What's Next After Getting A Blog?

 I can tell you a secret about EVERY site that depends on blogging, including all the major media sites, every single one of them.

None of them get any traffic per article. Zero. Unless an article goes viral, which is rare. They all get traffic from the so-called long-tail. Maybe one article will get 5% of the traffic per day and 10,000 other articles will divvy up the other 95% of traffic.

 That’s how every major site works. Huffington Post, Gawker, thestreet.com, and every site I’ve ever seen.

So you can’t rely on blogging to create a media presence. You have to start to do everything: blogging, vlogging (blogging with video – I need to start this), radio, TV, syndication to get yourself exposed to a new audience, twitter (like what I do with these Twitter Q&A), Facebook (figure out ways to build traffic to a fan page for your blog.

 I still have to work on this), and books (here’s how to self-publish and why).

So “the next thing” is EVERYTHING, all at once, and all integrated together.

Now, you have to have something to say. And it has to be AWESOME.

I’m still figuring it out. Sometimes I tell personal stories and what I’ve learned from them. Sometimes I directly give an opinion and support it.

 Other times I’ll describe what I’ve learned from others. Often, the articles I think are the highest quality will get the lowest traffic. But that’s why I have to mix it up.

But I’m still figuring this out. Every day, all day long, I’m reading, writing, watching, studying, to figure out what this “form” is and how to get better at it. So I’m a student of what’s next.