Success & Wellness: the Need for Faith

Often things don’t happen as quickly as – or happen differently from how – we might want.

At such times, it’s important to keep faith that success will eventually arrive.

Let me tell you something about starting a blog.

Becoming a successful blogger needs an extreme leap of faith. You set up your homepage and you publish between three and seven articles a week.

You are flushed with the expectation of creativity and success. And then…

Nothing happens.

Nobody but nobody is accessing your blogs and enjoying your nuggets of wisdom.

Undeterred, you keep blogging for several weeks – perhaps a month or more – but all the time it’s the same story.

You check the SERPS, all the way down to page ten, but none of your posts are ranking and your dofollow backlinks are negligible.

This is a dangerous moment, three months in. It’s when most bloggers give up in a tsunami of disheartenment, and it’s why most blogs fail.

The bottom line is this… setting up a blog and “getting it out there” so to speak, is a one-to-two-year project.

This is what happened to me last year. I started the Successity Blog and posted thirty articles on it.

Nobody came, nobody cared.

But what did I do? I stopped blogging on the Successity Blog for six months and started blogging on MEDIUM in the hope of learning about my craft. In the meantime, I took two SmartBlogger Courses to get me a Content Marketing and SEO Strategy Certification, and I took Adam Enfroy’s Big Growth Engine Blogging Course.

I learned a great deal from both Jon Morrow (SmartBlogger) and his extremely supportive team, and from Adam Enfroy. And about the time I was getting bored of Medium because most people there seem obsessed with writing about how to make money on Medium from writing, I had learned a great deal, and it was time to relaunch the Successity Blog.

I learned six crucial things about blogging from these courses:

1. Optimise your own blogs for Google the way you would for a third-party post from a paying client

2. Choose your keywords carefully by doing keyword research

3. Google punishes duplicated material, so that, contrary to what some people advise, it is not a good thing to publish your posts on both your own blog and Medium

4. The mantra you should adopt for your first twelve months is CONTENT & LINKS

5. It might take a year of posting articles before your blog begins to gain traction

6. You might need to spend a year aggressively gaining backlinks through writing guest posts and from other sources before your domain rating grows sufficiently to result in meaningful traffic.

As I say, it’s a one-to-two-year project. You’re not going to have overnight success no matter how much you might wish for it.

The same is true of many things in life. In December 2021, one of my screenplays was optioned, and it is due to be filmed in South Africa in the Autumn of 2023.

That sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?

But it sounds less brilliant when I tell you that I started screenwriting in 2013, and the screenplay in question first came into being in 2016.

It’s been a ten-year project. I had to learn my craft. I had to grow contacts in the film industry. I had to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite. And I had to make sure I didn’t become too obsessed with the process and to find the right balance between screenwriting and sleep and recreation time, and all the other things that make up my day.

Success often takes time. And while you are in the midst of waiting you may need to arm yourself with the shield of faith.

The shield of faith is fundamental to success because it protects you from the wound of disillusionment.

Part of that shield – and I will write about this at length in another post – is to scrub out the notion, often perpetrated and encouraged by the media – that you have to be in your twenties for success to have any meaning or bearing upon the world. That’s just nonsense.

One person I like to bring to mind when I feel down about the fact I am in my fifties and only now on the cusp of success, is Andrew Davies, the writer of the original British House of Cards. He is still working and is in his eighties, and only a few years ago wrote the successful headlining adaptation of War & Peace for the BBC.

Yet another artistic inspiration is the film composer John Williams, who has just celebrated his ninetieth birthday and is still going strong.

Get the propaganda of ageism out of your head.

Have faith that you still have time.

If there’s one thing I have learned about blogging, it’s that no one is going to visit my site for the first six months at least. By that time I will have posted over 100 articles and built up a fistful of backlinks. And I will have a new story to tell about the making of my film.

I have faith that, in good time, the good times will roll. And that the waiting will make success all the sweeter.