the competition was not as fierce as it is today.
Years ago, you can build a blog without any promotion, and people will start flooding it. You will be getting a fear-arousing amount of traffic, but today, everything has changed.
If you build it and fail to show the world what you’ve got then, the blog will be for you and Bingo (your Dog) alone.
With all the noise going on in the internet now, you will hardly get any attention by doing nothing. Everyone is seeking for attention and for you to get it; you must devise some mind blowing means.
Bottom Line: If you build it and fail to invite them, they will never come.
3. Your Blog Posts Should Always Be Between 300-700 Words
If you still believe in this lie today then, perhaps, you leave in a cave; I don’t want this to come as an insult but, you know it’s ridiculous to harbor such malicious belief about your blog.
You might argue that Seth Godin prefers writing shorter posts but, remember you’re not Seth Godin.
This is what you don’t know about him:
- Seth is one of the greatest marketing gurus of our age.
- Shorter blog posts match his messages
- his approach
- his audience
- his style.
Look at the screenshot above, that blog post is about 94-words but, check out the social shares. This type of contents can only work for Seth therefore, overlook it.
The image below shows a recent post by Capsicum Mediaworks on Google search result rank based on content length.
From the screenshot, you will notice that the higher the Google SERP position of the pages, the more contents the page has. As you can also see, all the first page results have contents that are over 2000-words.
Whenever you’re writing a blog post, stop worrying about your word counts instead, focus more on giving your readers lots of value in whatever length required to cover a topic adequately.
4. Content is King
This can never be true in today’s content/internet marketing world. Content used to be king but not anymore.
You can no longer write mediocre contents and expect it to be king. Except you’re applying some sought of hypnotic measures, people cannot leave all the well writing and compelling contents on the internet and prefer to read your crappy articles.
The competition has gone fierce, and if someone must stop over to read your contents, it must be highly relevant and resourceful.
Think of people like Michael Chibuzor; he writes insanely useful contents on his blog; as a result, he has been able to work with most well-known names in the industry. People trust his writing hence, he’s perceived as one of the copywriting gurus on the internet. I’m sure you know what that means for his career.
Bottom Line: Start practicing how to write contents that engage, compel and entertain because, without such contents, your blog will suffer.
5. You Must Update Your Blog Daily
With so many things going on in our daily lives, blogging daily can seem to be very daunting if not impossible.
Yea, I know some people can do it like Ann Smarty but, except you’re a super human or someone who already has a team of writers, you cannot do it.
While updating daily will help boost your traffic and reader base, it’s not necessary if you’re a one-man blogger.
If you try to believe in this myth then, apparently, your contents will always be valueless while you’re trying to post daily. You will end up filling your blog with garbage.
According to HubSpot, “companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X more traffic than companies that don’t blog”. Break this down and, you will find out that they publish a few posts/week, not bad if you ask me.
Bottom Line: Don’t aim at publishing daily instead, focus on publishing when you have something worthy to say. Aim for quality and not quantity.
6. You Don’t Need Money To Build a Successful Blog
Have you ever seen a successful business that survived without any investment? I guess you answered NO.
The saying that “making money requires money” isn’t a fad and I can vouch for that. For you to succeed in blogging today, you need some investments, no matter how little.
You might actually make a few bucks by relying on free blogging tools but, that will take a very long time and efforts.
Yea, there are lots of free themes and plugins out there, but free things will always be of lower quality. If you dream of building a successful online business empire, you must be ready to put down some money to buy the necessary tools needed.
7. Social Media is Entirely Useless
Even though I’ve said it a lot of times that depending on social media while starting your blog newly is a waste of time, it does not mean it’s entirely worthless.
The only thing I’m against here is putting all your focus on social media while neglecting to build your own audience. This is because any audience you have on social media is not yours per se, anything can happen, and you’ll lose all of them overnight.
However, promoting your business via social media is very necessary, provided you’re channeling the traffic to a landing page where you can capture their email and eventually turn them to long term fans and clients.
If you’re only putting all your trust on the size of your social media audience then, you need to rework on your strategy.
Conclusion
There you have it all. You really have to debunk these 7 blogging myths if you desire to take your blog to the 6-figures/year level.
Some of the things I talked about here worked many years ago but no longer today. If you still believe in them, you’ll be making a mistake that will take you time to correct. Therefore, if you love your blog, get rid of these myths and rather, start being realistic.
