Two days ago a friend of mine showed me her new side project she has recently started. Writing articles and publishing them online. Sounds familiar? Sure, that’s pretty much what I have been doing for the last 425 days and counting.
But what she did was quite interesting. She basically send the link to all her friends and asked for a like. I mean, sure, why not? That’s how you get traction right? Well, after texting with her for a while she asked me this question:
“HOW DO YOU FIND PEOPLE FOR YOUR BLOG?“
To be honest, I was a bit shocked at first sight. How do I find the people for my blog? A question I haven’t really asked myself so far. My answer came promptly:
YOU DON’T FIND THEM, THEY FIND YOU! 🙈😂 IF YOU ARE GOOD, PEOPLE WILL READ SOMETHING AGAIN AND TELL OTHERS ABOUT IT!
Well, sounds like the usual “believe in yourself and everything will be fine” kind of attitude towards life I might represent. But come on, after checking out her article 24 hours later she had already 128 likes, currently having 144. What the hell? If one of my blog posts goes really through the roof these days we are talking about 12 likes and 20 readers or something like this. In my first half year I had only 118 likes as a whole on all the 185 posts I did.
Sure, depending on how you measure the term “success” with your particular project, likes can be important, but likes can also be just not that important after all. But more than 100 likes on the first post, which are in nature not that perfectly written anyways, I am honestly impressed! When I have started this thing last year, sure, my writing was just not particularly good. Well, it got better and better day by day, but is still far away from being anywhere close to where I want this thing to be.
Therefore I do what in order to get more followers and likes? Keep on working on this thing every single day like I do and let it grow naturally? Or should I use some guerilla marketing tricks as well? Speeding up the process and get more traffic on my blog?
As you can see in the following chart, the amount of visitors is growing again, slowly, but growing!
To be honest with you, it gets even more tempting day to day to finally get more traction. You invest so much time, you write, at least from my point of view high quality stuff, but in the end need to accept that a YouTube video about a monkey might have 1.000.000 times more clicks and likes than you have.
Sure, you tell yourself that this is not a big deal and that the readers will come naturally over time! It might just take a bit longer in your particular case! But come on! At least it lets me wonder.
For me personally, I guess I am not really ready for more readers. Sure, the posts are getting better day by day, but still, there is so much to improve upon. So much that I could do better, shorter and explain in more detail! But I guess this will stay like this. Come on! I am a perfectionist!
But back to the question above!
HOW DO I FIND PEOPLE FOR MY BLOG?
Well, first of all I wouldn’t say that I am currently actively looking for them. I don’t do commercials, I don’t share my awesome life on instagram or doing anything else that might help my blog to get some traction.
But let’s just start with the current situation:
Sure, you might have noticed by now, I have a daily blog. Meaning that I post something every single day. After publishing the post on my blog, every follower should get an email with a notification that, surprise, surprise, there has been a new blog post published today. And while WordPress is doing this automatically, it also generates a notification that gets posted on my Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Yes I have Twitter, but honestly, I don’t use it after all. I thought that it would be cool to have an account there as well. But I guess I just don’t want to waste my time with things like that! Complaining about stuff all the time and link other people!? Not my world! Therefore I was never seeing the point in twitter anyways and simply skipped it. The funny thing about it? I have two twitter followers! I have no clue how I could get two followers without posting anything by myself, but well, two followers are better than no followers, right?
On my Facebook page the blog posts are getting presented as well. There is an automatic notification going on that presents the new blog posts to my, wait for it … wait for it … wait for it … 18 followers.
WordPress
I guess the most traffic these days do I get on WordPress directly. Meaning that people who have a blog or website as well follow my stuff.
Oh right, and then there is Instagram. Maybe it sounds funny, but I would describe myself as being a little bit old fashioned when it comes to sharing details of my private life with the world. Showing off what I have? No thanks! This is not really what I am looking forward to in life. Sure, I post something here and there every couple of month, but I don’t want anyone else being a part of every single second of my life. And come on, it’s just me hustling from one thing to the other. Who wants to even see that?
Well, I guess I am not really ready to commit to the social media game. Posting pictures of me in my pool, home gym or what ever. I just don’t feel that this might be a good idea. But talking about my blog, sure, I should work more on the marketing side of life, trying to get the attention of more people.
Summary of my current marketing strategy so far:
There is non! Sure, followers are getting notifications on various platforms, but in the end, I have never thought about actually working on stuff like this. Therefore, I do not have many followers / readers yet, at least compared to where I could stand otherwise.
But sure, this is completely my own fault! At the beginning, I have started this blog without telling anyone! After a couple of weeks I told my parents, after some couple of month other friends and finally mentioned them on my last year created social media channels. I was simply put not ready for more traction. I mean come on, look at my early stuff. It wasn’t particularly good.
I have started this thing last year after my sixth semester in order to help myself get going in life and help at least one other person. Well, after having reached this goal already, I guess it is time to be less selfish and share my thoughts with the whole world.
A question to you!
Can we make this blog more popular? Should we change something? What are you still missing? What do you expect? What would interest you? Do you have some good ideas for future projects and posts to come?
Please let me know what you think about this. I am looking forward to any kind of feedback from you guys.
Am I ready for the next step? Or should I let it grow naturally without trying anything fancy in order to get more traction?
Thank you for your response! And sure, if you do not have better things to do, tell other people about this project! And maybe just maybe, it will get more traction. Just imagine that every reader of this post would share it with at least three other people. God, I guess I would be afraid to post something tomorrow! 🙈
See you next time!
dream | act | succeed 
Leave a Reply