“Don’t be too proud of this blogosphere behemoth you’ve constructed. The ability to gain subscribers is insignificant next to the power of engaging them.”

- Darth Vader (paraphrased)

I’d like to be able to write a post with a title such as From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days (by Tina Su) or The One Word That Helped My Blog Grow To 800+ Subscribers in 17 Weeks (by Christine O’Kelly). Both are great posts from two of my favorite bloggers. They gained tremendous momentum early on, and told us exactly how they did it.

But I can’t use a title like that because my blog didn’t grow nearly that fast. “From 0 to 500+ Subscribers in 10 Months” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. On the other hand, people might be able to relate better to a more realistic story of subscriber growth. At any rate, I can only share what I know, so I’ll talk about how I got 500+ subscribers in 10 months.

Be prepared to run a marathon

First of all, if you’re a new blogger with 10 or 20 or 50 subscribers, 500 might seem like an awful lot. It isn’t.

If I had 50,000 subscribers, I could just post anything that was reasonably well-optimized for social media, and watch it rocket to the front page of Digg. I could post a review of any product, then sit back and watch hundreds of people buy it. At 500 subscribers, even minor successes take a lot of work.

Blogging is not a sprint, but a marathon. If you always keep that in mind, you’ll do much better than the people who expect overnight success and get discouraged when they’re faced with reality. For every Tina Su, there must be thousands of bloggers who never make it to 10 subscribers.

However, things get easier as you move along. In the beginning, you have to figure out so much all at once. How do you install WordPress? What theme do you want to use? How do you fix the CSS? What plugins do you need? What is FeedBurner? This is all stuff that you have to deal with instead of growing your blog. Maybe that’s why I only had 3 subscribers after my first full month.

But these obstacles vanish soon enough, and then you really start blogging. And you stumble in the beginning, because you don’t know how to write posts or how to promote them. But you learn from experience, and you get better. The better you get, the more you grow, and then you benefit from exponential growth. I’m sure I’ll have a much easier time going from 500 subscribers to 1000, than I did going from 0 to 500. In either case it’s 500 new subscribers, but it’s a lot easier when you already have 500 readers to link, Digg, and Stumble.

Luck

I don’t think luck plays too much of a role in growing your blog. Tina and Christine may have been lucky, but they also had great content so they were prepared to capitalize on whatever luck came their way. But what is luck anyway?

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

- Seneca

Looking at the chart at the top of this post, you can see where my one lucky break was. On February 24th, I released an ebook called The Zen of Blogging, and it was well-received by my 20 readers. On April 11th, I succeeded in getting ProBlogger to link to it, which put it in front of 40,000 more. This happened right before I left for vacation, when I had 44 subscribers. I came back to find I had 205.

Yes, that was a lucky break, and I’d have more like 150 subscribers now if it hadn’t happened. But what did it take for it to happen?

1. I had to get the idea for the ebook. (Most people don’t spend time brainstorming ideas for ebooks.)
2. I had to write the ebook. (Most people don’t put forth the effort to write an ebook.)
3. I had to get Darren Rowse to link to it. (This wasn’t as simple as just asking; you can read how I did it in my post Persistence Isn’t Using The Same Tactics Over And Over.)
4. People had to like it enough to subscribe. (It could have easily gone either way.)

Preparation, meet opportunity.

Some bloggers seem to be successful just because they were in the right place at the right time. But most people wouldn’t have done what they did, even if they were in the same place at the same time. It always takes more work than a sane person would be willing to do.

Look at Darren Rowse. It might be easy to think that if you had happened to learn what a blog was back when he did, that you would have started ProBlogger and you’d be a 6-figure blogger today. But would you? Would you have been willing to post 20+ times per DAY like he did across several blogs, not knowing whether any of them would ever take off? Hindsight is 20/20. What opportunities are you not seeing right now?

I’ve had smaller lucky breaks here and there, but as you can see in the chart above, they’re all tiny blips in the grand scheme of things. Even my 15 minutes of fame on ProBlogger will appear as a tiny blip eventually. Focus on the journey, not on each step.

What am I doing wrong?

I see it all the time. People say things like, “I’ve been doing everything I’m supposed to–posting great content consistently, responding to comments, leaving comments on other blogs, etc. I’m putting in lots of effort, but not seeing results. What am I doing wrong?”

Well, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of people grow their blogs much faster than mine. In some cases, their content was fantastic, and I thought they were deserving of thousands of subscribers. In other cases, I just couldn’t figure it out. Just like how I can’t figure out why Facebook is so popular. But I do know this:

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”

- Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own

And this:

“The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

- Randy Pausch

A few people will have outrageous success. Most won’t. I can’t really tell you why. I do know that we have to take responsibility for our success though.

