Becoming a Blogger: Do You Have What it Takes?

Are you thinking of starting a blog or restarting your blog?

Do you wonder if you have what it takes to attract a strong blog audience?

To learn about what it takes to become a successful blogger, I interview Stanford Smith for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Stanford Smith, co-author of Born to Blog. He is also the founder of the Pushing Social blog and host of the Pushing Social podcast.

Stan shares how he started out with blogging and how Pushing Social became a blog-based business.

You'll learn how to recognize your personal traits and how they can be built upon to grow a successful blog.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Starting a Blog
How Stan's blog has helped his business

Stan explains that his business is about offering content marketing strategies for small- to medium-sized businesses. He helps people understand how social media can work for them.

His blog has been the sole reason why he was able to leave his 9-5 job and work full-time on Pushing Social. The blog is the main way Stan attracts leads, talks to prospects and educates people about his services.

Stan's advice for people in a 9-5 job right now is to build up your audience and understand where your next step is going to be. If you want to market yourself in a really effective, cost-efficient way, then blogging is a great place to start.

He talks about how he knew he was ready to go out on his own and why he should have done it earlier.

Listen to the show to find out how all of Stan's business comes from his blog without any advertising.

Common traits for becoming a successful blogger

Stan starts with the notion that there are five traits people have that are necessary for blogging, and the good news is that everyone has at least one. You'll learn in detail about each trait.

The five traits are:

Dreamer
Good storyteller
Teacher
Persuader
Curator

The idea is to take that trait or role that you play, recognize it, build upon it and then use it to create a successful blog.

Stan talks about his two traits and how he can weave them into a blog post. Some of the most popular bloggers have 3 or 4 traits.

Listen to the show to find out how to discover which trait you have.

Do you need to be a great writer to be a good blogger?

Stan believes that you don't have to be a great writer to be a good blogger, in the classic sense. When people think of the word writer, they think of poets or prize-winners. However, this does not have to be the case for blogging.

You'll hear what it takes to be a great conversational writer and what this means. You need to be able to communicate in a way that builds rapport and relationships.

Stan explains the difference between a blog writer and an article writer. Blogging is not just about text. For example, take a look at Gary Vaynerchuk's story about his video blog.

Blogging is the platform. If you feel you are better at speaking and doing audio, then put that out there and use the podcast platform. Video is also another platform. Remember, writing is just one way of expressing yourself on a blog.

Listen to the show to hear the benefits of how you can talk it out, record it and then transcribe it back.

Do you have what it takes to become a blogger?

Stan explains that there are three steps to becoming a successful blogger.

Have a borderline obsession with a topic. To stop yourself from getting burnt out,