You’ve got your blog. You’ve amassed a nice pile of posts on your site. Now where are your visitors? (Insert the sound of crickets chirping here.)
We live in a world where everything happens almost instantaneously. It’s all about fast food, fast coffee, and the expectation of fast results. With so much “Now! Now! NOW!”-ness, it’s easy to get discouraged when your blog doesn’t have scads of visitors right out of the gate.
So, what do you do? Do you hang up your blogging hat and maybe try blogging about a new niche?
Nope! You keep blogging! Better yet, you should continue to churn out quality posts and lend your perspective to what’s going on in your sphere of interest.
If You Build It, They Will Come…Eventually.
Your blog is a little like Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come… Eventually. It just takes patience and persistence. Burt Lancaster and James Earl Jones didn’t just show up in Kevin Costner’s cornfield-slash-baseball-diamond. He had to open his eyes a little wider to the world around him to see who would populate his park and make his “Field of Dreams” a reality.
Think of yourself as Kevin Costner. (A pre-Water World Kevin Costner.) You need to go after the topics that will fill up the Internet “bleachers” with visitors to your blog. Continuing to provide great posts and new, exciting tidbits of info to the handful of readers you have now will help build your audience of the future.
Using social media to promote your blog is the Field of Dreams equivalent of Kevin Costner road-tripping around the country to find James Earl Jones and Burt Lancaster. Only, you’re not leaving the confines of your cornfield — or computer. You’re reaching out and letting potential readers know, “I’ve built it. Come on over!”
Readers who love the content you’re giving them will be likely to share your posts because they’re either amusing, informative, speak soundly to a topic that is often overlooked, or presents a unique take on a topic that may have been done to death.
Among these readers, you may have influencers — tastemakers who others come to trust for being able to point the way to the most entertaining or informational pieces of content on the web. Who knows, maybe someday, through six degrees of separation and the combined power of the blogosphere and social media, maybe James Earl Jones will come to your blog. (And if you’re lucky, he’ll bring his pal Malcolm McDowell with him.)
Your Blog: It’s ALWAYS a Work-In-Progress
How was that pep talk? You’ve got high hopes for your blog now? Good! Now, let’s bring it back down to Earth for a second: Success and massive readership won’t come to your blog automatically. You need to keep building it and adding to it.
Don’t give up and don’t get discouraged. Persistence is the key to success. If you hang in there long enough and outlast everyone else who treats blogging about a certain topic as a fad, you’ll see some measure of success.
