Yesterday, I mentioned that in your early days of blogging you won’t have many readers (if any). It’s true, you will be basically writing in the hope that somebody might stumble on your site and like it. This is just the way it works. As a matter of fact, you should write some articles for the site before you even publicize the site! Why? Well, if you publicize the site, yet you have no articles there yet, people might come to visit and find nothing. Do you think they will come back again? Probably not.
So, write some articles, then start publicizing the site, as I suggested the other day. Then, keep writing on a regular schedule. Yes, I know, hardly anybody will read those articles as you write them, but there really is no better way to do this. As the months go by more and more people will start visiting your site (as long as you keep promoting the site). You will get subscribers to the site, and regular visitors who come and visit you daily, or at least on a schedule. As time goes by, people will start making comments, and a community will develop around your site. These are good signs.
I had mentioned that it might take 6 months before you have many readers. So, what happens to all those articles that you wrote and nobody read? Well, firstly, as people discover your site, many of them will go back into the archives and look at your older articles, so that they can “catch up” with the current writing on your site. Another thing you can do is to go back into the archives, choose stories that you feel are especially good or important, and re-post those! You don’t have to write them all over again, just change the time-stamp on them, and they will re-appear at the top of your site again!
Another thing you can do is to automate this process. I have one blog that I have over 2,500 entries on. It is not a topical blog that features news or something that is quite timely. Any of the posts can be looked at any time without looking dated. I have a WordPress Plugin that I use on that blog which automatically moves the oldest post on the blog to the newest post. In other words, the post that is last on the blog becomes first. I can set the interval at which I want this to happen. I have it so that every 12 hours. So every 12 hours the oldest post on the site suddenly becomes the newest post! There are so many posts on that site that most people rarely even realize that the post they are looking at is very old! This plug-in is called “Post Shift.” Keep in mind, though, if you have a blog that is topical and timely, this is not for you. If you are suddenly reposting a news article that is a few years old, people will be wondering what is going on! Also, if you only have a hundred posts or so, don’t do this, as it will rotate the posts to quickly, and a lot of readers will get tired of seeing the same articles over and over again!
So, don’t worry about having to write a lot of articles that nobody reads! You can recycle them later when you have readers who are following your site!
Exactly. One of the reasons that you write articles that no one will read is that someday someone very well might *after* you have become a somebody. To a very select group, I have become a minor somebody. Enough of one that people Google my name to see what else I have written. They then go back and read them and, apparently, want to send me email about how the read an article I wrote in 1998.
By the way, the importance of keeping email addresses ties into this. In the last year, I have written two articles for cash because someone sent me email to email accounts that I no longer actively use, but do not close. Why don’t I close them? Because I used them as points of contact in some articles. I will never close them.
Hi Tom – You are exactly correct! Regarding the old e-mail addresses, I agree with you there too! You know, I’ve been quite lucky, though. I bought my first domain back in 1995, and have been using the same e-mail address for 11 years now! I bet that there aren’t many who have been using an e-mail address for that length of time!
Hi Bob,
You are exactly right again.
I started writing a blog and to my surprise I got visitors from around the world after a while. As I am new to this I have found it hard to keep up writing so the hits dropped completely.
I have started again and its hard getting back even to the low level I was at.
Thanks for your advice on how to upload videos, I have done that now. So far its just me playing the guitar on my own but I’ll have some more videos to add soon I hope.
If I want to add music do I need mp3 codes?
Thanks again Bob.
Phil
Hi Phil – Regarding writing… here is a tip on what I do. I have about 5 different blogs that I personally write. I have others that employees write for me. But on the ones that I write (which include this one), I generally write all of my articles every Sunday. Sunday is my writing day, and I will write up to 25 articles on Sundays. Then, I post them on WordPress using the “timestamp” feature. You can set the articles to publish at any time that you wish, and on any day. So, I will write 5 articles for a blog, and set one to post on Monday, on Tuesday, etc. I don’t generally post on weekends, because I find that the number of visitors is down on weekends.
Regarding MP3 music. Here is what I recommend. Use Audacity or some other sound editing software to prepare your tracks, then export them as MP3 files. You can then upload this MP3 files to your server. I use a WordPress Plugin called “PodPress” for my readers to be able to play the MP3 files right on my site! It’ works great.
Good luck with your site, Phil!