Firstly, I wish to state that the collected wisdom of these forums are an ongoing source of knowledge and inspiration. This post is written for the simple purpose of giving something back to the Steve Pavlina community.
It has been a big month for my little blog with my RSS subscribers swelling from 100 to 600+ during the month. Here are the 5 most important reasons for this success. Hopefully some other bloggers will find this information of use.
1. Network: these forums have introduced me to a number of fantastic people. What has really been important, though, has been to build these relationships by keeping in contact with my new friends via email.
2. Use Social Media: Stumbleupon has been a huge source of traffic for my blog. It all started with the Stumbleupon Thread in these forums. I think what is really necessary, though, is to not simply post in the Stumbleupon thread and hope that a few people that stumble it. Instead, by networking (see first point) I suggest making friends with people who you can email when you have written a great new post and asking them to
consider stumbling (or whatever social media) the article. It goes without saying that you should be willing to return the favor.
3. Be Proactive: not only did Stumbleupon bring a huge number of new visitors to my site, but it brought my article
5 Signs You Are On Autopilot to the attention of Lifehack.org and Lifehacker.com who linked to it. What this made me realize, though, was the power of being linked to from a major site. Since then, I have emailed my best articles to sites that I think may enjoy them and link to them. The result? A Friday link from Scott Young and my article
30 Fundamentals of a Wonderful Life being linked to from Lifehacker.com.
4. Give Back: I have tried to build loyalty from my readers in a number of ways. Since many of them are bloggers, I send out a lot of links and have allowed a couple of guest posts. The biggest way I gave back this month was by writing the post
My Top 20 List of Personal Development Sites which not only included included 10 well-known sites, but also 10 (well actually 11) lesser known sites.
5. Focused on My Writing: as you can see, I have been busy this month
. At the end of the day, though, the success of a site comes down to the quality of the content. At certain times I realized I was becoming distracted, so I made sure to direct my focus back onto my writing.
Well, I hope the bloggers reading this have found it useful. I would be interested to hear your thoughts.