I’ve had a lot of public success with blogging over the last few years in terms of both making money from my blogs and growing the size of their respective audiences. What a lot of people didn’t see before this success is the number of failed blogs I’ve started which consumed hours upon hours of my time, only to go nowhere.
I attribute some of the success I’ve found now to the lessons learned from those failures, and I still feel like I’m learning a lot today, which is one of the reasons I love blogging so much.
At the end of 2009 I sold my personal development blog, PluginID, for a mid five-figure sum (I can’t reveal the exact amount) when it had no less than 6,600 subscribers. It took me a little more than 18 months to reach what I consider quite a substantial readership.
In 9 months I’ve grown by a similar figure with my marketing blog, ViperChill, which I re-launced a few weeks before announcing the sale of PluginID, which had been sold a few months prior.
Though I don’t think blogging is a great way to make money fast, there are ways to speed up the growth of your blog. Similarly, if you’re just focused on growing quickly and making some easy money, then you’re in blogging for reasons that will probably stunt your growth.
There are a few core principles that I believe really helped me to grow my blog fast that I want to share with you today.
I Focused on the Essentials
When I first started PluginID I was literally doing as many things as I could to help grow the site. You would find me going through dozens of sites per day on StumbleUpon, leaving comments every time a blogger in the same niche posted an article and connecting with as many people as possible on Twitter.
Some things were effective, but others were pretty much a waste of time. Now, with ViperChill, I have two simple aims:
Write the best content that I canWrite the best content for others that I can
I haven’t used StumbleUpon for as long as I can remember, I leave less than 5 blog comments per month and I generally just communicate with the same people on Twitter that I did a few months ago. I found that the two most useful things for me were writing the best content I can – which others talk about – and writing great content for other people (guest blogging).
By focusing on these two things, I was able to maximise the effectiveness they had and leverage these strategies to help me grow far quicker than I had in the past.
I Worked to Build Fewer, But Stronger, Connections
Another thing I did when working on my personal development blog was try to become a ‘friend’ of 50+ bloggers in the niche. Not only did this distract me from the essential items that should have been my priority but it also led to lots of mediocre relationships, rather than a few great ones.
In the marketing field now I’m in contact with a lot less people on a daily basis, but the connections I have with these people actually result in things that help my blog grow. For example, some of the relationships I’ve built have led to me getting press mentions and regular links on popular blogs.
They also make it very easy for me to grow my reach whenever I have something to promote, as these connections as more than happy to help me. Similarly, I’m more than happy to help them with things that they need because I’ve built what I think to be genuine relationships with them.
I Made Subscribing the Most Prominent Thing on My Site
Over the last few weeks I offered one-on-one coaching for a short period of time. I had many bloggers sign-up to work with me and the number one critique I had for most of them was that it wasn’t clear what they wanted people to do on their website.
Some had pop-ups for newsletters which were more prominent than their RSS feed (yet they didn’t care as much about getting newsletter subscribers) while others had Adsense ads all over the place yet were making pennies with it and turning away the traffic they did get.
Though I eventually did this on PluginID; I made subscribing to my feed the number one focus of ViperChill. The site is very clutter-free, with only a few places to navigate and take action on besides the content itself. Unlike most blogs, I don’t even have links to my post categories.
Instead, I have clear links to my RSS feed in the sidebar of the blog, at the bottom of all posts, and frequently in the post text. I believe this focus reduces distractions for my site visitors and makes it clear what I want them to do – which also happens to be the thing I think will help them the most (get free content updates).
Instead of feeling like you have to be everywhere and offer everything. Try narrowing the focus of your blog and see where that takes you. I think you’ll be surprised with the results.
This article was written by Glen Allsopp who writes on the topic of viral marketing. If you found this useful, you might love his most popular post which is about WordPress SEO.
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Filed under: Motivation, 000, 6, Second, Twice
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