How to have 250,000 blog visitors a day
I wish I knew how to get 250,000 blog visitors a day. Truth is – I don’t.
I plod along happily with several hundred a day and this figure is steadily growing, a fact I find very encouraging. Of course I’d like the numbers to be growing exponentially, but I have to be a realist. My voice is one of many thousands of people blogging about writing and blogging.
I started from nothing eighteen months ago. I now have had well over one hundred thousand visitors in total to my three blogs this year. Most months there is a steady increase. All very encouraging but far short of a quarter million a day.
What would you give to have 250,000 visitors a day?
Let’s stretch the dream a little – what would you give to have 250,000 visitors PER HOUR?
That seems totally out of the realms of fantasy. But wait – consider the following quote from the Writer’s Digest newsletter that came to me yesterday:
The latest Harry Potter sold 6.9 million copies in its first 24 hours on the newsstand. For you mathematicians out there, that’s more than 250,000 per hour. Hard to believe, considering most pundits tell you that kids (and adults) are reading fewer books than they used to.
Now THAT is the stuff of every writer’s dreams. To sell that many books worldwide is unprecedented – but it happened. I don’t think I’ll try to calculate the royalties that flowed in per minute as it might make me a little envious, not to mention sick.
Let’s dream a little more. If it is possible with a book, why isn’t possible with a blog? How do we go about that? Consider the paragraph next to the one quoted above:
No matter what you write, gather all the advice you can – even if it’s from a different genre. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll be selling 250,000 books per hour. All it takes is one magical book.
Perhaps it might take one magical post, but I daresay it might just take a great deal of hard work over many years of solid learning about writing and blogging and then applying that to our blogs. The latest Potter book may have been on overnight runaway bestseller. The writing process that made it so was steadily carved out over more than a decade of hard writing, day after day after day.
We may marvel at this one author’s success; we may even envy her. That success was hard won, word after word after word writing endlessly hour after hour and day after day for twelve years. When we have devoted every minute of our lives to our blogging for twelve years, we too can bask in the glow of success.
All it takes is a long term commitment. In today’s instant society, that is not ever a welcome message.
Update: and this blog is still plodding along nicely more than ten years later. (Updated September 9th, 2017)
Do you blog for yourself?
I’ve been blogging now for about 15 months. Actually it’s longer than that on one of my other blogs (See Trevor’s Birding) but that was on another platform.
I find that blogging for myself is very satisfying as I see the number of articles mounting into their hundreds with over 400 on this blog and over 500 on my birding blog. It is also satisfying to see the number of comments steadily increasing each month along with the total number of visits. On my three blogs I have a total number of visits of over 500 per day. This is very encouraging.
It is also encouraging to see my writing skills developing the more I write. I can now “write on demand” knowing I have set myself a target number of posts to write. I also set myself a target number of words to write every day. I’m a little short of this target but not far.
Writing for others:
A growing trend with blogging is to write for other blogs, such as a network of blogs. My son recently challenged me to consider doing this but I haven’t yet taken the plunge. I almost did a few weeks ago when an opportunity arose on a topic I could have written with my wife. I didn’t apply and the position was filled. I can see some advantages in writing a blog for a network, for example. Some of these advantages are:
- All the technical stuff is taken care of.
- Regular income.
- An expectation of regular posts – this is great for discipline.
- The benefits of being in a large network – some of the promotion is done for you.
- A sense of community within the network.
At this stage I don’t think it is for me – unless someone out there has an offer too good to refuse. Remember – I have the time, I have the skills and I have the track record.
To read more on this topic read this article: Blogging for yourself vs. Blogging for others on Darren Rowse’s Problogger.
How to be more successful in blogging
There are probably thousands of articles published every week about how to be a successful writer or blogger. I have written on this or similar topics on a number of occasions. Just scan through the contents section or the categories or even the archives (found on the side bar) and you will find many such articles I’ve published over the last year and a half.
Every so often, however, I come across another little gem that takes a new look at the same topic: how to be a more successful writer or blogger. I’ve just read Five Essential Skills for Blogging Success. Take to time to read it a bookmark it. Not only does the author make some very pertinent points, she has included many very useful resources and reference works relevant to both writing and blogging.
23 Ways to Become a Better Writer
Over the life of this blog I have written many writing hints and given plenty of ideas for writing stories. They have been well received and commented upon.
Scott Ginsberg has written a light-hearted article called 23 Ways to Become a Better Writer. It may read lighthearted and appear to be simple and easy to follow, but his suggestions are seriously great. Even if you only follow several of his suggestions your writing will improve. Why not even implement one each day for a few weeks?
It can’t do any harm. Taking a risk like this is certain to help you with your writing.
Why commenting is good for bloggers
When you start out in blogging you write and write and write, day after day until suddenly, you have A COMMENT! Someone is actually reading what you have written on the internet. What a wonderful day. It makes you really happy a feel that all the writing has finally paid off.
Then you read someone else’s blog and you see that one post has had 143 comments! Reality hits like a thunderbolt. That one comment does not seem so great after all. Still, it was exciting, and it is the start of greater things. All bloggers start this way. First – nothing. Then a trickle of comments – then more nothing. Eventually they start to come in fairly regularly. We all like comments but bemoan the fact that we don’t get many.
The truth is, very few readers of blogs actually leave a comment. The percentage varies depending on who you are reading, but it is generally believed to be about or even less than one percent of readers actually leave a comment. I’ve not done an analysis of my own stats but as a ball park figure it seems about right.
How to get more comments on your blog:
There is one simple way of doing this. Go out and read other blogs – and leave a comment. Try to do this every day on a number of blogs. You may only have time for three or four comments a day. Fine. It’s a start, and others start to notice and start clicking the link back to your blog – and many of those leave a comment. You are starting to develop a community. They soon turn into loyal readers and away you go.
I also make it a policy to send a personal email to every person commenting for the first time, thanking them for their visit and comment and inviting them to return. This has proved very beneficial.
10 Reasons Why Commenting is Good for Bloggers
Chris Garrett has written a list of ten reasons why commenting is good for you and your blog. His list makes a lot of sense and is something we could all do.
Now over to you:
- You can really make my day and leave a comment OR
- You could help me by commenting on how you get more comments.