Over the years I have received a ton of advice, some of it I have asked for, some has come unsolicited. Whether it be my personal life, career path, relationships, my golf game, well… you can pretty much name it.

Blogging is like anything else, there have been a lot of people who have tried it, some people who have had reasonable success, and millions of people willing to give their advice or opinion as to what I could do to make my site more successful. I have heard plenty and a lot of it I have taken to heart and given a real try. I thought I would share some of the best pieces of advice which have been instrumental in my success.

“Stick With The Winners” – Paul Kane, High School Adviser

Mr. Kane gave me some great help when I was in High School as I wasn’t the model student, that’s for sure. He got me out of some sticky situations but the href="http://www.yale.edu/">Yale grad did tell me some words I will never forget, “Stick With The Winners”.

I know what Mr. Kane meant and it was that if I ever want to win I need to learn how to do something right, I needed to learn from people with a proven track record for doing things right. A lot of people want to be experts and a lot of people feel they have expert advice to give, but why not just take the advice from those who have already done it before and use what you can of what has worked for them?

This advice has worked for me in many areas of my life whether it be making an omelette, doing a stock trade, or the hundreds of questions I ask and have asked as my site has grown and evolved. Personally if I want to learn ways how to get traffic to my site, I want to learn from someone who has a lot of traffic. If I want to learn how to make money online, I want to learn form someone who makes decent money online. There are enough winners out there, find out who they are and stick with them.

“You Will Never Make It If You Don’t Get Tech Help” – Yaro Starak

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I was a newbie once and I was serious enough about what I was doing to join href="http://www.blogmastermind.com/coaching/">Blog Mastermind not just to listen to the hours of valuable podcasts, but to participate in the coaching calls which are more than worth the price of admission alone. On the first coaching call I was ever on I asked Yaro what I thought at the time was a reasonable question and his response was simple, get tech help or you will never make it.

I thought at the time it was like learning anything else, that once I learned how to do things it would be simple and like checking my email once in a while. What I didn’t know was that it really took many hours to master the tougher stuff and a lot of hours after that to do the tech work. I think by how ridiculous my question was Yaro could tell I was lost in tech land. It didn’t mean I couldn’t write, it didn’t mean my blog wasn’t going to be good over time, it just meant that the time it would take me to learn the tech side would cripple me because I would never have time to produce content.

I know some people take this advice the wrong way. Whenever anyone asks me a tech question I tell them to pay someone to fix it, but really it is more meant to save people the aggravation and time, and in many cases frustration that tech problems can cause. I took this advice and if I didn’t, there is no way I would have been able to make this my full time job.

“Turn On the Camera, Say Something, and Get it Out There” – Gideon Shalwick

When I first joined Blog Mastermind, Yaro had Gideon on a conference call as a guest to talk about video (This was at least a year if not more before href="http://www.becomeablogger.com/signup/">Become A Blogger). While Gideon talked about differences between Mac’s and PC’s, Sony Vegas, different types of cameras and such, I of course asked the most basic of questions, “How do I get started?”. Gideon’s answer was simple, “turn on the camera, say something, and get it out there“. As simple as it was, this was some of the best advice and most lucrative I ever received.

What Gideon was saying was that without getting a video out there, you have nothing to improve on and almost any video, is better than no video at all. I know people who spend weeks producing a video and I know people who talk about doing videos and never do them. I can do them in my sleep.

I know that no matter what I put out there, it is more than likely going to be far better than my videos even a year ago. Even if the video quality or lighting may not be perfect each time out, my camera presence and comfort in front of the camera is far better.

I have literally hundreds of thousands of people who visit href="http://sportschatplace.com">Sports Chat Place every month and some days the site doesn’t run so perfectly. It isn’t uncommon for one of my readers to say I can call them if it’s easier to fix the tech problem they are experiencing. It almost always is easier and more effective to call them, as it could be a browser issue, and then as the fixes are implemented, with the help of my tech guy we can see if it is working to fix the problem.

The weird thing is, when I talk to these people who I have never met or talked to before, they always say the same thing – they feel like they know me. I know this is because of the videos and how they come into my living room every day. It is this relationship I have with my readers why they trust me and why they buy my products, even when I am having a bad day they want to support me. It’s a pretty cool thing.

“Just Write Articles, They’ll Find You”- Randal Cox

Randal is a guy I used to work with a few years ago before I became a full time blogger. While he couldn’t tell you how many quarters are in a football game or how many players are on a basketball team, Randal knows more about programming, code, and the other “geeky” stuff than anyone I know.

While Randal has a few sites, none of which he has the time to dedicate to, he always helped me back then with mine and I would never be where I am today without him. While having free tech help for the small stuff was awesome back then, Randal gave me some solid advice on my first blog which was only about college football: “Just write articles, they will find you“. While I think he had more faith in me and my abilities and that I would be pretty successful at this someday than I probably did at the time, I took this advice and it worked.

I have never paid for a link. I have never paid for an ad. I rarely have done a link exchange and haven’t done one in over a year. I used to do a lot of commenting but even that I stopped several years ago.

What I haven’t stopped doing is producing content. I don’t just produce content once in a while, I produce it every day and a lot of the time all day every day.  There isn’t a day that goes by that there isn’t a current video on my site and there isn’t a day that goes by that there aren’t several new articles.

I write posts on Entrepreneurs-Journey and I see that I get some traffic to my site. Of course all of you are welcome to visit any time, but I wouldn’t consider the blogging community a major source of traffic and nor is it the reason I write here. My major source of traffic is people looking for the specific content I am providing, about a specific game or team. The reason I write here is to give something back to the community that has given me so much and to hopefully share at least something to make your path easier.

In any event Randal was right, I write articles, people find me.

“Take Down Your Ads For Your First Year”- Many People

On my first site as soon as I learned about href="https://www.google.com/adsense/">Google Adsense, I was in a rush to get started with it and installed the code immediately. While inside I was hoping or thinking I would actually make a few bucks, publicly I used to say that I thought it made my site “more professional looking” or I just wanted to get the layout “right” for the future. The reality of it was, it didn’t make sense to have ads on my site as I didn’t have nay visitors, at least not enough to make any kind of money.

While I know a lot people have been very successful with Adsense, I wasn’t one of them. One of the things about Adsense is that they pick the ads for your site so if it’s links, there is a chance it can be links to your competitors.

In my case I mentioned the weight of a football coach and they put an ad on my site for a site that caters to men looking to date heavier women. I know it is just an ad but anything that appears on your site is your content and what people see when they are at your site. Most people who visit your site, depending on your niche of course, won’t know much about the inner workings of a site or how ads or anything for that matter gets on the site or internet, nor will they care. If it’s what they see when they go to your URL, it’s yours. If you aren’t making much or anything from it, is it really worth it?

Of course now my site has more ads than a Nascar and the ads are one of several sources of income the site generates that I make my living off of. The income generated from advertising is a direct result of the traffic my site gets, not from having ads up over any longer period of time before they were of any value. While my ad agency sells the bulk of the space on my site ( I still control some of it), I can tell them if there is an ad or advertiser on there that I don’t want and they will turn it off and replace it. I think having at least that much control is important as it is your hard work and reputation at stake.

Mitch Wilson