Today Trent Hamm from The Simple Dollar shares his blog’s tipping point.
For me, the tipping point of The Simple Dollar was the removal of a mental block. Prior to starting The Simple Dollar, I’d had limited success with blogging and I’d chosen to convince myself that the reason for that relative failure is that others had access to some “secret” that I didn’t have – it was a buddy’s club that I was excluded from for some reason. I was bitter about it, to say the least.
With that philosophy, I started The Simple Dollar not believing it was going to be successful at all. I started it intending solely to write about the stuff I was learning about money management – mostly, to work through my own personal finance goals and such. It really was all about the content – I hacked together my own template and did only the minimal SEO stuff.
That’s why I think that it took off. I didn’t spend my time focusing on SEO optimization or grumbling about how other blogs got all the breaks or judging my own success based on the subscribers and hits that other blogs got. I basically decided that it didn’t matter and really only thought about the content.
That made all the difference in the world, and in my eyes, it is THE reason my blog became successful.
Don’t worry about what others are doing. Don’t sweat the “perfection” of your layout. Focusing in on that stuff just gets in the way of succeeding. Instead, focus on stuff other people want to read. That’s it, seriously – figuring that out and really applying it was my tipping point.
