I created this list: 25 Traits of Successful Bloggers to help you understand how to shape your blogging experience towards becoming more successful online. I hope you are able find characteristics that “you’re lacking” or may need to “step it up a notch” with! Nobody is perfect, but successful bloggers really do a great job at effectively mastering the majority of the 25 traits that I’ve compiled. The cool thing about this list is that though bloggers may have an edge against you with certain traits, you can always work to improve! Check it out and let me know what traits you can work to improve on in the comments section below ;)

1) Hard-working - Though it looks like an easy path to become a successful blogger, it does take some elbow grease (hard work). If you cannot put in hard work towards becoming successful online, it would probably save your soul to not work at all. It takes time to educate yourself about a certain topic, think of new ideas as article topics. Successful bloggers are willing to work hard on a daily basis in order to improve and stay successful! In blogging, you must produce new, quality content to keep your reader’s satisfied. The content cannot be filled with bogus information either: you’ve gotta be willing to actually do some hard work!

2) Persistent - Successful bloggers never back down in the face of failure. They realize that if they want to be successful they must never back down and be around for the long-term. Bloggers that may not be persistent, usually back down and aren’t successful. The hype that initially comes with the creation of a blog can definitely keep you motivated for a couple of months, but if you’re going to back down and fail to be persistent with your actions, you probably didn’t want to be successful in the first place.

3) Educated - It is important to stay educated in the niche that you are blogging about. Let’s face it: nobody wants to really hear what amateurs are going to write on their blogs. Most people are looking for good, quality advice that they can use to improve their blogs and make them better. As a blogger, it is extremely to keep yourself educated by reading other “successful blogs” and understanding what can be done to improve your efforts.

4) Disciplined - It can be difficult to stay disciplined for anyone, even the successful bloggers. What separates the successful bloggers from the unsuccessful, is the fact that successful bloggers force themselves to stay disciplined with posting, thinking of new post ideas, and doing work to improve their online image. Discipline can be tough for anyone, though there are activities like “getting into a posting routine” that can improve your discipline.

5) Strategic - Not all bloggers have a good online strategy that works. Successful bloggers understand how to plan for success. When something goes wrong, or their business model isn’t well accepted by their visitors, they re-evaluate and plan out a new strategy. Strategy is a factor in virtually every part of a blogger’s online experience: promotion, goals, getting traffic, and keeping visitors around. While many successful bloggers like John Chow make blogging strategy look like a breeze, there is a lot he’s doing “behind the scenes” that he may not blog about!

6) Intelligent - Do you want to read a post by someone that’s less intelligent than you? Nah… nobody does. Most people follow bloggers to learn something. If you aren’t as intelligent as another blogger, who do you think is going to get the majority of traffic and keep their visitors around? Intelligence is key as a blogger. Though nobody starts out life with blogging knowledge or experience, you can educate yourself by reading other blogs and staying subscribed to Andrew Pavelski dot com!

7) Understanding - Successful bloggers are usually understanding of what other’s want to hear and how they can help out their readers. I try to be understanding of my reader’s needs by interacting with them in the comments section of each post and answer all e-mails that I receive. If you are not understanding of other’s needs, you don’t allow yourself to have a friendly online image that helps form a community.

8) Social - If you are not networking with other bloggers, it’s time to start. Networking with other bloggers can include things like: guest posting, running contests with other bloggers, a mutual exchange of links on your blogroll. Businessmen network offline, online, and know how to network successfully. You don’t want to network with another blog that has significantly lower traffic than yours or a poorer online image. If you haven’t started networking with other like-minded bloggers, send several blogs (preferably with a good online image and similar statistics) a message asking if they’d like to network with yourself. You can do things like put up each other’s 125 x 125 advertisements, comment on each other’s blogs, advertise w/ Entrecard frequently on each other’s blogs, etc.

9) Flexible - Flexibility plays a huge part in being a successful blogger. Most successful bloggers understand when it’s time to call it quits and spend time with their family or engage in other hobbies. It is important to not “get addicted” to blogging to keep other areas of life in perspective. Too much of any one thing can really throw other areas of life out of wack. Too much blogging isn’t good and actually get me a little overstressed. To many outside activities and it’s difficult to get back into the blogging routine.

10) Creative - If you do the same thing as everybody else online, it’s going to be extremely difficult to succeed. Right now the make money online niche is so overcrowded and over populated that it’s very tough to survive! The key to online success is being creative. Most bloggers that are successful right now did something completely new and innovative that most others hadn’t thought of at the time. Take John Chow for example: “I make money online by telling others how much money I make online.” This was the first of it’s kind at the time and has made John a lot of money. People are reading his blog hoping to do the exact same thing as John and make the same amount of money. The fact is, most do not realize that it’s much more difficult when you follow suit. When you can be creative and be the first of your kind in an “untapped” niche, then you will be able to be as successful as John.

