My Blog = My Life: blogging pep talks

Before we get too much into the nitty gritty of writing and building big blogs, we need to continue with a few more foundational posts. Today, I want to talk about the five most important goals you should have with your blog, and what you should be doing right now to reach those goals.

Single Dad Laughing is not some phenomenon that came from nothing. Though my original intention wasn't to turn it into a big blog, I certainly made being a big blogger my goal early on. With that goal came serious dedication to making it happen, whether that included time, investment, or picking up dog poop to bring in extra money. To reach my goal, I gave it my everything, I went about it logistically, and I set (and reached) lots, and lots, and lots of small goals all along the way.
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A free trip to Universal Studios. Another awesome perk of big blogging. When I started Single Dad Laughing, I didn't have any plans to be a big blogger. I was working a highly salaried job as a business executive and the thought of making money through blogging never even crossed my mind. Within weeks of starting the blog, I realized that I could probably make a few bucks here and there. Two months after that, I quit my job and decided to chase my writing dreams.

At that point, I wasn't making much of anything blogging. In fact, I had decided to keep ads off of my site while I grew my blog. I felt that I'd do much better advertising myself and my blog (with my best webpage real estate) than I would making pennies advertising for others. It was all one giant leap of faith, especially considering the traffic I was getting.
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Welcome to my new blog, Will Work 4 Followers. It's my blog about... well... blogging. For those of you who don't know much about me or my "other blog," my name is Dan Pearce, and I started Single Dad Laughing back in July of 2010. Within four months, it was among the biggest blogs in the world, and at the peak of its introductory mayhem, it was pulling in nearly a quarter million hits per day. Currently, I receive between 25,000 and 100,000 page views each day.

I don't share those numbers to brag. I share them as evidence that building a big blog is possible, and also to give you a glimpse of what you could be seeing on your own blog if you put in some hard work and consistent hours.

I didn't use tricks or gimmicks to make Single Dad Laughing big in a hurry. It took a lot of elbow grease and a lot of help from my followers. It took determination and a lot of trial and error. It took a lot of writing. It took a lot of time. And... as tricky and tough as some of it has been, it has all been worth it.
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The number one question of almost all bloggers (and a big one I get asked a lot lately) is, how do I get more followers? Nobody really knows how many blogs are in the world, but I've read "current" numbers starting at 50,000,000 and even as high as 150,000,000. Whatever the number, that's a lot of zeros to compete with.

Picture a bookshelf, twenty miles wide and twelve feet tall, crammed with people's personal journals and memoirs. You just added yours to the very middle of it, and now you're standing on the sidelines with 150,000,000 other people, watching lookie-loos choosing one here, choosing one there, just hoping that they'll stop and choose yours.

Kind of interesting to think of it that way, isn't it? Here's the thing. You can stand out from the crowd. It is possible.
When I started Single Dad Laughing, I looked up lots of websites which all claimed to know the tricks of building a blog quickly. Aside from the fact that many of them contradicted each other, I tried to implement as many of their common suggestions as possible here at SDL. Some of them were effective, some weren't. They did, however, seem to all pitch the same three common rules to blogging (if your goal is to attract a following).
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