Photo by froodmat

If you’ve been wondering why your blog or website hasn’t been growing as quickly or steadily as you hoped, you might be encountering one (or more) of the five barriers to success. So far, I’ve covered three parts:

1. Content with a lack of significance for its target audience.
2. A lack of diverse entry points to the site.
3. An un-defined or vaguely defined target audience.

In this post, I’ll be outlining the fourth barrier to success: visitors perceiving your site as low quality, even when it isn’t.

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Photo by *L*u*z*a*

If you’ve been wondering why your blog hasn’t been growing as quickly or steadily as you hoped, you might be encountering one (or more) of the five barriers to success. So far, I’ve covered part one: content with a lack of significance for its target audience.

In this post, I’ll be discussing the second barrier to success: a lack of entry points to your blog — with some pointers on how to overcome this barrier.

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Photo by Frabuleuse

Each weekend for the next five weeks I’ll be posting about one of the 5 barriers to success. If your blog is growing too slowly, if you’re rarely receiving comments or blogging feels like shouting into an empty valley, I hope this series will help you identify what isn’t working — and change it for the better.

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Photo by *Solar Ikon*

For a few minutes, I want to you to suspend your natural balance of optimism and cynicism. This article lists exactly what’s required to break into the Technorati Top 100 most linked-to blogs in the world.

It might seem like an insurmountable goal, but remember, many others have done it — and most of those blogs started small. The journey towards a big goal is just a collection of many little steps in one direction. My aim is to set out all the little steps here.

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Photo by Hamed Saber

I found myself thinking about an article I read a month ago on Zen Habits today, called “Wake Up: Are You Living Consciously?” The memory was prompted by a feeling of regret I had about pouring many hours of my time into a role at my university’s magazine — something I ended up getting very little out of in return.

About half-way through my commitment to the magazine I’d decided that I didn’t like the kind of writing I was doing, and that I no longer wanted to be a journalist. Yet I stayed on, wasting more time and energy on the project. It wouldn’t have been hard to find someone else to fill the role. My mistake was running on autopilot. I never took the time to evaluate what I was doing, so I continued to pour my time down the drain on something that contributed little to my life and what I want to do with it.

Living consciously is about analyzing and evaluating your actions, habits and behaviors, rather than simply doing. In other words, asking why rather than doing without really thinking.

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