11) Consistent - Consistency is a key attribute to online success. Successful bloggers stay consistent with posting, marketing, and maintenance of their blog. Being consistent with posting frequency plays a huge role on gaining the trust of RSS subscribers and getting more visitors to subscribe! Staying consistent with all of your online efforts will play a huge role in the success of your website. If you know that you can stay consistent with quality content, I can assure that you will make money online and be successful! Staying consistent is much easier said than done, though with proper discipline, I think you can do it!

12) Confident - I’ve yet to come across a successful blogger that has low levels of confidence. Confidence is displayed in your writing tone, through the quality of your content, and through activities such as: guest posting on other blogs. Most other bloggers that are in the business to be successful are never stressed about asking someone to guest post or posting links to their posts in forums. If you are lacking in confidence, you’d be doing yourself a huge favor by boosting it up! Check out my article: “How To Boost Your Blogging Confidence” and learn what you can do to become more confident as a blogger!

13) Positive - If you write articles in a negative-tone that criticize others’ or discourage others, I will not be reading your blog. Not only will I not be reading your blog, chances are great that others won’t be willing to read your blog: they’ll take a look at a couple of articles, see the negativity throughout and won’t hesitate to leave and never look back. Keeping a positive writing voice is something I always try to maintain on Andrew Pavelski dot com, and I encourage you to stay positive with your writing tone: it will really help you maximize your results. People love reading blogs that have a positive, encouraging author. A positive attitude shouldn’t only be taken into account for blogging, it should be taken into account for life. Without a positive outlook and positive relationships, blogging isn’t even fun.

14) Responsible - Successful bloggers take responsibility of all their actions. Taking responsibility of actions means letting their readers know when they made a mistake, learning from mistakes, and following through on promises. It is very difficult to stay subscribed to a blog when a blogger tells his readers one thing, then never follows through or have an explanation for not following through. Do you take responsibility for your mistakes and actions?

15) Independent - You cannot be completely dependent on others to show you the way to success online if you expect to succeed. At some point, you’ve gotta take your own action, think of your own goals, and know what you want to achieve. I’ll try to help work you through any rough patches here at Andrew Pavelski dot com, but I can only teach you so much. A lot of online blogging knowledge comes with experience! Being an independent thinker, coming up with your own ideas, and learning from yourself is key to becoming more successful!

16) Enthusiastic - Everyone loves someone who can show enthusiasm through their blogging voice. I try to be as enthusiastic as possible! I really don’t want you to all get bored reading my articles here. I hope you feel the upbeat tone that I try to convey through my content. Try to be as enthusiastic as possible towards your online goals and make an attempt to display your enthusiasm to the crowd. Put on a show, do something to fire up your readers: chances are good that it’ll help you become successful. If you can be enthusiastic everyday, I would really enjoy reading your blog!

17) Goal-oriented - What are your online goals? Do you even have any yet? It really helps to set SMART goals that you think you can realistically achieve. I’ve seen a lot of blogs lately without a clear-cut focus and it’s really a time killer! The blogger doesn’t know what topic to focus his or her time on and makes a huge list of categories in the sidebar. I personally think it’s much easier to be successful online if you set an achievable goal to work towards. Whether you like to blog about sports, SEO, cars, or making money online, make it a clear focus. Successful people know that goals are important and realize that having good goals to work towards can keep them motivated, focused, and excited! If you don’t yet have any online goals, ask yourself what you enjoy: list the items. Force yourself to pick 1 item and 1 item only from the list. Then, blog about only things related to that item. It can be difficult, but keeping your blog’s goal focused is key to success!

18) Purposeful - What is your online purpose? Do you want to make money? Do you want to help others and make money? Whatever it is, it really helps to understand the purpose of your website in relationship to your personal values. If I really didn’t enjoy running this blog, I’d shut it down in a hurry and start up a blog about something that I enjoyed and that truly fit my values. Successful bloggers understand their online purpose, share it with others, and are passionate about their online experience because of it. Understand that purpose isn’t the same as your online goal, purpose is the reason for which you are online! Successful bloggers want to be online and aren’t forcing themselves to run a blog and make money online: they truly want it!

