Photo by Tengis

This post is a lesson borne out of a challenge I’ve been facing at the moment: a growth plateau. It started at around the time I began to experiment with an inward growth strategy without external promotion: I would write good posts, new audiences would find them through links and social media, and the blog would grow on the back of its content and existing audience alone — or so the theory goes.

It’s a strategy that goes against common advice — that you should constantly be searching out new audiences and promoting externally, whether by guest-posting or by calling upon social media networks.

The result of my experiments? They haven’t worked for me. My old promotional strategies yielded more subscribers in less time, and while the inward method is less time consuming, it seems to yield significantly less results.

The experience has taught me that good content, even with an established audience, needs to be shared with new audiences on regular basis, whether that’s by guest posting, asking for links, writing easily linkable posts or promoting content on social media. If you only look inward, your blog or website becomes a walled garden, and it’s much harder for new audiences to enter that space.

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This is the free 27-page eBook version of a post series that appeared on Skelliewag in 2007. It’s completely open-source, so do whatever you want with it: offer it as a download on your blog or website, share it with friends, or sell it and make a million!

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Photo by millicent_bystander

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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Photo by Indy Charlie

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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Photo by Unhindered by Talent

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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