The Butterfly Growth Model
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.
The two stages
From a layman’s perspective, the two major growth stages of a butterfly are 1) chrysalis and 2) butterfly. The metaphor describes my own experiences growing Skelliewag over the last six months or so.
The chrysalis stage will be a familiar experience for anyone who has or is growing a blog or website without leverage. It’s not surprising that it’s tricky: your audience finds you through links, social media and search engines, but your audience is also largely responsible for creating this traffic. In other words, you can’t get an audience without an audience! In the beginning, you must inevitably function as a promotional army of one, laying down links to your blog like railroad track.
In a matter of days, or weeks, or months or years, your blog or website will enter the second stage of growth: the butterfly stage. You’ll know you’ve entered this stage when visitors tumble in and your subscribe count climbs incrementally even when you’re no longer self-promoting. You’ve developed an established audience who share the burden of promotion for you.
Some of you will identify yourselves as part of the chrysalis stage, when you’re really at movement number two. Your audience could share the burden of promotion alone, but you don’t let them. You’ve been pursuing the first growth method for so long that you don’t know anything else.
I discovered that Skelliewag was in the ‘butterfly’ stage by accident. For a period I found myself too busy to guest-post, leave comments elsewhere or pitch links to popular blogs. I stopped self-promotion completely. Despite that, readers continued to link and vote for the content, and new visitors and subscribers continued to trickle in at about the same rate they were arriving when I was spending hours on promotion.
There is a point when you realize that your audience no longer needs you to make things happen. Retrospectively, I think a chrysalis becomes a butterfly much earlier than most of us realize. I’m talking a few hundred subscribers, rather than a few thousand. Some of you may already be there, even though you don’t know it.
Which stage are you?
Here are the criteria that I would apply to the two stages:
Chrysalis
- Fewer than 500 subscribers. I don’t include daily traffic as a criteria because it’s not a good indication of how engaged your audience is. Good SEO, for example, does not guarantee good content. Just look at the results for a search on ‘Make Money Online’…
- Trouble getting more than a few comments on your posts.
What you should be doing
Owners of a chrysalis stage blog or website should be dividing their time evenly between value-packed content and off-blog promotion. Here’s what I would suggest:
- Comment a few times on other blogs in your niche to demonstrate your knowledge and attract the notice of the blog’s owner. I don’t think even chrysalis blogs and websites should pursue a comments for traffic strategy. The rewards aren’t in proportion to the time spent.
- Guest-post as much as possible on the most popular blogs in your niche. You do this for visibility, profile and traffic.
- Create value-packed content and pitch your best links to popular blogs in your niche.
- Make friends and connections on your social media profile of choice.
You’ll grow fastest in this stage if you’re your own biggest fan. While it’s possible to grow without these methods (possibly by skipping straight to butterfly growth), I truly don’t believe you’ll grow as quickly in the beginning stages.
Having said that, part of using the chrysalis model effectively is knowing when to stop. Once you move into the butterfly model, it’s time to hand over promotional duties to your audience and concentrate on the things that make them passionate about you.
Photo by eye of einstein
My criteria for the next stage:
Butterfly
- More than 500 subscribers.
While I practiced chrysalis growth until about December and 2,000+ subscribers, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made was failing to start earlier. A lot earlier. In fact, I’m suggesting that you should start butterfly growth once you hit about 500 subscribers.
This is the point where you acknowledge that your audience is more influential than you are. Give them great, value-packed content and they will champion it with or without you.
What you should be doing
It’s possible to grow a blog or website at an astronomical rate with only one element: value-packed content. But only once you’ve entered the butterfly stage. Value-packed content won’t stand for much if nobody sees it.
Great content + an engaged audience = all the things that grow a blog or website. Links, social media votes and search engine traffic. You don’t need anything else.
Pitching links to popular blogs is still worth the time because it only takes a few minutes to do so — work potentially resulting in hundreds of visits.
At this point, guest-posting needs to be carefully evaluated. If you’re already well-known in your niche, guest posting will only build your profile to a limited extent. You might get dozens of click-throughs, but social media could send the same post hundreds of visitors if it appeared on your own blog. The key difference is this: the traffic you get from guest-posts will be highly targeted if you’re writing on another blog in your niche. The traffic you get from social media is not nearly as well targeted.
