Subscribe
This is part of the the book BLOGTASTIC! Growing and Making a Difference Through Blogging. You can read the table of contents and follow the book on this page:
See the table of contents for the book here: BLOGTASTIC project
Previous article: Timeless content produces disproportionate returns.
BLOGTASTIC: Your blog needs tipping points.
Unless you have a huge personal brand before you started the blog, don’t expect your blog to be an instant success. Every time you hear an “instant success” story for a blog, you should ask yourself a few questions:
• Who was behind that blog?
• How much time have they invested in their identity before they started the blog?
In most cases, you’ll find an instant success occurs when someone already has a celebrity name within a field. For the rest of us, we have to create tipping points for our blogs. In simple terms, the tipping points are those circumstances that will lead to hockey-stick growth.
When I started my blog in early 2005, I started with very little traffic. For the first few months, my blog would receive only a few hundred page views a day. Most of these views came from my friends and family. I was encouraged to hear their responses, but my blog readers were already people who knew and liked me. In order for my blog to grow, I needed to attract readers beyond just my circle of friends and family.
Here are a few steps that allowed me take my blog to the next level. I’m not going to list them in any particular order.
• Published my book Beyond Code (foreword by Tom Peters). The blog helped sell a few more books. The book helped get a few more readers.
• Received reviews of the book in online and offline outlets that led to additional traffic for the blog.
• Distributed a free e-book When You Can’t Earn an MBA (downloaded by few tens of thousands);
• Wrote a free e-book Personal Branding for Technology Professionals (downloaded more than 1o0,000 times so far);
• Created one of the top 5 manifestos on ChangeThis—25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself;
• Published a free e-book Lasting Relationships;
• Crafted Squidoo lenses (especially the Blogging Starter Checklist)
• Launched the Quought for the Day Project with interesting quoughts from more than 50 people over two months; and
• Received help from many online and offline friends (too many to list).
I didn’t get discouraged. I continued blogging, and I continued writing. My online and offline actions supported my blog. Each time I completed a project, I pointed people back towards my blog. My journey took time, and it took lots of effort.
Today, I receive a few tens of thousand pageviews a month on my blog but that didn’t happen without several tipping points along the way.
What could be the tipping points for your blog in the next few weeks or months?
Blogging Tip: Create tipping points at regular intervals
If your efforts provide significant value for your audience (blog readers) over a reasonably long period of time, then you will probably see tipping points that will take your blog to the next level.
However, you don’t have to wait for things to happen. You can design strategies to create tipping points. There is no sure way to predict a tipping point, so you may have to try, learn, change, and execute again.
Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow