One post at a time is the way to go
It has been said before but this is really important. How do you market your blog? How do you get readers? The answer is simple: one post at a time.
The last few days I’ve seen a slow rise in visitors to my blog. Visitors mostly come through two channels at the moment: Either a certain forum I attend or through Twitter where I notify people when I have a new blog post. But as any beginning blogger I want more. The trap of blogstatistics and I fell in face first, even with the big red flashing neon arrow above it stating “watch out for the trap”.
So how do we market our blog? How do we get more readers. There is only so much you can do to market your blog and after some thinking and reading I’ve come to the conclusion that indeed, you can only market your blog one post at a time. Not only blogposts though, meaningful comments on other blogs should help. If you add something meaningful the odds are at least one reader from that blog will see your comment and decide to take a look at your blog. It’s a great way to test your writing skills and to learn to give useful comments to others. (It’s harder than it seems.) Next time you comment on a blog somewhere, make it count. Forget the “Nice blogpost, please visit my blog too.” posts you see at times. They do stand out in the crowd, but for me personally they stand out in a very negative way.
I must admit that the first few days I’ve been using twitter to give a heads-up on my new blog posts but you can only do that so many times before you start to loose followers because of it. There is no quick way to get a blog on the roll, it takes hard work, long hours getting out there getting known for contributing to the blogosphere.
Problogger had an interesting post a long time ago about marketing your blog. There are great tips there but in the end, only one thing really does matter. It’s the number one on his list: Write well, write consistently, don’t give up. As we are only human, we can only do this one post at a time.
So there we have the long and short of it. Blogging isn’t a quick way to earn money, nor is a blog an instant success. Getting more readers involves getting known… and getting known only works properly if your writing is worthwhile. Let’s begin there, meaningful writing and meaningful commenting on other blogs.
It’s a slow process that involves a lot of patience and perseverance, but we have to keep writing! That’s all we can do. Any big successes come from a lot of hard work and time. There was a review once about Nobel prize winners where they were asked what they felt their number one attribute was that lead them to winning the Nobel prize, the majority simply said “effort.”
Yes, you hit the nail on there head there I would think. Effort, or attention… That’s all we have. And the more we put in, the more we get back.