The History of My Blog and How It's Grown Over the Past Two Years: Finding New Readers (Part 2)

Last week, I talked about the very first steps I made when I started my blog. (Click here to read Part 1 if you missed it.) Today, I'll be talking about how I found readers for my brand-new blog...

The idea of being a salesperson, having to pitch myself or anything else for that matter, to someone is incredibly uncomfortable and stressful to me. I’d much rather let people come to me on their own accord than feel like I’ve dragged them here against their own will.

This makes finding readers for a blog a challenge, though.

Once my blog was up and running, I started with what I knew: the folks around me. I emailed the link to some close family and friends who I thought would truly enjoy it. I also linked it to publish new posts to my personal Facebook account so that any other folks I knew could click through if they wanted to.What are friends for if they don't want to read what you have to say?

Getting the word out about your blog is probably the hardest part about the process, and so during this time, I spent a lot of time researching like crazy and trying new avenues to see what would be successful. For instance, I guest posted about my wedding on a larger blog and was surprised when very few people from that blog ended up coming back to mine. But then, when I submitted a thrift-store outfit I wore to another blog, I got a lot of traffic from it.

(In my post about how to get readers to stick around, I talked more about using programs like Google Analytics to monitor that kind of stuff. It can be extremely insightful for deciding how and where you cross-promote. Just be careful not to get obsessed with all those stats!)

I also started paying closer attention to the blogs I visited: Where did they guest post? Where did they link their posts? What kinds of blogging communities did they participate in? A ton of inspiration for my blog comes from looking at other blogs and what they do that I like, that I think is smart, that I can use as fodder for improving my own.

So it was very much trial-and-error trying to get the word out about my blog, which I mentioned before in my post about how I have made an effort to find readers over the years. My thought is that I’ll try anything once, when it comes to guest-posting, because you might end up incredibly surprised by what encourages traffic. That being said, nowadays, I don’t do a ton of cross-promoting, just occasionally when I think about it or when I have tried-and-true outlets that I know are worthwhile.

(If you want to see more specifics, you can check out the post I shared about how I find new readers for my blog and the post I shared about what I do to try to get readers to stick around.)

Curious to see how my blog has grown over the course of the past two years, I went back into my Google Analytics and Feedburner (the program I use to disseminate my RSS and email feeds) statistics to see how my blog was actually growing over this time. (Remember, my first post was in early November 2009.)

Here is a snapshot of my blog’s growth over time:

It’s pretty obvious that my blog did not grow overnight. It took continued effort and patience to get to where I am today. For instance, from November 2009 (when I first started this blog) to a year later, I only had 235 subscribers. But a year after that, I was well over 700. It can take time to find some traction, but once you do, then growth starts to happen easier on its own.

Click here for Part 3 in this series of posts that look back at how my blog has grown. In this next post, I look at how my blog has grown as a brand and in its design over the years.

Related Posts
Why I Started This Blog
Thoughts on Having Too Many Ideas for My Own Good

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