The 5 Barriers to Success Series — Part 2: Lack of Entry Points

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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.

Barrier 2: Lack of Entry Points

Visitors can’t reach your blog without an entry point. There are only three types of entry points:

• Links
• Search engines
• Social media

If your blog is still in its early stages of growth, you will have to work particularly hard to create entry points yourself. In a post I wrote in the earlier days of Skelliewag called Hansel and Gretel Link Building, I referred to these entry points as ‘crumbs’ readers use to find your blog. If readers aren’t yet creating these ‘crumbs’, you’ll need to do it yourself. As your blog grows you can gradually hand over these duties to your readers and focus almost solely on content.

Here are some things you can do to build more entry points into your blog:

• Write great content and pitch links at highly-trafficked blogs.
• Write guest-posts for other blogs.
• Learn the basics of SEO (though I have personally been terrible at this).
• Participate in a social media service and links to your blog in your profile.
• Write value-packed content aimed at social media. If you’re not sure how to start, create a resource list.
• Join a forum frequented by your niche and link to your blog in your signature.

I’m still not sure whether a comments for traffic strategy is an effective use of time. Some bloggers can get hundreds of visitors from comments over the period of a month, but this takes hours upon hours of work. Alternately, an article that does well on StumbleUpon can send a thousand visitors with only a few hours work.

While I do think commenting is a great way to connect with other bloggers and become more visible in your niche, the strategies above will serve you better for generating traffic.