I’d suggest only guest-posting on highly-trafficked, highly-targeted blogs, and not doing the same blog more than once a month. However, Dosh Dosh’s recent milestone of hitting 10,000 subscribers without ever guest-posting shows that this strategy isn’t a prerequisite for success in the butterfly stage. Great content on your own blog is.
The chrysalis stage work you did on a social media profile should be enough to have developed a cluster of readers who actively use social media and will regularly vote for your articles. From what I’ve observed, having an amicable relationship with a top Digger or other social media power-user is invaluable, but it’s something I’ve never chased and now that I have it, I don’t really know how to use it. In other words, I can’t provide much advice on this particular point because I’m still stumbling my way through it.
Changing your perspective
This discussion begs a fundamental question: could a butterfly stage blog or website grow quickly without any kind of off-blog promotion? I think so. In fact, I’d suggest that if you divert the time you’d usually spend on off-blog promotional methods into creating value-packed content, you’ll receive more links and traffic than you could have created yourself.
My overall argument is this: if your blog has 500 or more subscribers, let your audience take charge of what they do best — supporting and championing you. As a blogger, focus your energies on providing the value which creates a passionate audience who want to spread the word about you.
Stop talking about yourself and give other people a reason to talk about you.
Skellie, excellent advice. I recently started a new blog and I would consider myself in the Chrysalis stage.
It has been difficult, knowing how to spend my time, developing my new blog. The suggestions you make have given me a new perspective. Thanks!
Awesome perspective here, Skellie. I think it is worth investigating which particular niche that a person is blogging in. Some niches have a much more “link-able” audience than others. The meta-blogging or “making money online” niche will typically have an audience with the power and know-how to promote content and create links for you. Other niches, such as my own, have a much less tech-savvy audience. I’m struggling to find which strategy or tactics would work best for my niche: comments, forum posts, guest blogging, or social media. Those are the main ones I’ve considered and experimented with. It’s been a fairly slow road so far, but your posts have always inspired me. Thanks for the topic.
Great metaphor, and one that resonates with me since I just went from chrysalis to butterfly. It’s an awesome feeling when you know you’ve reached that tipping point and momentum helps things take care of themselves a little.
Skellie another insightful post and I can see its coming straight from your experience. I agree with you on ‘no one-size fits all’, for blog marketing. I have one blog thats in chrysalis stage and one that I built uto the advance stage and I know the journey is difficult. But as you always advice to think aboutthe PURPOSE and AUDIENCE of your blog. Its shoulnd’t about anything else in the first phase. There are far too many people suggesting ‘monetization’ and so many early bloggers get digressed and loose focus.Thx for a nice post as always.
Exactly.
I was wondering when you’d get around to talking about the difference.. there’s no way I’ll write a guest post (though I did let Darren Rowse turn a comment into a post once) because I want that content for MY readers.
I also don’t believe social media (Digg etc.) is critical. I grew without it, and so have plenty of other sites. I’m not saying it’s bad, just that content and attention to your readership is far more important.
Good post!
While I have more than 500 subscribers I still feel like I’m in the chrasylis stage of blogging. I got my 500 subscribers in a matter of a few days after an article of mine hit the front page of digg. Since then, there has been very few link-ins or comments. Because my blog is only a month old, I still feel like I have to promote it hard by contacting big bloggers, getting links, ect. Should I just accept that my blog is in the butterfly stage or should I keep working it like a hungry caterpillar?
“Stop talking about yourself and give other people a reason to talk about you.”
I love this sentence !
I just wish I could get my readers to use more social networks! With nearly 1000 subscribers I’m still stuck at the chrysalis stage
Thanks for this article, Skellie.
You often talk about high-value content. The question is, how do we know if your articles or blogposts are seen to be valuable?
My sense is that there are 3 indicators:
*We get high-value comments;
*People spend time on your blog and read lots of other posts once they find you;
*People who visit tend to subscribe
@ David Lano: The Chrysalis stage is definitely tough, but keep plugging away and it gets easier :).
