I absolutely love this post. Thank you for giving a very spesific and documentary correct answer to the question “How to get more traffic to your blog”.

Personally I often tend to read Before-and-after-posts, makeover-posts, and personal How-I-achieved-this-type of posts. I find them inspirational and motivational. I think that’s similar to what many other people think of these types of stories as well.

Greetings from Norway 🙂
-Christina

Can you consider my blog going from $2 – $3 income monthly income to more than $40 and rising this April 2012 already a transformation? Actually I have noted that my Google Pagerank have been updated too from 0 to pagerank 2.

I hope the transformation I am experiencing would continue and climb higher so as to become more exciting. 🙂

P.S. I am a Thesis user too!

It’s so interesting that I should read this now.

I have literally done what you have suggested and turned myself into a transformational story in the hopes that I might start a movement of women who say no to dieting.

I have been overweight and suffered miserably because of it most of my life. And today I am finally fit, healthy and feeling so happy in my own skin … it’s incredible. I can’t believe how it feels. And I did it all without dieting.

I have a dream … (sounds corny to say that I know) … but I have a dream where one day we will all be empowered to get in the best shape of our lives by not following traditional diets and sometimes dubious diets to do it.

I started a blog back in January and wrote every day about what I was experiencing … trying to find out and pin point exactly why I had failed at every diet I had ever tried.

I nailed some things, and I reveal them all in my blog.

It is my deepest desire that my journey to hell and back may inspire just one person to do the same …

I’ll let you know if it works ..

Thank you for sharing this post.

Sincerely,
Erica Jean

Thanks for the response Derek, I’ll give that a shot!

After a month in Panama and our current two month swing in Mexico, we’re off to Europe for six months, where we’ll stay in London, Scotland, Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, south of France, south of Spain and Portugal.

Taking the leap to become Digital Nomads felt BIG; actually living and working on the road feels completely natural. Our travel blog (built on Thesis, of course) is here: http://owlandbear.org/

PS – I’m loving the Custom Sidebars plugin, which really allows me to organize the content on the site in some interesting ways.

That’s a tricky call isn’t it? Is it more interesting to take your readers along for the ride? Or to see the final product? Maybe both!

Instead of waiting to get to your final handicap (in golf, that could take years – or a lifetime – isn’t that the best and worst thing about golf!) maybe chronicle how you lower your handicap by 5. And then create a separate article on how you lowered your handicap by x% or by 5 in JUST 3 weeks! Perhaps a short term transformation article that you blast out as a press release. That way your quest for your final handicap doesn’t overtake your ongoing blog.

I agree, Rodney. Just any transformation won’t cut it. I think it has to be a transformation that people desire. The flab to fit story works because so many people are desperate to lose weight.

Another story that works is the one I experienced – going from huge debt and no Internet experience to a six-figure blogging income within 3 years. It works because so many people are struggling financially and are searching for answers.

A key factor is the personality of the protagonist in the transformation story. The hero has to be likable so that the readers want to identify with him or her.

As bloggers, we need to use story-telling skills to show how endearing the hero is, how impossible the mission was, how the hero nearly gave up, and what the turning point was that made him or her find success in the end.

Given all that, you can see why stories, like “How a morgue attendant morphed into an alien”, or “How I turned my cat into a dog by mistake” just won’t work…