I just read an interesting article on John Paul Aguiar blog where he asked 8 well-known and successful bloggers what one thing bloggers need to do today to succeed that they didn’t have to do in the past. It is interesting read, as are all his articles, and it got me thinking about what it takes to succeed, not just today, but tomorrow as well.
There are many ideas, and theories, about what it takes to succeed online. Some of those ideas are well-founded, while others are guesswork at best. While I haven’t realized the success as the bloggers in John Paul’s article have achieved, I still have learned a lot in my almost 4 years of blogging. One thing, however, has stood out above all other ideas with regards to success online: adaptation.
As Humans, We Have Learned to Adapt
Before I go on, let me just say this – “I am a creature of habit.” I don’t know why, but if given the choice I would do the same thing on a daily basis – which I do to some degree. It must be a comfort-thing.
Throughout history, we have seen that we a species have learned to adapt to our surroundings. We have survived in the almost every known part of this world, with the exception of living under water. We have even lived outside of this world. We have learned to adapt to our environment and to use technology to help us adapt.
The online world is not much different. To survive you must learn to adapt, and use technology to help you succeed. The online world is always changing, and unless you learn to change with it, you will be left behind, and someone else is more than willing to take your place.
Evolving with the Internet
When I started blogging almost 4 years ago, Facebook was in its infancy stage, and mostly confined to personal usage. Twitter had just started, and the purpose of writing 140 character messages didn’t appeal to many people.
In the past 4 years both sites have exploded in popularity – probably more than any other web site in the history of the world wide web. “Social networking”, and “social media” became the latest buzz words online, and it seems that to succeed you must adapt your interactions to make use of social networks.
The Internet has evolved rapidly since the days of BBS’s, chat rooms, e-mail, and instant messages. We are more engaged online, and are able to share a lot more with the use of social networks. We can interact in ways that we never thought possible ten years ago. How many would have thought about the ease of creating and sharing videos online ten years ago, or digital photos for that matter?
Adapting to the latest method of information sharing and interaction is crucial to being successful, whether you are a large corporation, or the owner of a blog. Understanding what avenues are available to you to, and what is being developed, is important for success.
Adapting to Rule Changes
If you want to get visitors to your web site, it is important to get other sites to link back to your web site. Obviously, writing great content is key, but others have found different ways to get the backlinks – some ways not always recommended.
A popular method of generating backlinks was to write, and publish, articles online to the various article hubs. You would simply write an article, and include a link to your web site in the author bio section. Besides the time and effort in writing the article, it wasn’t difficult to generate the backlinks.
With regards to content, many people were simply publishing articles from these article hubs onto their own site, which was allowed, but the articles were not original, unique content. Traffic was flowing to such sites because they would rank well in search engines.
Then this past year Google released their famous Farmer/Panda update that pretty much dropped many of the article hubs, as well as those that published duplicate articles, from the search results. While I’m not sure how this affected the backlink value, the sites that had the copied articles saw their traffic drop – some even considerably.
The rules of the search rankings had changed. It happens from time to time. In such situations the owner of sites that were dropped needed to evaluate their own site and understand why their rankings dropped. The would need to adapt to the changes made by Google, and other search engines, to find other ways of ranking well for their content. Copied content wasn’t going to work anymore.
Adaptation is very important for success online. While how you measure success will be different than how I measure my success, staying “status quo” will mean you will be left behind. It can be tough to succeed online if you are a “creature of habit.”