Be Patient and Do Something To Grow Each Day!

So, your blog is not growing fast enough? Not getting as much traffic as you dream of? Feel you really SHOULD be promoting your blog more, but where o where to find time and energy for that?

Don't know if you recognize these things but they have certainly been something to tackle during my first years as a blogger. I have two suggestions, that at least has worked for me:

1. Patience, think about your blogging as a long-term activity

To build a successful blog takes time and commitment. There really seems to be no shortcuts in life and blogging is no different: Think of the growth of your blog in terms of months - or even years. If you can't imagine yourself keeping the same blog for more than a year I doubt that you'll ever be a successful blogger (whatever that is)

My most popular blog last year, Fantasytree, grew steadily in 2009. Not by far as much as I dreamed of, of course, and at the end f the year I thought: "I've put so much time and effort on this blog, it should have much more traffic, it should..." etcetera etcetera. Disappointed I checked the traffic increase for the year - and was surprised to see it had grown not by hundreds of percents, but by thousands!

Run your blog for a year and THEN evaluate how it has done. Remember that if you seriously think about making money blogging, you must be ready to do it for many years, maybe decades. Otherwise your probably not passionate enough. To be a pro blogger that is - blogging can be so much more than a job of course.

But I imagine that those who visit blogs like this one is rather serious and anxious about increasing traffic.

My second advice has to do with that enchanted word to anyone serious about building a succesful blog: TRAFFIC. How do you keep building traffic, day after day, week after week. My second advice for this time is really deceptively simple (but is working remarkably well for me):

2. Do Something To Make Your Blog Grow Every Single Day

No, no, no you say, don't give me this crap, tell me how to gain 10 000 visitors in a week, you might complain. The truth is however, the way I see it: If you can't start building up your blog in a more continuous way, starting with something each day, then you - in my humble opinion - never will have the drive/passion/enthusiasm to run a really successful blog.

Let me ask this: Can you honestly say that you do SOMETHING every day (of course even a blogger is allowed to be ill, go on vacation etc, here I'm taking about that usual "blogging day") to make your blog more succesful?

If the answer is "Yes", then you probably won't need my advice much longer. If it's "No" on the other hand, then why are you expecting your blog to grow so much?

Enough preaching (I often fall prey to the "Why can't people keep visiting my blog even though I'm not putting in the effort necessary to make it worth visiting at the moment - I have many old articles they should enjoy reading?"-thoughts myself), let's round this of with a few concrete examples of what you might do (at least I keep doing these) every single day in order to keep your blog growing. Just one of these each day is a great start. Sounds simple? It is theoretically, the catch is that you'll have to keep doing these things for days, months, years or even... oh my... decades.

- Visit one other blog in the same genre and write a comment, maybe even link to that blog
- Increase the number of followers on Twitter (you do use twitterfeed to post your blog posts as tweets, do you?)
- Find a blog directory where your blog is not listed and list your blog
- Send email to your mailing list or old readers
- Find a guest blogger
- Evaluate which posts are most popular and make a mental note to write a similar/follow-up post soon
- Be active in any online forum about something related to your blog and have a link to your blog in your signature
- Start another blog that links to the one you wish to grow
- Visit a blog on "How to build your blog" or read a book, watch a video etc about it (Warning: It's always easy to spend hours upon hours on the theory - what will bring in those real visitors, as opposed to those imagined, potential ones, though, is the actual physical actions/changes/contacts that you really make.)

Who said it should be easy to build a succesful blog? The challenge should be half the fun to the serious blogger. Remember: If you don't love what you're doing, why do it? You don't HAVE to be the most succesful on the planet. Having a good time doing something you enjoy can be quite enough.

Happy blogging!