Another Thought on Being Consistent
This post is aimed at our fellow bloggers, people we feel we can help by imparting our collected experience and knowledge.
This past week I wrote about being consistent where it concerns blogging. It really is key to being successful at anything in life. However, I'm focusing on blogging and that last post really focused on nuts and bolts. Things that you can put to paper and really visualize.
It's important to note that while knowing how to blog, what to blog about and having the “right approach” is awesome, it's not necessarily going to help you build a following… Bloggers will sometimes ask me “hey, big fella, how did you get your audience?” I look at them and I can say I really don't know. To this day, I don't have a forumla for building an audience or online brand.
In 2008, Consistency kicked our ass.
When you're writing every day, publishing to FB, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr or whatever social network you syndicate to just continue to do it… Often. I'm saying REALLY do it! Don't be “spammy” but just DO it. I noticed that one of my fave bloggers, Simone Grant, was always writing stuff and multiple times a day! I knew we needed to up our writing significantly.
The turning point for the Urban Dater was November 2008. When I say turning point, I'm referring to that point in 2008 when we saw our monthly readership jump by over 300%. Yes. Three hundred effing percent!
We didn't make any money and we didn't get recognition of any sort… But a few things happened.
- We switched from Joomla to WordPress
- We upped our articles that month from 5 to 28
- Began sharing on Twitter
- Traffic bumped by 300%
Now, most bloggers know that WordPress is an amazing tool and is SEO friendly out-of-the-box. But that takes time to show value. What we saw happened in 30 days!! That jump in readership came from us writing a ton more articles (in comparison to the 3 to 5 we did a month at that point). Twitter wasn't our main source of traffic. People would find us in blog searches or Facebook. Just posting more, and consistently was a huge thing for us.
If you post 3 articles or so in a month… You might get 30 visits a day, not many people will give a shit about what you're doing. One of my very talented blogger buddies is an extremely talented writer. She falls into this category of inconsistency. It's infuriating! Her traffic is about 20 to 30 a day… When she posts an article? 400 to 1000 that day and 20+ comments!!! If my friend could get four articles out in a week… I can only imagine how she'd be doing.
Since that month in 2008, we consistently average 25 articles per month or so… Our traffic hovers around 40,000 uniques per month now… It took time to get to that figure, though; it rarely, rarely happens over night.
As a side note, if you ever want to read more on this, I know this gal @kirstenwright who is AMAZING when it comes to content development strategies… Check her out! She has tons of great articles that have not only helped me, but tons of other folks, too! (she's hot, too!)
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Wow, thanks for the awesome mention! I am a firm believer in consistency, however I have learned recently that consistent doesn’t have to be 5 times per week. Recently, I became the Social Marketing Director for an Agency, so I added their blog to my weekly writing schedule. Which means my own blog had to take a bit of a back seat. While I still write consistently 2 days a week there, it’s definitely less than I used to. My advice? Write as much as you can while keeping the content still awesome!
@kirstenwright Well, it definitely goes without saying that consistency and quality are king and queen. =) It was after reading one of your posts on the topic that I really ramped up what we were doing here and it’s made all the difference. =)