@ Pat: That’s a good point. I try not to talk about specific niches too often because the information is only ever going to apply to a small number of readers, but I agree that certain niches facilitate growth more quickly than others, and certain niches are often better for growth in certain ways. You’re getting to know your niche, though, which is an important start.
@ Michael: Congrats on the transition :-). You’ve been creating quite a bit of buzz lately and it’s been very cool to see.
@ Hersh: Thanks for reminding me that keeping in mind your purpose and audience should be something you take with you through both stages of growth. :)
@ Anthony: Glad you liked it. I agree with you re: social media. I don’t believe it’s useless — it works very well for some blogs and I get most of my traffic from it — but that if you routinely find that your traffic comes mainly from inbound links, focus on that. It’s about playing to your blog’s strengths.
@ Brett: Your blog is difficult to categorize because while getting few comments is a ‘Chrysalis’ trait, your subscriber count says Butterfly. I’m concerned that your homepage layout is holding you back because it doesn’t give readers the chance to become gripped by your articles. The headlines are small and there’s only a little bit of text available, which probably isn’t sufficient time to hook visitors in and force them to click through and read the rest. Your headlines are fantastic — really — and from what I’ve read, the content is also really high quality, so I’m thinking it might just be the barriers in the layout that are holding you back. I’d suggest linking theartofmanliness.com straight to the blog rather than to the magazine-style page and see if that helps.
In regards to your broader question, I would say that if you feel like a ‘Chrysalis’, you probably still are. That stage is characterized by a feeling of having to do everything yourself, and if you’re still feeling that despite your subscriber count, then keep aiming for Chrysalis growth until links, comments and social media votes start to trickle in.
@ Antoine: 1000 subscribers is an achievement to be proud of, even if other things aren’t happening as fast as you’d like. Maybe you could introduce some of your readers to StumbleUpon (maybe write a post about it?) Or create a resource list to get some links?
@ Mary: I agree with those 3 criteria. That’s a very useful way to define content that’s value-packed for the target audience. Thanks!
Re: the “Manliness site”
Personally, I find the title offensive. Not the articles generally (though some are), but the “Art of Manliness” just turns me right off.
Now: that’s just me. Don’t change a thing! But I don’t think you can reasonably expect a lot of comments from the “manly man” - remember, he’s the “Strong, Silent Type”, right?
I’m not - I’m chatty, open, like to hang out with women (”Stop Hanging Out With Women and Start Dating Them”).
I think your very concept and target audience discourages comments - so you should stop worrying about it (not that Real Men every really “worry”!) and just go on doing what you are obviously doing well.
Skellie, this is a great piece of analysis coupled with practical advice - it’s much appreciated :-)
I am still at relatively small subscriber numbers (around 250) but have a vibrant community of quality readers and commenters of which I am extremely proud, and which makes me *feel* more like butterfly than chrysalis. They make me want to fly :-)
Joanna
@ Skellie- thanks for the awesome feedback! i think i’ll start linking to the blog itself instead of the magazine layout. i’m also going to toy with changing the size of the headlines to see if that will do anything. thanks again for taking the time to give me such amazing feedback. I really appreciate it.
@ Anthony- I guess you’re not part of the niche I’m aiming at. :)
great post, love the analogy!
Wow. Butterfly synchronicity. I just wrote a post comparing creativity to a butterfly net: doesn’t do much without the hand that steers it. Then, someone emailed me asking how I already “had so much traffic.”
I don’t have “so much traffic,” yet, and traffic is not the first goal. For a brand new blog, traffic is not the point. It’s about relationships and identity. Traffic happens later, for different reasons. At my stage, a few hits and Stumbles here and there and the comments of those I know and admire are helping to keep me encouraged, as I do what I would be doing anyway. I’m absolutely fine with my chrysalis status. :)
Absolutely perfect article. I’m going to start working on following your steps - especially the guest posts. Thanks again for such a great post.
I would like to think that my food blog has finally hit the “Butterfly” stage. Traffic and subscriber count (albeit in the region of 250) has been growing without any promotion on my part. I suppose like what Pat said above, certain niches probably have differing standards of what number of subscribers or readers to switch from Chrysalis to Butterfly. For blogs about blogging, I do agree with you that 500 would be a good figure :D
Skellie,
Thank you so much for the insight — it really answered a lot of my own questions, with my blog only a month old.
