The One True Cause of Rapidfire Growth

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.

• They focused their efforts on one social media service, rather than them all.
• They wrote 90 – 95% of content with that service in mind.
• They refined and practiced the art of writing content which did extremely well on their chosen service.
• They repeated formulas which worked in the past.
• In at least two cases: the blogger became friends with at least one power user on their chosen service and occasionally co-ordinated publishing and submission of articles by the power-user to ensure they got to cast the first vote.
• In one case: became a power-user on the service they targeted.
• Provided a call for action: directly asked readers for votes on their chosen service, in post.
• In at least three cases: swapped votes with a network of friends and contacts.

And that’s the truth of most rapidfire growth strategies. All of these things are carried out in public, I’ve never observed any secrecy about them and, as far as I’m aware, none of the strategies above contravene any terms of use. Most of you (and myself included) will be participating in some of these strategies on a small scale already. It’s simply a matter of taking things a step further.

Anyone could do the above. Most people don’t. If you want rapidfire growth, almost guaranteed, follow in the footsteps of the aforementioned blogs. If you can’t write for Digg or StumbleUpon, hire someone who can. In a few months, your blog will probably have paid for them many times over.

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Now that you know what’s required, are you going to do it?

I try to write value-packed articles for my target audience, and they tend to do well on StumbleUpon, but the networking, means to an end stuff bores me and makes me feel uneasy in more than small doses. Does that mean it’s boring? No — just that it bores me. I like to write the best content I can and see what happens. If I could escape the feeling that mobilizing social media traffic is not what I want to be doing, I’d no doubt be enjoying a lot more traffic than I currently am. But that doesn’t mean you should follow in my footsteps.

I’m not going to teach much on the ‘hows’ of this stuff much because it’s not a lot of what I do, but if you truly want a lot of subscribers in a relatively short time, it’s a near fool-proof strategy if you can get all the pieces to fall into place.

If you blog in a niche without widespread appeal (i.e., local issues, knitting), focus your efforts on StumbleUpon.

If your niche has widespread appeal (i.e., fitness, happiness), focus your efforts on Digg and del.icio.us.

If you write a lot of news, focus on Reddit and Digg.

Despite my partial aversion to social media networking, I’m starting to wonder if the significant rewards outweigh the hard work and dubious feelings involved. If it truly meant getting thousands of subscribers, would you put aside your uneasiness and try to implement each part of the strategy?

By all accounts and observations, these methods do translate into rapidfire growth. And I don’t think the above strategies are news to you — in fact, I want to suggest that you’ve probably known about them for a while.

So why aren’t you doing them yet?

That’s not a challenge. I’m genuinely curious to know. Despite our love of reading about booming social media success, what is it that stops us taking action on it, when the blueprint is right in front of us?

The truth: it feels like cheating. It sounds too good to be true.

But is it cheating if it’s the new rules of the game?

And how can it be too good to be true if it’s the core machine behind the success of so many popular blogs we know and love?