Post Launch Growth Strategy

Hooray! Huge congratulations on launching your blog to the public. I hope you were able to carry out your launch plan, and that you feel good about your first blog posts and the response you have received.

You have already accomplished a lot of work. You have a great foundation, but this is really just the beginning. Because you have two big dangers coming your way now.

The biggest danger facing you and your blog right now is that you’ll stop posting and your blog will die a quiet death like so many millions of other blogs.

The second biggest danger after that is that you’ll get in a rut, publishing the same mediocre stuff week after week, expecting one day to have a breakthrough that never comes.

So, you are going to counteract all that by setting a goal you can control.

The truth is, you don’t really know much right now. After publishing a handful of posts, you’ve barely scratched the surface. There is so much to learn. After publishing, say, 100 posts, you’ll be in a completely different place. You’ll know yourself and your audience better, and you’ll understand much better how blogging works for you.

So that’s really the goal that matters right now. The goal we want you to set for yourself is: to get to 100 blog posts.

Now, that might sound ludicrous to you, but look at it this way: if you publish once or twice a week, you’ll get to 100 posts in somewhere between one and two years. Which feels about right: it takes about that time to really grow as a blogger, to build an audience, and to understand really what blogging is all about.

Publishing 100 posts is a goal you can control. You can control how much effort you put into blogging. But you can’t control how quickly you see results. If you focus on the heartbeat of your blog, which is consistent publishing, the results will follow in one way or another.

So, that’s the big goal: get to 100 posts published. And the simple action we want you to take in this lesson is to commit to a publishing schedule.

Your publishing schedule is simply an answer to this question: how often are you going to publish?

This is a weekly or monthly number you set in stone, you promise to your readers, you commit to yourself, and you get accountability for.

In a minute I’m going to share the 2 golden rules of blogging, but first I want you to understand that your publishing schedule is really at the heart of your blog. It’s the work you commit to, and the promise you’re diligent about.

Your deliberate practice of posting according to your publishing schedule every week is really and truly the heartbeat of your blog.

It’s so important right now that you throw your expectations out the window. Put your head down and write consistently, publish consistently every week. You can publish once a week or multiple times a week. It’s up to you. The important thing is that you do it consistently and don’t stop.

Because our expectations can sabotage us. If in the back of your mind you’re entertaining a dream of having X thousands of readers in a few months, what happens when you miss that goal?

So, instead, we set a goal we can control: publishing 100 posts. And we commit to a publishing schedule to make focused, measurable progress towards that goal.

There are 2 golden rules of blogging.

1. Show up and publish consistently.

2. Constantly and deliberately work to publish things that are interesting and useful to your audience.

Follow these rules and your blog will grow. Ignore them and your blog will either plateau or wither.

Everything we’ve done in this course was designed to give you the strongest foundation possible for you to be able to follow these rules: publish consistently, publish things are interesting and useful to your audience more and more.

Because those are the two things you can do to make yourself as likely as possible to succeed. I mean, nobody’s guaranteed success, you have to work at this, but if you’re following those two rules you know you’re heading in the right direction.

So those are two indicators of success. How else will you know you’re getting better?

Remember, your goal is to publish things that are valuable to your audience. You want to write interesting, useful, entertaining and shareable posts. So, you’ll know if you are succeeding when readers feel compelled to take action because of your articles by commenting on them, emailing you, subscribing and sharing your posts.

You’ll also know that you are succeeding when you experience a breakthrough blog post. Every successful blogger has stories about a handful of posts that led to breakthroughs. Sometimes a post will go viral and attract thousands and thousands of visitors. Other times a post will become a mantra for your core audience. And other times a post might get the attention of someone who changes everything.

These breakthrough blog posts are what you should aim for, but realize that they’re exceedingly rare. By the time you write your 100th blog post, I would hope you’ve experienced at least one or two of these breakthrough posts.

The Next Steps

There’s courses coming up in the roadmap that are going to continue to lead you through writing excellent content, growing your audience and email list, and more, but before you get to those, I have two simple actions for you to take before moving on. The action box below will guide you through them.

Remember, this is just the beginning of your blogging journey. You’ve come a long way and I want to say congratulations on all you’ve accomplished so far. Now it’s up to you to honor your commitment to yourself, to your readers, to your blog by doing the weekly work it takes to build a blog that matters.

Thanks for letting me guide you on this journey. Keep writing, break a leg, and I’ll see you in the next course in the roadmap.

Bonus: Recorded Coaching Session #10

When this course first launched, we led a cohort of students through the material and assignments over the course of 10 weeks. These coaching sessions are very in-depth (each session was 90 minutes to 2 hours). We spent most of the time answering student questions and reviewing assignments.

These sessions are recorded if you would like to follow along. They will appear here, at the end of lessons throughout this course. Keep in mind that each session covers more than one lesson, so only 10 of the 17 lessons will include recorded coaching videos like this.

Enjoy! Here is session #10, which covers this final lesson: