31 days to building a better blog
Darren Rowse on ProBlogger is running a month long series of articles on building a better blog. He has called it 31 days to building a better blog. Each day he will feature a simple, easily applied tip about blogging. He is inviting readers to participate in this month long project by giving their tips and hints for improving their blogs.
Here are the links to the first two hints:
- Email a new reader of your blog – I’ve been doing this since day one of my three blogs. I believe this is a very effective way of developing not only loyal readers but also a community of readers based around your blog.
- Run a first time reader audit on your blog – this is one technique I haven’t yet tried, but it seems like something very easy to do and will show up some strength and weaknesses on your blog.
Related articles:
How to have 250,000 blog visitors a day
I wish I knew how to get 250,000 blog visitors a day. Truth is – I don’t.
I plod along happily with several hundred a day and this figure is steadily growing, a fact I find very encouraging. Of course I’d like the numbers to be growing exponentially, but I have to be a realist. My voice is one of many thousands of people blogging about writing and blogging.
I started from nothing eighteen months ago. I now have had well over one hundred thousand visitors in total to my three blogs this year. Most months there is a steady increase. All very encouraging but far short of a quarter million a day.
What would you give to have 250,000 visitors a day?
Let’s stretch the dream a little – what would you give to have 250,000 visitors PER HOUR?
That seems totally out of the realms of fantasy. But wait – consider the following quote from the Writer’s Digest newsletter that came to me yesterday:
The latest Harry Potter sold 6.9 million copies in its first 24 hours on the newsstand. For you mathematicians out there, that’s more than 250,000 per hour. Hard to believe, considering most pundits tell you that kids (and adults) are reading fewer books than they used to.
Now THAT is the stuff of every writer’s dreams. To sell that many books worldwide is unprecedented – but it happened. I don’t think I’ll try to calculate the royalties that flowed in per minute as it might make me a little envious, not to mention sick.
Let’s dream a little more. If it is possible with a book, why isn’t possible with a blog? How do we go about that? Consider the paragraph next to the one quoted above:
No matter what you write, gather all the advice you can – even if it’s from a different genre. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll be selling 250,000 books per hour. All it takes is one magical book.
Perhaps it might take one magical post, but I daresay it might just take a great deal of hard work over many years of solid learning about writing and blogging and then applying that to our blogs. The latest Potter book may have been on overnight runaway bestseller. The writing process that made it so was steadily carved out over more than a decade of hard writing, day after day after day.
We may marvel at this one author’s success; we may even envy her. That success was hard won, word after word after word writing endlessly hour after hour and day after day for twelve years. When we have devoted every minute of our lives to our blogging for twelve years, we too can bask in the glow of success.
All it takes is a long term commitment. In today’s instant society, that is not ever a welcome message.
Update: and this blog is still plodding along nicely more than ten years later. (Updated September 9th, 2017)
How to increase your blog readership: participate in carnivals
One very effective technique I’ve used to increase the readership on my blogs is to participate in various carnivals relevant to the topic of each blog. Carnivals are an excellent way of getting exposure in your particular niche.
I see the following benefits:
- People in your niche become aware of your blog.
- It is a good source of developing incoming links.
- You discover other blogs in your niche and by reading their blogs you discover new ways of writing about and presenting your subject.
- Many of those reading your blog for the first time will leave comments.
- You become part of the community in your niche.
While I don’t see huge inflows of traffic from participating in carnivals, I do see a strong bond of loyalty from those who participate in the carnivals. We visit each other’s blogs frequently, we leave relevant comments and we make links back to each others articles where relevant.
Related articles:
- Trevor’s Birding – from the archives of my birding blog.
- Trevor’s Travels – from the archives of my travel blog.
Links:
- Blog Carnivals – an index of over 2000 carnivals for bloggers on many different topics.
- 31 days to building a better blog 2007 – the inspiration for this post came from this article by Darren Rowse.
UPDATE: I have written a follow up article in answer to the questions left by people commenting on this post. It is called:Â How to participate in blog carnivals – I hope this answers a few questions.