If you’re not getting ad clicks, the problem isn’t that people aren’t clicking your ads; the problem is that you’re not making your ads clickable enough. If you’re not getting stumbles, the problem isn’t that people aren’t stumbling you; the problem is that you’re not making your posts stumbleable enough. And so on. Keep that attitude, and you’ll find the answers.

There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there about blogging. In How To Write Blog Posts With Confidence, Monika Mundell, with 750 subscribers, talked about how much time someone should spend on a post:

“I’ve heard certain bloggers state that they take between 2-3 hours for each blog post to complete. In my humble eyes, this is crazy. While I occasionally spend a couple of hours on a post, most of the time I get them written within 20 minutes to 1 hour. Even 1 hour is too long…”

Meanwhile, Tina Su spends about 8 hours on a post, and sometimes as much as 20 hours.

20 minutes vs. 20 hours. Who’s right? They both are. There’s no “right” amount of time to spend on a blog post, because bloggers have different niches, target markets, and objectives. Which is the “right” country to live in, the U.S. or Australia? More on this later.

Every blog’s growth comes down to two things: content and marketing. There’s nothing else. You need stuff for people to read (content), and you need people to read it (marketing). Most people do a bad job at both, which means less competition for you.

Content

There are lots of blogs out there about how to write great content, so I’ll mostly defer to them. I just want to say what I think is the most important key to writing great content: find your niche.

What does that mean? Niche in the sense of what topic you write about? No, it goes deeper than that.

Writer Dad says he doesn’t have a niche, and that’s certainly true in the traditional sense. But I think he has a very specific niche. He’s writing for people who like about 1 post per day, about 500 words, broken into lots of short paragraphs, with lots of interaction in the comments section, and most importantly, his unique writing style. Name another blogger who’s similar. Can’t think of one? That’s because he’s the only one in his niche.

What’s my niche? Personal development? Yeah, right. That’s the niche for people who don’t like niches, because everything is personal development, from Abraham Simpson to the Akashic records, and that’s just the As. My topics are all over the place, but the people I’m writing for are by definition those who like to read what I write. So as long as I write differently from other people, that’s a niche. Name another blogger who’s similar. Can’t think of one? That’s because I’m the only one in my niche.

Better and worse are subjective. Don’t worry about being better, worry about being different, about being you. You’re inherently unique, so just let your personality come through. That will be better, for the right people.

Look at metablogging as a niche. There are so many blogs about blogging out there, and most of them are a faint shadow of ProBlogger. That niche is completely saturated. But that didn’t stop Copyblogger, Remarkablogger, and Blogging Without A Blog from carving out their own sub-niches, did it? There’s no more room in that niche for copycats, but there’s plenty of room for trailblazers.

That’s what I meant about whether you should spend 20 minutes or 20 hours on a post. Whatever you decide, that’s part of your niche, and there aren’t any wrong answers. I’m somewhere in between. I couldn’t have written this post in 20 minutes, but I also need to get to sleep at some point.

One other thought about content. Many new bloggers will come up with great ideas for a post and just hold on to them, wanting to save them for when they have lots of readers. Don’t. This comes from a fear that you’ll run out of great ideas. But if you ever run out of great ideas, you’re dead anyway.

Marketing

The best content in the world doesn’t matter if no one ever sees it, and that’s where marketing comes in. Marketing consists of everything that gets your content in front of people: commenting on other blogs, guest posting, SEO, etc. Much has been written about this as well, so I’ll be brief.

I mainly do my marketing by commenting on other blogs. Unfortunately, I’ve found that to be a full-time job. It’s fun to read other blogs and comment, but at this moment, I’m looking at 247 unread posts in my RSS reader and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to get that down to 0. I’m probably going to have to just scan these posts without intending to comment. Less fun, but much faster.

However, I’ve found a couple of marketing methods that are much more efficient. One is guest posting on Pick The Brain, which is bringing me lots of traffic for relatively little effort, compared to commenting on blogs. The other is Steve Pavlina’s forums. I haven’t posted very much in them, but from my limited experience they seemed to be great traffic generators. However, it takes significant time to keep up with them.

These are just methods that have worked for me, and they might be useless in your situation. The point is to keep trying things and see what works. I’m going to keep commenting on blogs, but I also need to be efficient with my limited time.

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Well, there you have it, a realistic overview of going from 0 to 500 subscribers. If you haven’t had enough yet, check out my interview on Jamie Harrop’s blog. Now, onward to 1,000 subscribers.

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