I felt like you were writing directly to me — a hallmark of a value-packed post if I ever saw one.
Thanks again.
Great perspective on blog growth - and it is a topic we were just discussing today about a new blog we are launching in the coming weeks. Funny how info falls into your lap when you need it most!
More amazing tips. You don’t ever seem to write a mediocre post. Thank you.
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thanks, skellie, for this insight. i was pleasantly surprised with the butterfly metaphor because i use a picture of a butterfly as my blog’s symbol.
i agree with pat that some audiences are more “link-able”‘ than others. for instance, the readers of my first blog, about breastfeeding advocacy in the philippines, do not even know how to post comments. instead, they email me with their comments! one emailed me asking how they could subscribe (so i did it for her myself). and they are certainly not members of social bookmarking sites!
so i use other indicators of success, such as when a journalist picks up on a blog post and writes an article on the particular topic, or downloads a document that i have provided a link to.
nevertheless, it’s nice to know that, with more internet-savvy readers, it is possible to reach a stage where one could stop actively promoting one’s blog and instead focus solely on creating the best content. i’m not very fond of self promoting.
Great post, Skellie.
While the subscriber count can be used as a measure of a blog’s growth, I think that a better measure is the responsiveness of the community surrounding your blog. Perhaps a yardstick such as post/comments ratio (PCR?) or returning visitors/subscribers ratio can be used.
I do agree that getting a blog past the early growth stages (or chrysalis stage as you call it) is the most challenging. I appreciate all your suggestions.
Lovely post!
Hey Skellie,
you wrote “pitch your best links to popular blogs in your niche.”
How do you do that? Have you written about this all ready?
All help on “etiquette” graciously accepted.
I love the post, and it confirms that I’m a butterfly - and since I find butterflies pretty I am all for that :)
In my niche though (personal finance) I find a *lot* of blogs that get to about 1000-2000 subscribers and then kind of stick there and don’t break free, onwards and upwards. I’m nervous that will happen to me. My subscriber number is inching closer and closer to blogs that were at 1500 when I started blogging and somehow, still are around that number even while continuing to produce content.
I am happy I enjoy writing content so much, and my readers seem to think it is valuable, so there is that. I haven’t seen a real slowdown yet. But I’ve just entered that four digit territory… so we’ll see what happens in the next month or two. 10,000 here I come ;)
Great article Skellie! Great blog! I usually don’t like articles about how to have a better website or a better blog, but this is excellent. Thank you!
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@Paidtwice:
I think that one of the issues with pfblogging is that it can be relatively lucrative at the 1000-2000 subscribers stage, and so people concentrate less on adding to their subscribers, and more on general traffic.
I can think of a couple of personal finance bloggers that aren’t actually interested in growing beyond that stage in the near future. Sure, there’s a limit to the size of the audience you’re likely to get, but I wouldn’t say it’s 2000.
Thanks for this Skellie - what a wonderful way of presenting this story.
I do have a question though ;)
More and more I am hearing probloggers recommend to newer bloggers that they should send an e-mail with a link to a potentially interesting story to bigger bloggers.
While I understand the importance of pitching to the right blogs that would potentially be interested in a story, I just get sick to my tummy thinking about doing this.
I have to admit that the bloggers that I have e-mailed with questions have all been brilliant with their response (not mentioning any names Skellie - :) - thank you), it is an extremely different thing - asking for advice, and asking for them to take a look at something.
Suddenly the whole vulnerability thing comes into play and I start thinking: now why on earth would they care? Way too much on their plate, way too many requests for help, so why bother them even more (and potentially put them off me for life) with my own stuff…see the problem? Argh!
@plonkee - you are brilliant. I’m shortsighted and didn’t think of the fact that might be a purposeful strategy, Ah-ha!
This is a great way of putting it and really good advice.
Especially for me as I am still in the chrysalis stage and in need of some inspiration. I have been trying commenting to attract traffic and it’s been very slow. So it’s nice to see your thoughts on it and I will be looking at guest posting as a new direction instead.
