The first 6 months of serious blogging are crucial. In today’s post I’ll share my experiences with one of the most ignored activities by the beginners, and that would be promotion. This is the second post from a bigger series, so I recommend you to read the introductory post, if you came here directly. If you want to know more about the first post in the series, you can go to The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing. And keep in mind that this post is also pretty big, over 2000 words, so you’d better book some free time to read it at ease.
Broadcast Your Message
Promotion accounts for at least 40%-45% of the overall time I spend “blogging”. If this sounds surprising, I must confess that I feel I’m not promoting this blog as I should. I feel I’m not doing enough for it.
I cannot stress enough the importance of promotion in the early months. As always, I learned this the hard way, from experience. In the first 3 months, my traffic was constant, but low. Shamefully low, as opposed to my expectations. The vast majority of traffic came from search engines and since the blog didn’t had a significant number of inbound links, my page rank was low. It still is, by the way, only this doesn’t matter now anymore. 🙂
Here’s my traffic breakdown for the first 3 months:
Search Engines – 58%
Referring sites – 28%
Direct traffic – 14%
During the first 3 months I didn’t do anything to promote this blog. I waited to be picked up by search engines. It happened sooner than I thought, only the traffic I received was extremely low. I was indexed almost instantly but the traffic was not as expected.
So, after 3 months of stagnation I decided it was time to actively involve myself in promoting this blog. I realized something extremely important: the world of blogging is really crowded. There are literally millions of blogs out there. Tens of millions. The vast majority are low quality, it’s true, but even if we accept that 1% of the blogs are really good, 1% of 50.000.000 of blogs is 500.000. You have an enormous competition: 500.000 sites! If you have a little bit of decency you realize that you really cannot wait for the search engines to pick you up and send you in the first place. You can’t afford to do that. You have to actually control the process. At least until you can automate some parts of it and assess some progress. If you do nothing to promote your blog, your chances for a steady, growing traffic are extremely low. You act on a field with enormous numbers.
So, after I started to actively work on my blog promotion, my traffic breakdown changed dramatically in the last 3 months. Here’s how: