In this post, I’m going to share what is easily the single best piece of blogging advice I know.

Here it is: Drum roll please…

If you would like more great people to read your blog, start off by asking yourself the following question:

“If I already had 10,000 prospective clients reading my blog each day, how much time and money would I be prepared to invest in developing it and delivering useful content?”

When I ask people that question, they often say things like:

• Wow… with 10,000 readers each day, I’d invest as much time as I possibly could.
• The  blog would be worth a fortune, so I’d invest in a professional design. With all those readers, I wouldn’t want to look cheap.
• I’d publish posts most days and really work hard to make the content as useful as possible.

Cause and effect

After listening to their answers, I sometimes take a look at their blogs and usually find that they have not invested much time, money or energy into them. They want a highly valuable blog, but they won’t make the commitment required, until after their blog is a success.

That approach is a little like a restaurant owner saying she refuses to serve great food, until after her restaurant if full every night!

My mentor used to say that it would be crazy to walk up to an empty fireplace and expect heat. We know we need to do the work of building the fire and lighting it, before we can enjoy the warmth.

We don’t need to be geniuses to build a successful blog, but we do need to be wise enough to understand that our results will be guided by our actions.

A leap of faith

The people that already have thousands of daily readers, did the work and made the investments before our blogs became popular. We paid the price for success in advance.

That takes a huge leap of faith, but unless you show faith in your blog, you can’t expect others to.

P.S. Still not convinced? Here are 25 Reasons to write a business blog.

From as early as I can remember, I have boxed. It was a popular sport in the rough area of London where I grew up and a way for poor kids to channel their energy into something better than crime and drugs. Today, I’m a 46 year old successful business owner and I still get the gloves on a couple of times a week.

Punch bags don’t hit back

One of my trainers had a fantastic phrase he used occasionally in the gym. He used it to describe people who loved to grunt and scowl as they worked on a punch bag, but who wouldn’t get in the ring and fight. He used to call them punch bag heroes. As he said, anyone can look tough hitting a punch bag, because the bag just soaks up the punches and doesn’t throw concussive punches back at you.

Blogging and punch bag heroes

When I started blogging, I quickly figured out there were lots of blogging equivalents of punch bag heroes. I found bloggers who would refuse to give their readers the power to question them, by deleting comments that disagreed with them.

A few weeks ago, I had a big problem with spam comments to this blog. I was getting around 2,500 a day. One of the options open to me was to turn comments off. It would have saved me time and completely eliminated the problem. The reason I decided to do whatever was required, in order to leave comments enabled, was that I figured out it was a cowardly option.

Here’s why:

• Turning comments off would have refused you the right to have your say.
• It would have stopped you being able to publicly question what you read here, where the rest of the blog’s community can see it.
• It would have made me a blogging equivalent of a punch bag hero.

So, the comments are staying on here for as long as this blog exists!

Blogging or broadcasting?

It’s easy to publish anything, when you know your words will never be challenged within your own tribe, because you delete comments that disagree with you or because you refuse your readers the right to question you in public, by turning comments off. However, it takes courage to open yourself up to critics and allow people the freedom to question what you say, where you know it will be seen by your readers.

What do you think?

I believe a conversation based, accountable approach to blogging helps a person improve the quality of their work and the value of their blog.

Last year, I wrote about how Seth Godin and I were ruining our blogs. According to the experts, we do it all wrong.

There are lots of expert guides to blogging, which suggest you need to do everything a certain way, in order for your blog to succeed. The problem with these guides is that the closer you follow them, the less visible you become. They tend to focus on the same dozen or so rules, which hundreds of thousands of other bloggers follow.

It’s hard to get noticed, when you are following a massive crowd like that.

Great news: Seth Godin is still killing his blog

I was reminded of the alternative to these ‘how to’ guides, when I read a wonderful post by Seth last week. Seth mentioned a post he saw, which listed 12 things that kill blogs – at least 7 of which should, apparently be killing his blog! If you don’t already know, Seth writes the largest single author blog on the Internet. It’s very alive!

Seth summed it up brilliantly in his post: ‘One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.’

It’s all about choice

We can either become extremely good at following the rules and hope to out-perform the thousands of others using the same approach or we can refuse to work within those rules. It’s a matter of choice. Neither option comes with a guarantee, however, in my experience, it’s easier to stand out, by standing out.