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When I started blogging in August, I had big goals. I planned to go from zero site visitors to 20,000 in just 6 months. Although I'm not quite at that 20,000 visitor goal, I am moving in the right direction. What follows are the pearls of wisdom that I've picked up during the past six months, most of which I learned quite by accident.
1. Your friends are not your most loyal readers. When I started my site, I sent out a blast email to about 50 close friends and family, asking them to check out all of the cool stuff I was writing. I assumed I'd always have at least 50 people who checked in every day, padding my numbers so I never felt as if no one liked me. Nearly all of them went to my site at least once. Some went more than once, and one or two of them (my mom and her best friend Judy) continue to read every day without fail. (Thanks Mom and Judy. I love you both more than anything!)
One of my best friends doesn't read my stuff ever. I know this because she asks me questions about my life, the answers to which she would most definitely know if she were reading my blog. That's okay. I still love her and, truth be told, I don't read many of my friends' blogs all that regularly either. Most of my friends are freelance writers. The vast majority of them have blogs. If I read all of them, I'd never have time to write my own blog. I've forgiven my friends for not reading my stuff, and hopefully they'll forgive me for not reading theirs.
2. Some of your loyal followers will be the people you least expect. When I started my site, I envisioned my audience as being 100 percent women. Then a strange thing happened. Men started commenting on my blog and corresponding with me. I got to know many of them by first name. I know the intimate details of some of their marriages. Heck, I'm well aware of how often---or how rarely---some of them are having sex. This is something that I never expected, and it caused me to change my writing. I still write from my own experience, but I try to make my writing more gender neutral.
3. Before you succeed, you will feel like a failure, and you will feel like a failure on more than one occasion. I felt like a failure when my site crashed and I lost all of the files. (Oops: regular site backups are a great idea!) I also felt like a failure when one of the world's foremost experts on blogging wrote, "If you don't have 200 visitors a day within the first few months, then something is wrong." I didn't have anywhere near that many site visitors within the first few months. At the time when I read that piece of wisdom, I was struggling to break 100, and I was getting the vast majority of my visitors from advertising. I thought, "Something is wrong with me. I suck! I suck! I really and truly suck!" But I really don't suck. I now have about 300 daily visitors. So there! Nothing is wrong with me! (And you, my lovely, wonderful, awesome reader already knew that I didn't suck. You love me. Me? I don't know that I don't suck, which is why I felt the need to type that sentence just now. I don't suck. I don't suck. I really don't suck. There. Much better.)
4. During the first few months of blogging, you will likely do everything wrong. Get over it. We all screw up, even the best of us. There's nothing wrong with screwing up. It's how you get better. You don't suck.
5. During the initial months of blogging, you will obsess about your site traffic more than you have ever obsessed about your body weight in January. You will check Google Analytics as often as 973 times a day, complain that it does not update fast enough, and worry that it is not catching all of your site traffic. You will send desperate notes into the Twittersphere, pleading with someone to suggest a traffic counting software program that actually works. You will ask other bloggers about their site traffic and secretly think very unsavory things about them when you learn that they have more readers than you do. You will contemplate paying people to read your stuff, but then realize doing so would definitely mean that you will not get rich by blogging.
6. After about six months of blogging, you'll stop worrying about your site traffic so much. Instead of checking Analytics 900 times a day, you'll do it only about 20 times a day. You won't stop worrying because you are no longer a neurotic, obsessive human being. You will do it because your family secretly changed your Google Analytics password. When you finally break the code, you will realize that your traffic has been steadily increasing all by itself. Right around this time, you will read a blog about blogging that reveals what all seasoned bloggers know: It takes 6 to 9 months to build a following. You'll also realize that no one likes that dude who said something was wrong with you for having so few visitors during the initial months of blogging. That lack of traffic you had during the past 6 months? It was perfectly normal, and you don't suck afterall.
