Blog Ego Armour (Why You Need It and How to Get It)

Gone with The Wind was rejected by 38 publishers AND won a Pulitzer.

I repeat this fact to myself on a regular basis. It’s part of my ego armour. I have a guest posting strategy. It’s fraught with rejection.

I keep rejection letters, as though they were prizes or trophies. They remind me that one day I will look back on them and be smug. One day I will be proud. One day they will amuse me.

Not on the day I receive them of course. On that day, it’s always personal. Because it has to be. It’s my words, my thoughts, my ideas. And only one thing protects me on those days. Ego armour.

The thing that allows me to keep writing, keep inviting rejection, keep believing that if I have 1 reader I could just as easily have 100 or 1,000 or 100,000.

Like a venus fly trap

Guest posting is a great way to lure new readers, like a venus fly trap to your blog. New audiences, new people who will comment, share and extend your network. And in the age of Twitter and Facebook, where less and less of the conversation is actually happening on your blog, it is even more important.

And for some stratospheric talents it is easy. Everything they write is accepted. One post sparks something and all of a sudden they are virus-like everywhere. But for the rest of us mere mortals, you need to be able to be comfortable with rejection.

I’m not saying that you should be blind to the flaws in your own work, put your head in the sand and start singing at the top of your lungs to block out the negative noise that is filling your head. Because rejections do tell you something. Sometimes they say:

It’s not good enough.

Sometimes it might be

It’s not consistent with the style, theme or audience of the host blog.

But mostly it just means that it’s not good enough. Because if it was, it wouldn’t matter how many guest posts were planned, if something similar was written recently or if it’s slightly off topic. If it was good enough, it would be featured.

Not good enough for a guest post?

So how do you balance the fact that you are awesome enough to have 100,000 readers, but not good enough for a guest post?

1. Keep stories of rejection which result in ultimate out of this world success close to your heart
2. Don’t think about it, as soon as you get that rejection, send it to someone else. You can wallow about their lack of vision later.
3. If they do have time to give you constructive feedback, take it with both hands and examine it with the cold efficiency you don’t really possess to see what you’re going to absorb into the development of your work
4. Take the time to treasure your positive feedback. It might be a comment, or a tweet or an email. It deserves to be relished.
5. Actively ignore stories of success that don’t involve a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears. Sure it happens, but we don’t need to dwell, or twist ourselves into knots of jealousy.
6. Be generous. Acknowledge people. Give the kind of comment love that you would like. Share what you enjoy. Forge the kind of friendships that will make you not care about the harsh realities of blog stats, readers and followers.
7. Realise that your writing isn’t going to be everybody’s cup of tea. And blogs are benevolent dictatorships. Some bloggers will feature you over and over because they connect with your way of storytelling or dig your content, and others won’t because it doesn’t speak to them.

In the meantime, hoard those rejection letters. In the end you might end up with an even better rejection story than Gone With the Wind.

A guest post by Zoey Martin. Check out Zoey’s blog on adventures in parenting at http://goodgoog.com. Want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog? See more info here.

Image by DerrickT.