The Boston Celtics are the 2008 NBA Champions, capping off a spectacular regular season which saw them turn around from last season’s 24/58 win/loss record with a 66/16 record. What are some of the things that their success can teach bloggers?

1. Success comes from team strength

The Celtics made a lot of changes in the offseason and throughout the year, trading almost every player on the team and bringing in some new stars and role players to rebuild the franchise. The three big names came from lacklustre teams, each having poor regular season records in the past and rarely making it to the playoffs let alone anywhere near a championship. Together these players became the Celtics Big Three and lead their team to the first championship for Boston in 22 years.

You might be a great writer, developer, designer, or artist, but to make your blog or website a great success often comes only through team work. Consider the success of Digg. When people think of Digg they often think of one man, Kevin Rose. But behind Digg there is a team of talented professionals working together to make Digg what it is today.

Should you team up with some other people to achieve success with your blog?

2. Success breeds popularity

During last season’s 24 wins from 82 games do you think the Celtics were selling out their home stadium every night? By the end of this season I bet they were. Everyone loves a winner, and a crowd draws a bigger crowd, and so often the more successful you become the faster you become more successful.

If your blog can deliver good content on a consistent basis you will find more and more people stick around and become repeat visitors. Not only that, the better your content the more people will talk about you, which can lead to an exponential increase in readership as visitors send their friends your way. Take a look at John Chow’s subscriber count. It took him a year to get to 10000 subscribers but only another 4 months to get to 20000 (Source: FeedCompare).

Are you delivering enough quality content to bring the readers in and keep them?

3. Success breeds expectation

With the best regular season record in the league everyone in Boston expected the Celtics to win the championship. During the playoffs that belief was shaken when the Celtics were taken to 7 games by both Atlanta and Cleveland, failing to win any road games out of those two series. Fans and media quickly turned on the Celtics and began expertly declaring why this team wouldn’t win the championship. The Celtics fought on and won the championship, and now the expectations are even higher to come back and win again with this great team of players. If they fail to live up to those expectations how quickly will the doubters resurface among those who would currently claim to be die hard fans? Just look at the Miami Heat, 2006 champions and just two seasons later winning only 15 regular season games and struggling to draw a crowd.

Can you keep the quality content flowing to meet your readers’ expectations, or will your pool of inspiration dry and up cause your readership to abandon you?

4. Success isn’t easy

Even with the Big Three the Celtics had to work hard to become NBA champions. A long regular season, training, travel, injuries, being stretched out in long series throughout the playoffs, and then having to come back from big deficits to win games against the Lakers. Amongst all that they also had pressure from fans, the media, and the inevitable doubters.

As a blogger you face similar challenges. Finding time to manage comments, work on site design, configure plugins, create resources such as ebooks or podcasts, promote your articles, participate in forms and social networking sites, pay hosting and bandwidth bills, all of which has to leave time to actually write the content that will make your blog successful.

Not only that but if you’re trying to earn any sort of income from your blog you will face many people in your life who will tell you it is never going to happen (Mehdi at Stronglifts.com refers to them as crabs).

In his book and on his blog Darren Rowse writes that making a successful blog takes a lot of time and hard work. While there are some bloggers who can start a new blog and have it become a virtually instant success for most of us the reality is that it will take years of hard work writing content and promoting your blog before you achieve great success (if ever).

How will you measure success for your blog, and do you have it in you to keep working at it until you achieve that success?

5. Success is sweet, but what comes next?

When you’ve reached your own goals for success, as the Boston Celtics have this year, you too can take the time to enjoy the fruits of your hard work. The Celtics will face some stiff opposition next season, as the Easter Conference gets stronger and the Western Conference continues to field a strong set of championship contenders. In blogging the competition for readers gets tougher each year as more and more people start up great blogs on every imaginable topic, all trying to capture the attention of readers.

What will you do to continue your success and take your blog to the next level?

Tagged as: Blogging