Strategies for Blog Growth
There are many different strategies for growing your blog, its readership and your traffic. These strategies are endlessly debated on a large range of blogs. Many bloggers come to blogging expecting quick monetary returns. It doesn’t work that way.
Chris Cree on his blog Success CREEations has an excellent article about using the steady growth strategy he uses for growing his blog. He encourages the following sensible strategies:
A Winning Strategy
Personally I’m a fan of slow but steady natural blog growth. Here’s what I mean by that:
- Consistently write quality posts
- Read other blogs in your niche (have them in your feed reader)
- Comment those blogs in a way that adds value to the conversation
- Link to all the good stuff you find out there (with trackbacks)
- Be patient
You can read the whole article here. I recommend it.
Trevor, for me the hardest part is that last one. I’m too much apart of that microwave instant gratification society. Patience comes hard for me!
Hi there Chris. Being patient is indeed hard for today’s society, and although I think of myself as being quite a patient person there are times when, like you, I want it yesterday. The impatient person’s prayer: “Lord, grant me patience, and I want it right now!”
Trevor, although I dislike “gimmick” stuff, there are some additional things you can do that might improve readership. The challenge is to find ways to engage readers that prompts THEM to evangelize your blog.
Something Ben Yoskovitz did, the “What I learned in 2006” contest he ran in December ’06, was instrumental in inspiring me to run a contest at my site. It was a silly little thing, yet participants were evangelizing it all over the place, because it was a)simple, b)fun, c)challenging, and d)easy.
The results were astonishing! For instance, prior to that, “Robert Hruzek” returned approximately 150-225 hits on Google. Three weeks later that number is about 11,500! Readership went WAY up, and it’s still up, at least for now. And my Technorati rank went from about 298,000 to around 52,000.
Of course, it remains to be seen if readership remains, but for now the onus is on me to continue to produce content that will keep the larger audience coming back. Hopefully a reasonable percentage of them will stick with me.
Trying to engage the readers in conversation on one’s blog is always a challenge. On one of my other blogs ( http://www.trevorsbirding.com/ ) I have many regular readers who do contribute frequently. It has proved a little more difficult on this blog but I keep working on it. I might try the contest idea one day.
You certainly received a great response from your writing contest. Interestingly I contributed to another one exactly the same on another blog.