7. It's probably not a good idea to submit every single blog post to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg. In the beginning I paid my sister-in-law by the hour to submit every single blog I wrote to these social book marking sites. I generated very little traffic as a result. Why? First, long "about me" blogposts, which is pretty much all I wrote in the beginning,. don't tend to do well in social book marking sites. "How to" posts, lists and video---none of which I wrote in the beginning---do. Second, if you submit to these sites too often, they mark you as a spammer and either ban you altogether or massively reduce the ability of your site to do well.
Third and most important, the type of traffic you get from such sites is usually short lived. These people temporarily boost your site traffic. You see these numbers on your Google Analytics and call all of your friends and family to say that you've had a record breaking day. Yet you fail to notice that their "time on site" is about as long as it takes a 15-year-old boy to have an orgasm. It's just like a one-night stand. You get an initial rush followed by a fast fall because these folks rarely if ever come back to see you again and almost never thank you with a comment. When your Google Analytics graph takes a sharp nose dive the following day, you feel dirty and used. A better strategy: create one post a week (or even less often) that is truly Stumble and Digg worthy. Promote that one, and let the others garner traffic under their own merit.
8. It is a good idea to learn more about SEO (search engine optimization) even if you think of yourself as the least technical person on the planet. If your site is optimized, certain pages of your site will come up earlier when people type specific keywords into Google and other search engines. This leads to free long lasting traffic. With the exeception of Lincoln Tunnel toll workers and commuters, I don't know anyone who doesn't love free traffic.
Now, I'm by far NOT the world's greatest SEO expert, but I can tell you this. Two things greatly affect SEO. One is the number of websites and blogs that link to your site. The more sites that link to you---especially big sites like About.com or Yahoo Shine!--the more important Google sees your site. Second is where and how often you place keywords on your site. This may seem elementary to you, but it certainly wasn't elementary to me. I've wanted to rank high for the keyword, "Marriage advice" pretty much since I started blogging. So I just kept blogging away and waiting. Every day, I checked to see how I was ranked for this keyword, and every day I learned the same thing: I wasn't ranked at all.
Perhaps I didn't want it badly enough, or perhaps I was going about it all the wrong way. Last week I tried a different strategy. I did a series of blogs all with the same title, "Free marriage advice." I linked all of them to one blog, essentially giving that particular blog 5 back links. For instance, I had the following posts in the series:Save your marriage and your happiess
In every post, I found a way to link to Free Marriage Advice: Part 1. The result? See for yourself. Type "free marriage advice" into Google.
9. Twitter builds friendships, not followers. When I first went on Twitter, I wanted to convince everyone there to read my blog. Oddly, my repeated Tweets that said, "New blog post!" and "Even Newer Blog Post!!" did not get many clicks. One day I got mad at Twitter and decided it was a waste of time. Then I got over myself and decided to use Twitter differently---to meet new people, learn from other people, and have some fun. That's when Tweeple started reading my blog. If you think about it, it's a lot like real life sales. Are you more likely to buy something from the pushy guy who only talks about himself and what he can sell you today or from the guy who compliments your shirt, tells you jokes, and barely ever mentions what he does for a living?
10. You won't become rich by blogging within 6 months or even a year. You might not become rich ever, but that doesn't mean you should stop blogging. Let's face it. There are the Darren Rowse's and Dooce's of the world, and there are the rest of us. Do I wish I had 100,000 daily visitors? You know it! Would I like to make 6 figures off my blog? Damn straight. But am I doing this for the money? Not in a million years. In the end, I love to write. I love to blog, and I love to interact with and help people I don't know. It's worth it, even if I never make it big.
Don't you just love Alisa? Help her make it big. Tell every single person you know about www.projecthappilyeverafter.com. Follow her on Twitter. Subscribe to her blog by email. Link to her blog. Get in an airplane and sky write her URL for an entire city to read. Do your part to make this girl's dreams come true.
Read Alisa's other blog entries >
Everything I learned about blog traffic, I learned by accident
