After publishing my motivational post about striving for perfection I realized I have overlooked one major obstacle that would prevent readers from actually getting motivated by it.
This obstacle is one of the biggest myths in the blogosphere and is believed to be true by most new and many mainstream bloggers. It’s the myth that not only prevents us from feeling motivated after reading a post or story, but will actually foil any chance that we will ever be motivated to do something notable with our blogs.
“A Resource Limited Blogger Cannot Make it Big Time”
How it Emerged & Why is it a Myth
A myth carried from old school offline businesses
In the offline world, or the “real world” as most people choose to call it, to open a shop or business you’ve got to have some money to start with for things like rent, initial stocking, design or promotion.
While it’s not entirely impossible to open a business when you’re on a low-budget, in today’s tough market competition a resource limited owner translates into a resource limited business. Therefore people with no cash to start with choose to either get employed or take a loan to pay off their kick-off expenses.
The thing is - in the blogosphere, a resource-limited blogger doesn’t necessarily result in a resource-limited blog. Many people forget that when approaching their online assets as a business because they carry the reality of offline businesses with them.
5 Reasons Why Resource Limited People Can Make it Big in the Blogosphere:
1. Networking - Like in every business, the more connections you have, the better. We know sometimes it’s about who you know and not what you know, I started to realize it when I got myself a new header & script for a simple review on my blog; of course the same can be applied to offline businesses, but where is building business relationships easier? where can you do it on a much wider scale?
2. Marketing - With the constant rise of social bookmark & link submission sites, getting your blog noticed by the masses without spending a dime is no longer impossible, it wasn’t before they rose (no pun intended), but it’s a lot easier now. One more point to think about: Where would it be easier to get your business plugged by someone authoritative, offline or online? think of link exchanges for online businesses and banner poster for offline businesses.
3. Value - You should know that the definite outcome of free value is traffic. After putting something new on the table, traffic and income will soar. What are you more likely to do? buy a great book or read 5 great blogs? your reader will most probably have the same answer.
4. Knowledge - Now that you’ve covered your role of providing value to your audience, it’s time to inject some value to your own mind. Fortunately, almost any kind of knowledge can be acquired freely on the internet, whether you want to learn HTML, learn how to design a header or improve your blog, it’s all there waiting for you to consume.
5. Growth - A business that doesn’t grow over time is a failure. While both offline and online businesses are likely to grow under a good management, which do you think can grow faster and bigger? which will have bigger expenses in case of growth, and which will have less in case of failure? (think about your shop stock vs. your hosting package as an initial investment)
Examples: People Who Dispelled the Myth
Allen Heat (Yes, me!): I don’t consider myself a resource limited blogger anymore, but back when I just started, my initial investment was as little as $25 for a year of hosting, I never got a cent out of my pocket since then because my business has been paying for itself and enabling me to live off it. Most of the design, coding & promotion work done on my blogs was and is still free of charge.
LeftLane News: I first heard about leftlane two years ago, when it was featured as a case study at Problogger, today it’s founder built a successful blog network. Here’s an excerpt from the article at Problogger:
“the site just turned six months and the traffic growth has been nearly exponential. There have been a few days where I’ve even had more traffic than my competitors from Weblogs Inc or Gawker. And I’m a relatively independent blogger (not part of a blog network), so this should be inspiration to anyone looking to take on the giants.”
Now that we’ve shattered the myth, try reading my post on striving for perfection and see if it’s more motivating, If it still isn’t, don’t fret - Getting your mind used to think like the big sharks with a low budget is not something easy when you first attempt to do it, that’s why in the next post I’m going to show you how I managed to do it while keeping my feet on the ground.
Posts in this series:
1. Why You Should Always Strive For Perfection
2. The Myth We Need to Dispel (Reading now)
3. The Best Tool to Leverage Your Business
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Great post, very motivational. Always nice to see posts like this.