Most blogs (and websites for the matter of fact) require a lot of time and dedication to become successful ventures. This fact is trivial but many bloggers ignore it, getting discouraged after they realize that it might take more than 6 months to build the next TechCrunch…
Darren Rowse carried a research some time ago and discovered that the Top 100 Technorati blogs had been online for 33.8 months on average! The conclusion is straight forward: blogging requires patience and persistence.
Another reason to have patience comes from the fact that most successful blogs or websites follow an exponential growth line (some have huge spikes, but the “line of best fit” is always similar to an exponential graph). Suppose that at the picture above both X and Y represent the same time lenght, for instance 3 months. If you measure the traffic gain during the X period and during the Y period you will see that that blog gained much more readers during the latter.
The question then becomes: do you have patience and persistence?
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
Seth,
We understand that traffic leads to traffic, but how do you get traffic in the first place? Are there ways or sites that help you promote your blog, especially in reaching the intended audience?
Exponential growth is right… Starting your blog is all abut publishing as much quality content as you can and then it seems like your blog takes off and continues to increase. The beauty is that traffic leads to traffic!!!
Yes i agree with you. The exponential grafik is the ideal grafik for a blog.
Agree with you:
Write articles on a regular basis, be patient and a have a bit of luck.
I am also a new blogger, posted more than 100 articles on my blog, still waiting for good traffic…
Eileen, you make a good point about offline businesses. And you’re right, no one expects them to be profitable at first, but we as online entrepreneurs ( sic ) are impatient. We need to constantly remind ourselves that it’s a long-term venture, and to have patience.
I agree totally with your post – experience from the most successful bloggers shows that we have to stay in it for the long term. A need for patience and persistence unfortunately doesn’t fire up many people starting out in web publishing – especially when overnight fortunes and quick profits are sold as the norm. Nobody would expect an offline business to show any kind of profit in its first year. Businesses have to be built over time especially if they are going to last. One thing’s for sure though – do the right things and traffic will grow.
You are right about the time investment. I think the biggest hurdle is that period of time after the initial excitement recedes and you don’t have the traffic or community to spur you on. It’s during this time that tenacity and perseverance are going to be most needed.
Tracy, it depends how you define success. If your objective is simply to share your ideas and receive some feedback then a personal blog could be really successful for you even without a large readership.
Great information. Do you find that blogs that are personal in nature are more or less successful then blogs which are content/subject centric such as this blog?
Brian,
That’s a reasonable number, if a bit on the short side. A lot of it depends on luck ( hate to say it! ), and whether or not your content really gets into people’s heads. 6 months to a year is more realistic in my book; by then, you’ll have a solid collection of archives to offer your new and loyal readers.
Thanks for the tip, it makes me feel much better when I check my stats and see my visitors per day hovering at around 20 or 30 — though I’ve only been blogging for about 3 weeks.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m hard at work on blogging front, and don’t intend to give it up anytime soon. I sometimes just wonder if I’m really on the right path, and if I should be working on something else instead.
Leroy, I guess there is no “best” way to earn an income online, it depends on your experise and on what you love to do.
It almost makes one wonder if blogging is really the *best* way to earn an income online. The time requirements are enormous, and don’t pay off for a looong time.
Thanks Leo, recently I discovered your blog also, good stuff!
show o artigo!!