Be the Best, Be Discovered
Photo by bestfor.
I’ve been thinking about some of the important lessons I learned in the very early days of my engagement with the web, back when only an obscure few knew what blogging was, and before blogs like ProBlogger existed. There were no websites (at least none that I found) to tell you how to build popular sites, or how to make money online. Those who had done it probably weren’t sure exactly how they’d done it, but were pleasantly surprised and pleased none-the-less.
As you may have read on my About page, I’ve been creating web content for about nine years now. The first site I ever created was hosted on Yahoo! GeoCities and featured lime-green text on an image background (completely unreadable). There was no medium for interaction on the site. I hadn’t discovered stat counters yet, so I also couldn’t tell if anyone ever visited it. I certainly never promoted it, though I think I would have if I’d known how. The focus of the site was on writing lessons for beginner writers. I–someone who has never published a novel, or received any accolades for her fiction writing–was the guru. In reality, I was just excited about what I was learning about writing fiction at the time. I was as much a beginner as the imagined people I was writing for.
That site didn’t last long. I craved some kind of feedback or appreciation for the work I’d put into it, which I wasn’t getting. I was determined to try a different format.
The next website I created was fan-site for a band I was crazy about at the time. My design skills had sort of improved (I’d moved from outdated HTML in NotePad to fumbling around in FrontPage 2000), and so had my knowledge of the web. I still hadn’t found anyone to tell me how to promote the site, but I did have some understanding that I’d need to give people the means to actually reach it if I wanted to share my work with other fans.
At that time I wasn’t exposed to stories of people receiving four-million page views a month, earning 75k a year from blogging, having this many subscribers and that much search engine juice. Because I didn’t know about it, I didn’t know it was possible, and therefore it didn’t concern me. I didn’t care about getting a lot of people to like the site, but I was happy if a few people loved it. Mainly, though, I was happy if I loved it. I poured a lot of time into creating every kind of band-related content you can imagine. Anything that a fan might want, I made. I painstakingly transcribed audio interviews with band-members, uploaded setlists, kept track of tour dates, archived every image I could find, offered downloads of bootlegs, covers and live recordings, reported on news and even created a horrible looking WinAMP skin.
And still, I hadn’t yet installed a stat counter on the site, I didn’t know there was such a thing as online advertising (at least, not that I could put on my own site), and the only time I knew anyone visited the site was when I got an email. Sometimes I’d get 5 – 10 a day, which for all I knew meant the site was visited by 5 – 10 people a day. That was enough for me, because I knew I was going above and beyond what any other fan-site was doing, and I was giving the project everything I had. Not in terms of promoting it as much as I could, or in terms of making as much money as I could, but simply through creating something that had as much to offer as I could possibly give, and by working on it day-in, day-out, and loving the process for its own sake.
A friend of mine at the time, who was a web designer, asked me how many hits the site was getting. He was shocked to find out that I had no idea, and helped me add a stat counter to the site. When I saw that the site had upwards of 500 unique visitors a day, I was quite stunned. Where were they all coming from, and how had they found it?
To this day, I still don’t know. I’m sure my stat counting program had the capability to show referrers, but I didn’t think to look at the time. I had done next to no promotion of the site. All I had done was pour everything I could into making it as cool as it could be. The result was the best fan-site in that niche, and those few who did stumble across the site initially must have recognized that, and passed it along via word of mouth. Based on what I know now monthly page views could have been as high as 60,000. If I had known how to promote, who knows what that figure might have been.
So, did I flip the site?
No. At that point I didn’t know websites could be bought and sold.
Did I start to make money from it?
I made about three dollars worth of Amazon referrals on sheet music. Because the payment threshhold for Amazon is $100, I never saw the money. Once I got a free Xbox game in return for displaying a banner ad on the site. I didn’t own an Xbox (and probably never will), but I gave the game to a friend.
Did I grow it into something even bigger?
No. I started to enjoy checking my stats every day and the site did reach 700 uniques on some days, but I lost interest in the project soon after.
What it means
At this point you’re probably asking: where is the lesson in all of this, then?