19) Efficient - How efficient are your work habits? I’ll admit that sometimes I get caught up and am not able to stay focused online, but I do always try my best. Sometimes when writing a new article, I’ll stop and have the urge to check my email, or feel compelled to check out Entrecard. I’ve recognized this behavior and every time I have an urge to check my e-mail I let it pass. If I just so happened to open up a new browser window already to check my e-mail, I immediately click that “red box with the white X” in the upper right hand corner (ctrl + W works well too). Why do I try to curb my e-mail urges? Because checking my e-mail during the middle of a blog post is inefficient. Successful bloggers usually have a daily blogging routine that they stick by: a certain time period each day to blog and let nothing interfere with “blogging time.”

20) Competitive - I’m always up for some good competition in the blogosphere. You’ve got to be somewhat competitive if you want to be a successful blogger! What do I mean by competition? Friendly challenges with other bloggers such as: networking to throw a contest and the winner of the contest is the blog that has the highest RSS subscriber count. Simple things like that are what’s great to see in the blogosphere. If someone asks me to have a competition (that’s within my current budget) you bet that I’ll be willing to join ;) Being competitive means being up-to-date with advertising, producing quality content, etc. In the end, it’s important to realize that your only competition is yourself. Are you pushing your current limits?

21) Honest - Honesty online is crucial to success. If you cannot be honest with your readers and admit your mistakes to others, you’ll never build trust or a good relationship! I am as honest as possible with the commenting crowd here at Andrew Pavelski dot com, and I really think that my readers enjoy that. Successful bloggers aren’t afraid to admit their shortcomings or report the trouble that they ran into along the way. I will not hesitate to post about a time that I failed online because I realize that there’s always something to learn. Be honest with yourself and be honest with your readers. I’m not going to report $10,000 dollars in earnings just to draw attention to my blog and impress my readers… Go ahead and check out my earnings from this blog for the first month: you realize that I’m honest (maybe too honest), but my honesty always works in favor. I feel that it is a terrible thing to lie to your readers and give them false hopes by displaying skewed information. Read a successful blog once and you’ll know that they aren’t afraid to admit their mistakes!

22) Balanced - Successful bloggers understand that staying well balanced is crucial to their success. There are tons of things you must learn to balance such as: promotion time vs. time spent writing articles and balancing blogging with life. It can definitely get very tough: you may initially want to overwork yourself in pursuit of money and begin to lose sight of things that really matter; things more important than money! Successful bloggers know how to keep the right balance to achieve optimum results. Too much time spent promoting and not taking the time to develop good content is a setup for failure; vice-versa also applies.

23) Focused - Staying focused on blogging is very difficult for anyone that hasn’t had much blogging experience. Starting out blogging, I only posted around once a week (no this isn’t my first blog). With this blog, I really challenged myself and make a conscious effort to post everyday without excuses. While I’m writing posts, it can be difficult to stay focused when others are talking, listening to music, watching T.V., etc. I developed a good strategy that seems to work out for me and really helps keep me focused. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out my article: Blogging Productivity: Writing Concentrated Articles - I think you’ll find it helpful ;) Getting into a daily blogging routine also helps keep me focused! Successful bloggers stay focused on their online projects and like a chess match, know exactly what move to make next. Are you focused, or does A.D.D. kick in hardcore the moment you open Mozilla? (If it does… make your blog your top priority)

24) Unique - Being unique is always something to strive for and incorporate into your online image. Who really wants to read “just another car blog,” “just another make money blog,” “just another self-improvement blog,” or “just another blog?” It really helps when you can think of your own interesting content and not flood your posts with regurgitated ideas that myself and others have read on all other blogs in that related niche. Can’t think of ideas? Check out this post or this one and start thinking of how to be unique. Most successful bloggers were the “first of their kind” and put forth the best effort in their given niche. Sure you can choose to start “another make money online blog,” but don’t make it a blog that someone refers to as “just another make money online blog.” Develop an image to stand out from the crowd, something memorable!

25) Patient - Initially, blogging isn’t a very good investment. Your time spent blogging is worth much more than what you’ll initially be earning online. If you are willing to stay in the biz for the long-term, I think you will be very happy with the results. Successful bloggers understand that in the short-term, it may be very tough to get traffic, earn money, and get recognized. However, once you have stuck around for awhile with consistent content, you will be recognized as a reputable source of information! Sure it is great if you can throw a huge contest to celebrate the start-up of your blog, or get a ton of traffic initially, but most bloggers aren’t that fortunate. Patience is a virtue that successful bloggers have!

Do you genuinely display all of these traits? If you don’t, what action are you going to take to improve yourself and blogging career in order to become more successful?

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