While reviewing some of Technology Evangelist’s web site stats today, I was reminded that success is not something that happens over night in most cases. While this may come across as a fairly obvious statement, seeing graphs that support is really make sense of it. For example, here’s a graph of Technology Evangelist’s RSS circulation stats from Feedburner since this blog was launched a little over 3 months ago:
Feedburner measures the number of subscribers to a site through services like Bloglines, Feedblitz, NewsGator, and other RSS options.
We did some advertising January that accounts for the jump at that time, but other than that the growth has been primarily from people discovering the blog through search engines, other blogs, or word of mouth. The first six weeks of blogging was a fairly lonely time.
Why did our blog’s circulation grow?
1. We did some advertising in January in conjunction with our work at the CES show.
2. Search engines started picking up our content, leading to more unique daily visitors.
3. Other blogs started linking to articles they found interesting on our site.
4. We moved our subscription options to a more prominent location on our site’s template.
5. We offered explanations on what RSS subscriptions actually are for new blog readers.
6. We consistently posted fresh content to the site.
After six weeks, or over 40 daily posts, we we still tracking less than 25 subscribers to our RSS feeds. It’s a good thing we stuck with it longer than that so search engines would have a chance to index the content we were creating.
Lessons Learned
1. Blogging success doesn’t happen over night.
2. Search engines don’t index content over night.
3. Providing easy to find and understand instructions on RSS syndication increases subscribe rates.
4. Consistent posting pays off.
Further Reading
Steve Pavlina published a great summary of his blog’s traffic and revenue growth for 2005 that really shows how exponential a blog’s growth can be if it provides regular posts with great content.
Darren Rowse published analysis last year of his growing AdSense revenue with comments on what exponential monthly growth can mean for bloggers who stick through the lean first few months.
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