It's not against the law to have fun

Another thing you will notice if you visit several of the “superblogs” every day is that these bloggers are constantly working on projects that will somehow get ther readers to interact with the site. They concoct contests and giveaways and various competitions, and they ask their readers to participate in these.

As a recent example, I noticed that John Chow and ShoeMoney had a friendly competition to see which one of them could increase their RSS feed readership members the most. Ok, that’s kind of silly (not for them, of course, but for their site visitors. I mean, it is obvious what Chow and Shoe get out of it, but why would their blog readers care about signing up? Most of them read both sites regularly anyway.) But that’s not the point. It was just fun for the readers to get involved, to interact. To be asked to DO something.

The event or contest or whatever doesn’t have to be that big of a production, or cost you anything. It just has to have some semblance of fun or excitement about it, and it must somehow get the readers involved in the process.

Are YOU asking your readers to interact with you and the others? What have you asked them to do lately?

Why are you so different?

What’s the difference between your online income and the online income of somebody like John Chow or Darren Crowse or Jeremy Schoemaker?

What’s the big difference between your blog and their blogs, attractiveness-wise and writing quality-wise?

If you are blogging about a subject that you care about, the writing quality of your website is probably as good as theirs. (English was not even John Chow’s first language.)

And if you have honestly put in the effort, then the format and attractiveness and even the monetization may well be as good as theirs, too.

One possible difference is that none of their blogs is less than a year old. If your blog is just a few months old, then hang in there and keep plugging away. Keep doing the things you know will bring more traffic to your site. Success doesn’t come overnight. Not even for these guys.

But if your blog is more than several months old and you still are not making any money to speak of, consider that you might be hiding your candle under a basket, and that the world doesn’t know you exist. It isn’t that people don’t like you or that they don’t like what you are writing. Maybe they just don’t know who you are and where you are.

Preposterous, you may say. After all, there are eleven zillion people surfing the web at any given moment.

Perhaps. But there are a heck of a lot of blogs and other website choices available for those surfers, too.

Consider the possibility that your low-traffic problem may have something to do with the fact that you don’t advertise. I have honestly never met anyone who truly put forth the effort to publicize his web site (using all the tools at his disposal to do that) who hasn’t been able to dramatically increase the traffic to his or her website.

Is it time you made the financial decision to really go into business, instead of just pretending to go into business? On the other hand, If you are a good writer, but have no desire (or discipline) to learn and execute promotional skills, then I humbly suggest you go out and find a publisher and let them worry about promoting your writing. Take the ads off your site and blog for fun.

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The web sites referenced in this post are:

John

Darren

Jeremy

John is johnchow.com
Darren is problogger.net
Jeremy is shoemoney.com

It's not against the law to have fun

Another thing you will notice if you visit several of the “superblogs” every day is that these bloggers are constantly working on projects that will somehow get ther readers to interact with the site. They concoct contests and giveaways and various competitions, and they ask their readers to participate in these.

As a recent example, I noticed that John Chow and ShoeMoney had a friendly competition going on throughout the month of October to see which one of them could increase their RSS feed readership members the most. Ok, that’s kind of silly (not for them, of course, but for their site visitors. I mean, it is obvious what Chow and Shoe get out of it, but why would their blog readers care about signing up? Most of them read both sites regularly anyway.) But that’s not the point. It was just fun for the readers to get involved, to interact. To be asked to DO something.

The event or contest or whatever doesn’t have to be that big of a production, or cost you anything. It just has to have some semblance of fun or excitement about it, and it must somehow get the readers involved in the process.

Are YOU asking your readers to interact with you and the others? What have you asked them to do lately?