What if I tell you that all that you do for your blog’s promotion is totally wrong? From the ground up! Mostly likely you’d say that I don’t even know what you’re doing for boosting your site’s popularity. But the problem is that most of us (bloggers and would-be ones) make the same mistake. I personally understood it after watching one short video. So, the other day I was wandering around the web and I stumbled upon a really amazing video that I found on WordPress.tv It’s about generating enough traffic to your site so that you can start earning a living and quit your day job. The guy in the video was Leo Babauta. He runs the Zenhabits.net blog. As a matter of fact, I used to read it on a sort of regular basis but then I stopped. Not sure why (perhaps I just goofed up again) but it’s beside the point. 🙂
Before I go any further, watch the video itself so that you know what exactly I’m talking about here.
So, Leo was saying some controversial things about what works for generating traffic to your site and what doesn’t. The interesting thing is that it contradicts what most marketing gurus keep on saying to us.
Warning: some of his statements are real eye-openers, though you need to take them with a grain of salt as anything in the world.
The location of the chair you sit on ain’t important
The first thing is what I totally agree with. You can live in virtually any part of the freaking world and still do your best so that people want to read your blog. You just need a laptop, broadband, and surely the desire to create amazing stuff for sharing with people.
You need no marketing
This statement is a bit contradictory and though Leo said that you don’t need marketing, it’s not exactly what it means. 🙂 He meant (and I believe he corrected himself in the video as well) that your marketing strategy will be created and implemented by your avid blog readers (and you can just lay back and relax). In other words, if you succeed in converting people into your blog’s raving fans (and you can do that if you invest a decent amount of time and effort in your content creation process), your audience will do all the marketing for you. They will talk about your web site with friends (and send them links to your posts), talk about your posts and topics in Twitter and Facebook. Refer to you in LinkedIn and the list goes on and on. Isn’t that too good to be true?
So, it’s not like you don’t need marketing but your marketing activities are exclusively performed by your readers. You kind of outsource your marketing needs. Well, in the good sense of the word though. 🙂
No, that’s not Leo on the image above but that should help you to get an idea how Leo’s readers spread the word for him across the whole Web. 🙂
What does not work
So, we’re going to start from a list of the things that don’t work according to Leo:
- blog commenting. From my own experience I can say that it actually works but maybe not that well as we might want it to. 🙂
- ads. It all depends on your target audience and also what kind of ads you run on your site. So, it did not work for Leo at least
- SEO. Leo Babauta says that you are not supposed to do any SEO and still rank high for certain words. Being an SEO, I can say that it’s certainly possible but it’s like shooting with your eyes closed. It’s actually better to come up with really great content and afterwards SEO optimize it just a bit.
- pop-ups. I can’t agree more with him here. All those pop-ups really get on my nerves but some guru bloggers still use some of them, such as Pop-up Domination.
- flashy components of all sorts (banners, etc). Agreed. All they do is just distract. Leo actually recommends adhering to Instapaper-like designs. Clean and simple.
- mailing lists. And it’s a nice one. I myself have heard thousands of times that the first thing that you need to is add a subscription form to your site. Leo says you don’t need that.
- social networking sites. According to Leo, you can just focus on making fantastic stuff and your blog readers will do the rest for you. The same holds true for social networks.
- comments. And that’s my personal favorite. It’s a very strong statement. I believe that you really need to be able to create super-duper cool content in order to be ready to run the risk of not using comments on your site. Since it worked for him, it’sobviously possible, but I’m not sure that you need to do it if you’re not that sure about the quality of your blog content.
What works
And now I’m going to list what worked for Leo Babauta and his blog’s promotion:
- giveaways. He states that if you give stuff away, you earn credits for your blog’s popularity. And I personally believe that it works just because we all like free stuff. 🙂 Other than that, if you give people free stuff they feel obliged to return the favor and they either just become your blog’s avid readers or even buy stuff that you have for sale, such as ebooks and stuff like that.
- great content. I’ve mentioned it in the previous list, but I’m going to repeat it again because it’s really crucial and that’s basically what all the blogging thing boils down to. If you create rad content, people will do the rest for you: they will talk about your posts in Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, you name it. So, you don’t have to do any social media marketing. They will send emails with links to your blog posts (email marketing), they will mention your stuff in blog comments (so you don’t have to do it on your own), they’ll talk about you and your blog on forums and off-line. In other words, they’ll get you covered but your content should be REALLY high quality and useful, because it won’t work otherwise. And by that I (well, actually Leo) meant that the content, which solves problems that your readers have. People are super thankful if you fix their issues that they have been bugging them for quite a while.
- unique stuff. You need to have something unique in the idea that your blog is driven by. It should have something that nobody else offers. So, people come to your site because they just can’t get the same thing elsewhere.
How to monetize
Since we all need some cash to make ends meet or even make them meet in a pretty lucrative and elegant way, Leo also monetized his blog. He did it with the help of ebooks and courses. And I should admit it’s way less intrusive than all sorts of flashy and giffy ads on a site. I honestly believe that his example is worth following if we want to make the blogosphere a better place to live in.
In conclusion
Though I do not exactly agree with some statements – such as about mailing lists – I got really inspired by the example of Leo’s success with his blog. Now I got totally determined that I’ll start striving for quality rather than quantity on my own blog because I’ve been focusing on mostly quantity until now. Shame on me!
What do you think about the way Leo did it? What worked or works for you? What is your take on that?