Great read Skellie…Like LID, I also would like to know what you have to say about pitching interesting stories to ‘probloggers’. From what I think, it really depends on the individual blogger’s attitude. A person could either be very helpful and open-mined…or the opposite. Not thinking too much on this subject (been a long day at the National Institutes of Health, heh…), I feel like it wouldn’t hurt to email well-known bloggers. I think most bloggers would like to get in on an interesting read on the sole fact that blogging is their hobby (and in some cases, their profession), as for replying back to you…it’s less likely since they probably are really busy with their own things. To conclude, I think if it would be beneficial to email probloggers and if anything it wouldn’t hurt. What do you all think?
Great article! I’m still in the chrysalis stage methinks (everything’s very gooey and sticky, and there’s not much room), but hopefully my blog will fly away soon (possibly with the help of your other posts that I’ve yet to read).
I’m just wondering, if blogs are like butterflies, is there such a thing as the “blog effect”? (Just like the butterfly effect, where a butterfly flaps it’s wings on one side of the world and that snowballs into a tornado on the other side.) Because I don’t want to be making any tornados… although the publicity would be good (in the short term, at least).
Interesting post Skellie, it’s something I had never really thought about but I guess I entered the butterfly stage by accident too. Back in December I hit a really hard time personally and stopped all work bar managing to scrape together a few blog posts. Although I’ve picked things up greatly now, I spend so much more time with loved ones that I simply haven’t found much time for the promotional activities that I used to do and yet the blog still continues to grow. It’s a nice feeling when it reaches that stage.
Getting in on this discussion a little late and came across this post by way of my husband e-mailing it to me. I’m new to blogging (since Nov ‘07) and have been doing a lot of the things you have mentioned here. Is there a pre-chrysalis stage (fluates between 8 and 11 subscribers)?
Content is important to me and I have discovered a passion in sharing what’s on my heart and some of my life experiences. I feel I have written some good posts even though there are times I get caught up in the stumbling and commenting and before you know it the day is gone and I still need to write my post. I’m still learning how to manage my day more efficiently.
I appreciate this metaphor - it’s gentle and natural and encouraging. It reminds me to go with the flow of the process and not be so concerned with the #’s. I’m hoping I’ll discover some day soon, like Caroline, that I’ve landed in the Butterfly stage and wonder when I passed through the chrysalis stage.
We just started a new blog to compliment our main site and, being only 4 weeks old, it is clearly still chrysalis. While our niche is uber-crowded, we have always been of the main that so many of the blogs and sites in it (fashion & style) have focus problems and tend to switch topics easily, over self-promote, end up with 80% advertising on their blog, etc. We are targeting a particular segment of the space but feel it’s going to be a mountain. Your site was so easy to vote for in the Bloggies because it is so value added and always stays focused. If you look at the 5 in the fashion category, it’s not a stretch to wonder how they do it. One has 1.2mm uniques a month. Astounding! But the posts are so scatterbrained you ask yourself, how do their readers feel served (unless they all love wondering what topic will be next I suppose) I’m not trying to be too critical here but it feels sometimes that many of the super popular blogs violate some of the tenants many of the great blogging blogs espouse. I’d love to know your thoughts on this. Many Thanks - Mike
I`d love to be a chrysalis… no way to be a butterfly. I have a 4 month blog and just have 3 or 4 persons that entered - closed friends. I write about Brazil market to foreign people so my difficult is bigger than other cases. How could I reach foreign people to read about Brazil´s market? Could you help me? Mari
Hi Skellie,
I’ve read several of your posts on Problogger, but until now, hadn’t made the time to visit your site. Here it is, nearly 2am, and I can’t stop reading.
I feel like I have landed on a true gold mine of information.
Thank you for sharing and caring.
[...] The Butterfly Growth Model [...]
[...] to a recent post at Skelliewag, there are two stages that define how you promote your [...]
[...] The Butterfly Growth Model [...]
[...] comments: This may be less true than we’d like it to be. Skellie said the same thing in The Butterfly Growth Model, that once you get to 500 subscribers, your readers will do most of the promotional work for you. [...]
[...] Bloggers and their readers are co-creators of a blog’s brand. It’s important to invest time into finding the correct niche for your blog and formulating your goals. It’s likewise just as important to examine your blog in terms of growth models. [...]
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