The significance of this experience for me–and hopefully it seems significant to you as well–is that my motivation for working on the site was completely internal. My goal was only to please myself by creating the best site I could and my rewards came in being proud of what I’d done. Visitor feedback was nice, but it only served to tell me that ‘some’ people were enjoying the site. I didn’t really care so much about the volume, only that at least a few other people thought the site was as cool as I did. But if I had only ever received a handful of emails each week to say I was doing a good job, I probably would have been happy, and I probably would have maintained the site for a long time.
But I didn’t. Once stats came into the picture, my motivation was externalized. I wanted more visitors, and I started to only enjoy adding to the site when I felt it would see my stat counter climb. Whenever my visitor count dropped I felt deflated. My work on the site began only to matter in as much as it would eventually improve traffic. Predictably, maintaining the site became a lot less fun, to the point where I eventually gave it up.
I believe my experience six or seven years ago has some bearing on blogging and social media culture today. We measure everything. We try to hoard more subscribers, more daily traffic, more Twitter followers, more AdSense clicks, more Digg fans and more comments. We are so focused on this that what we actually do becomes nothing more than a means to an end. If your latest blog post didn’t yield any comments, it was a failure. If your subscriber count hasn’t increased in a month then you need to make your content more appealing. You write list posts even though they bore you, because you know they’re popular. And so on, and so on.
Photo by skyseeker.
The problem with being motivated and rewarded by external factors is this: external validation is not always going to be there for you. It’s virtually never there when you first start blogging, which is probably the reason why many blogs die almost as soon as they’re born. It’s also prone to leaving at inopportune times, even when your blog is well established.
Worse still, if you only value your actions depending on how (and how many) others react to them, the process of doing blogging and doing social media itself can become chore-like. If you find yourself sometimes having to force yourself to write a post, or wishing you could take a month off blogging and not worry about it, or feeling like you won’t achieve the goals you’ve set yourself, that’s probably a sign that your motivation and sense of reward for blogging needs to be brought out of the control panels, graphs and counters and back inside your head.
Be the best (really)
Your enthusiasm will be never-ending if your motivation and reward for blogging is to create something that you are immensely proud of.
You’re not that weird that other people won’t see value in what you’ve done!
If you create something that is as completely awesome as you can make it, other people will see that awesomeness. If you keep plugging away at it, adding more and more layers, even when you haven’t been discovered yet, one day you will be. You can put ads on it, you can promote and you can measure the results, but I want to suggest that a truly successful blogger will mainly concern themselves with churning out as much incredible content as they can, day in, day out. And you should do it even if you’re pretty certain the only people reading your blog are your mother and your boss.
This is why debut albums are so often a band’s best album, why debut novels are often the best novels, why the Matrix is so much better than Matrix Revolutions. What you think is awesome is usually a million times better than what you think someone else will think is awesome. That’s one of the ugliest sentences you’ll ever read, but it’s also drop-dead true.
What you would look for in an insanely good technology blog, or college basketball blog, or personal development blog, is not too different to what other people interested in the same topics would also go crazy for. You are your own target audience. And if you’re not, you should probably try writing about something you’re actually interested in.
Think back to the last time you stumbled across a blog and thought: Wow, I’m so glad I found this!
Think about the last time you felt a thrill to see a new post from your favorite blog in your feed reader.
Now ask yourself the question: how can I create a blog that would make me feel this, if I were someone else?
And if you’re a little competitive, ask yourself: how can I create a blog that offers more than any other blog in my niche?
To compliment this strategy of self-fulfillment, try checking stats less. A lot less. Once a week? Once a month? By unplugging from your stats as much as possible you place the emphasis back on what you do as a blogger, not the reaction to what you do. Stats still climb when you’re not looking at them, and if you’re working hard every day to create something incredible, they will climb up and up.
It might take some time for people to discover you, but when they do, they’re going to evangelize what you’ve created. This point reminds me of a great talk from Gary Vaynerchuck at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, where he said, if you’ll allow me to paraphrase: “I’ve been doing this online thing for a long time, you only heard about me yesterday.” But we heard about him, and now he’s huge.
I don’t want this point to be confused with “make your next blog post the best blog post you’ve ever written”. It’s not about that. It’s about looking at your blog as a whole, past, present, and future, and forgetting about traffic and subscribers, and what people will and won’t like, and what people will and won’t vote for on social media, and instead starting to think about making it incredible, and having the honesty to know you’ve added something really cool to your blog even when others aren’t there to validate you. If you do this, the end result will be something people can really evangelize.
