Blogging: How Not To Be Just Another Average Joe

The idea is very simple. You want to blog something cool and as frequent as possible, talking about your niche that would make people love all your insights and eventually come back for more. The end game is, monetising your own popularity. Being an influencer and popular do have a lot of benefits in this era. You can get paid to blog your opinion out on customers’ products, or get strings of invitation to be part of large events where you will enjoy many free or heavily discounted stuff, or perhaps get all-paid-for products or services in return for your review on products or services, or get appearance fee to share thoughts on something and many more. It would be even nicer if you can do this on a full time basis without having to worry being monitored by the employer. Such a great end-game right there isn’t it?

Before you start investing on a website with your name attached to it as a domain together with a decent hosting quality somewhere, these are a few vital steps you need to consider to ensure the path towards your objective is going to be very smooth. In theory these aren’t difficult to do, yet many people give up because of lack of two things – long-term commitment and strategy. To gain popularity and recognised as not just an average person,

It’s all starts with the new you. I hear you say that you really want to do this. That is good but not good enough. You need the believe, and the current you do not have this capability. It requires a new you.

Have a ‘me’ time somewhere, close your eyes and convince yourself that you can do this. Believe in yourself, believe in your capability, believe in your plan that it will work and believe that you will overcome all the challenges that may come after you. Don’t forget to treasure your love ones who keep on believing in you, in your vision and in this exciting journey you’re about to embark. These are the combinations of element that will pull yourself together to stay calm during turbulence time. To have this level of believe, again I’m telling you now that you need a new you. This is a mental game, which many people simply ignore because it sounds not that important at all. 

You need a strategy to become a superstar in your own field. First thing that you need to do is to work on your personal branding. Without this, there shall be no identity. And without identity, there is no way you can leave a footprint and impact to the industry in the future. Let’s take a look at AirAsia as an example. The airline was not the first airline in Malaysia when they began back in 2001. Yet they manage to triumph their competitions all the way and becomes a benchmark of the entire airline industry. How? People think of AirAsia first when they’re thinking about holiday. They managed to brainwash people to associate the word ‘Holiday’ with AirAsia. Same goes for your case, you need to make people think of you when they think of that one thing. What is that one thing? It’s the subject matter that you’ve the expertise on. You are the maestro when it comes to this topic. This is how you should do it to be a superstar or a rockstar in your industry. You must achieve this stardom status because people will not only follow you everywhere they go but also listen to whatever things that comes out of your mouth. Trust me on this, it’ll work.

Standing by all your awareness channels. That’s right, prepare your own social media channels to cater for your awareness programs. Standardise everything, make sure that the experience of your website is similar to your social media channels’.

Observation and reading must become your new habit. The key word here is to stay curious. Build questions in your head on the observed situations or things. These will help you to establish your own personal perspective, answer them and bring home the moral of the story learned. People often ignore observing stuff, perhaps they think it is not very important to them. While observing, please relate the object to your subject. I do this often when I’m visiting places such as shopping mall, night market, food and coffee joints as well as while driving. Observe beyond what you see. You must also observe how the large brands play the game especially on how they post their social statuses, the content they built prior to the posting and how they embed the emotional sentiment into the content. Observe beyond what you see and you will understand the bigger picture of the object’s why, what, when and how. 

Observation must be complemented with reading. Books, articles, journals, magazines, anything. Reading will help you to expand your language horizon, the style of writing, the better way to write a story and to elevate your knowledge and skills to become a great storyteller. 

You must know how to build lasting impression with your articles. Great bloggers know how build lasting impression from their writing. The first rule of thumb is to simplify things. They know how to absorb complexities and bring the same messages out using simple words. They avoid themselves from using long sentences with jargons all over the piece. They realise that the best is to write from the perspective of a street level of IQ so that the article can be easily understood, remembered and practised. The second rule is by having souls in the articles created. It can’t be a plain vanilla with facts everywhere but no storytelling element inside. They don’t write encyclopaedia kind of articles. What they’d do normally when they write is via storytelling and use the facts minimally just to highlight some key points rather than fill up cold hard facts all over the whole article. People love stories but really hate textbooks. And if they love your stories, the sharing out part will be automatic. Don’t forget, it’s the emotions that trigger the readers to act.

You need to help empower and build your audience up. People love to read and share those information or story that they can learn from. Believe me, they will come back for more as they also have the same level of passion as you are and they also want to improve themselves further. The viral-ability of content that has good substance may not be as good as those funny-but-stupid types but the viral growth will be sustainable long term. I know that the Millennials prefer to share content that has no substance but again these stupid articles, videos or GIFs normally short lived. Make sure your content helps the audience, build in some substance into it and you will realise that it would be the ultimate way to reach success.

Today, everybody wants to write. There are millions of bloggers today and the noise is getting out of hand. The distraction is unimaginably crazy. The only way to rise above the noise is to not to remain an Average Joe anymore. You must aim higher, be a superstar in your own field, be a blogger with substance and tell the world about it. I said tell, don’t sell.

Don’t ever sell, maintain your class. Instead, make them buy.