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Repeated and huge torrents of social media traffic over many months.

That’s it.

Think about the blogs you’ve observed grow from zero to many thousands of subscribers in a relatively short period of time.

Zen Habits has been on the front page of Digg 82 times.

Freelance Switch, 18 times.

Copyblogger, 22 times (but is now on the auto-bury list).

Dosh Dosh has never made the front page of Digg, but it eats StumbleUpon alive every day.

Here’s the truth about how they did it.

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While I’ve already discussed the benefits of trying to grow a blog in a competitive, crowded niche, I want to devote some attention to how you can best grow a blog in an empty or under-served niche.

The best aspects of this method are an undivided market. If you’re the first quality blog on a topic a lot of people have been searching for, you’ll generally become the biggest blog in that niche because you were the first — as long as you stay consistent. ProBlogger.net, arguably the first blog about blogging, is still the biggest. Freelance Switch, arguably the first blog dedicated to freelancers only, continues to remain the biggest in its niche.

Unless you’re focusing on ultra-obscure topics I think it would be difficult to be the first blog in any niche, but if a niche is under-served (there aren’t enough blogs to meet demand), it’s easier to be the best. Tapping into an under-served niche is what many bloggers dream about when brainstorming blog topics.

While the potential gains are great (quality blogs in under-served niches tend to grow rapidly), surviving in an under-served niche can present a host of difficulties.

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With the benefit of hindsight, I feel confident making a statement that you don’t hear often. There is no one-size fits all strategy to grow your blog or website. More specifically, the kind of work you do must depend on how far your blog or website has already grown to be effective.

I call this idea the ‘Butterfly Growth Model’ because, like a butterfly, your growth will move through two major stages. Each stage of growth needs to correspond with a very different promotion strategy. I’ll outline the secret to this model here.

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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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Unless you’re blogging about Mexican Walking Fish (who’ve been trained to fight in the Greco-Roman Wrestling style) you can bet that your niche is pretty crowded. If you’re blogging about personal finance, technology, blogging or making money online, the sheer number of peers and competitors can make standing out seem impossible.

While many have argued that blogging in a crowded niche makes things unnecessarily difficult, I disagree. Sure, being the first blog to cater to the needs of an under-served audience is very useful, but few under-served niches remain. Let’s deal with reality. Most niches are crowded. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can leverage a crowded niche for maximum benefit.

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