For the Next 7 Days, Stop Trying to Get New Readers

Photo by A Chilling Soul.

Seriously. For 7 days, don’t do any link-building or guest-posting. Don’t leave comments on other blogs. Don’t tweet your stuff. Don’t do SEO. Don’t do a single action intended to bring a new reader to your blog.

You can keep posting as usual, but that should be the extent of your marketing.

Do I want to show you that writing good content is all you need to grow your blog’s readership? Nope, that’s not it. It’s also not true.

So what am I getting at?

For one week, instead of focusing on getting new readers, I want you to focus in closely on the readers you already have. Your goal in this 7-day period is to get to know them as best as you can. This doesn’t mean that you should hold a survey or try to find out what they want from you. This isn’t market research. I’m talking about a plain old meet and greet.

Why it matters

I’m often awed when I go to a sports game and look out over the crowd. If there are 50,000 people there, I’ll mentally divide the stadium up by 10, look at one section of the crowd and think: that is how many individuals want to read what I write. Whether you have 100 or 10,000 daily readers, picturing them as a group of real people can be a very humbling experience.

Too often we only think about the numbers because that’s what we see, but behind each number is a person with a relationship to you.

Any blog’s success is made up entirely of these little relationships. It’s the trigger for any action a reader takes to help you on your way to success, whether it’s voting for you, linking, commenting, giving feedback or retweeting you. No blog can become successful on the back of self-promotion alone. At some point people have to care enough to help you along your way.

This 7-day exercise I’d like you to undertake is not about being mushy and sentimental. It’s aimed at strengthening relationships with individual readers for mutual benefit.

Getting to know your readers can give them useful insights, tips and help them learn from you. If you mean enough to them, getting noticed by you can also make their day. In return, when a reader likes you and knows you they’re much more likely to undertake actions that help you get bigger and better. When you talk to and about your readers, they talk about you. That’s just the way relationships work.

Coming full circle, you can begin to see that by focusing on getting to know your current readers you may end up gathering more new readers than you would have otherwise.

Individual relationships are the platform for your growth

The last couple of weeks I have been immersing myself in the internet marketing world to try and gather some new tips that I can apply to blogging. It’s an unusual community, I’ll admit, but some of the tips are solid gold. One of the key points I’ve taken away is that marketing is about relationships. It’s not about reaching as many eyeballs as possible – it’s about nurturing the closest possible relationship with your customers and prospects that you can.

When selling a product, prospects buy because they like a company and trust that the product is good. When marketing a blog, it’s the readers who care most about you that will spearhead your growth.

This week, make a connection with 14 of your most active readers – 2 per day

Your ‘best’ readers are the people who comment, link and tweet with/about you the most. These are the people who care most about what you do. Each day, set yourself the task of touching base with 2 of these readers. Doing so will only take a couple of minutes for each.

You could:

1. Start a conversation with them on Twitter with a friendly @ reply. The first step is to follow them, of course.
2. Shoot them an email to ask how they’re going.
3. If they have a blog, leave a comment on a blog post you like. They won’t miss it, because it will go into moderation if it’s your first comment there. If you’re not interested in their blog content then choose a different way to get in touch. Your comment should be genuine.
4. Add them to your Instant Messenger client and say Hi.
5. Chat with them on Skype.

Note: despite your best intentions I would choose not to make the interaction about thanking them for reading your blog. You might mention that you enjoy their comments/tweets/emails, but if you make it all about saying thanks, you’re focusing on the value they provide to you rather than being interested in them in their own right.

When it’s over, take stock

Did you notice a change in the readers you got to know? I bet they were talking to you and about you a lot more often.

Once the week is over you’re free to go back to hunting for new readers, but do keep up this habit. Each time you sit down to work on your blog, spend 10 minutes to get in touch with 1 or 2 readers. Each day you will slowly but surely widen the network of people who have a personal relationship with you. As a blogger, this is the single most valuable asset that you have.