The Third Month: Building Your Snowball Effect

Oct 20, 2007

The Third Month: Building Your Snowball Effect
by Skellie

This post represents the third stage in the 3 Month Growth Plan. I’d suggest getting an overview of the first stage and second stage before you tackle it.

The third month roughly applies to sites with 300+ daily visitors and 200+ subscribers. I think these strategies still apply very strongly to this blog, meaning that they may well be useful for any site with less than a thousand daily visitors and subscribers. I can’t write about growth beyond that stage, as I’m still learning as I go.

Now that your site has found its feet, this stage of growth is, at its core, about creating a network of fans who will begin to promote your work for you.

While readers are voluntarily recommending you to others in a variety of ways, this allows you to focus on what’s most important: creating vital content that will help build an even stronger snowball effect.

Guest-posting: aim high, because you’ve earned it
By this point you should have experience guest-posting on a variety of blogs in different stages of growth. With that experience under your belt I’d suggest going straight to the top of your niche and pitching your best ideas at its most well-known bloggers.

Make sure to highlight your guest-posting credentials and keep the email short. One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that high profile bloggers are incredibly busy and, more often than not, simply won’t tackle an email that is longer than two paragraphs.

Guest-posts on the highest trafficked sites in your niche will yield many targeted clickthroughs to your site. In my experience, guest-post traffic is the second-best traffic you can get (trailing only traffic coming through personal recommendations).

Be mindful of diminishing returns
At this growth stage, the traffic you receive from comments and forums will begin to seem modest in comparison with other strategies. I’d suggest no longer viewing commenting as a traffic building strategy, but instead focusing on whether your comments will be worthwhile in a networking capacity (or simply whether an article moves you to comment, purely from a personal perspective).

Forum use should also be stripped back to whatever level you get personal enjoyment from, rather than maintaining it as an intensive strategy — unless you feel your site rides heavily on the back of your forum profile.

The main reason behind a disengagement from these strategies is that the sheer volume of writing required is no longer going to be an efficient use of your energy, when it could instead be poured into creating a great article. At this stage, the latter will always grow your site more.

A stronger focus on virality and social media
With an established reader base your chances of social media success or virality increase, simply because there are more people around to support your content.

Now that you’ve stripped back some self-promotional growth strategies, it would be wise to reinvest this energy in writing value-packed articles your readers will champion in a variety of ways. The importance of this growth strategy will grow exponentially as your site does.

Connecting and co-operating with other bloggers
Ask quick questions, offer to guest-post, help out, or simply say hello. There are plenty of opportunities for bloggers to enter into mutually beneficial relationships. If there’s one thing we sometimes lack, it’s audacity: the audacity to think we’re worth noticing.

Your chances of success are relatively easy to calculate. If you approach the other blogger with your own self-interest in mind, there’s no reason for the blogger to do something that only benefits you. If you approach the other blogger with mutual benefit in mind, your chances go up. However, opening the dialog by giving and expecting nothing in return is always bound to be noticed. Mason said it best:

It’s often times good to start out with just a brief offer or introduction, something that doesn’t ask anything of them (in fact if you can give, you’re better off).

Once you have the conversation going, it is a lot more effective to send along links (but infrequently, it’s not something to be abused.)

Make it great to be a reader
Some of the most profitable companies in the world got to where they are by making it great to be their customer. If you want readers to get a snowball effect going, they need to feel motivated to do so. One simple and very rewarding way to do this is to treat your readers as you would your friends.

You don’t treat your friends as a mass — you treat them as individuals.
You would do something for a friend without expecting repayment.
If your friend had a problem, you would try to solve it.
If a friend asked a question, you’d try to answer it.
You’d tell your friend that you appreciate her/him.
You would treat your friend to spontaneous acts of kindness.
You would be selfless in your dealings with them.

Of all the growth strategies, the last has been the most personally important to me. It’s something that deserves greater discussion and something I think many of you will resonate with.

Now that we’ve explored the 3 Month Growth Plan, in my next post, I want to present grassroots growth as the over-arching philosophy behind it, and mount a case why this method is not given the attention it deserves.

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16 Comments, Comment or Ping

Travis

One thing you mention is treating your readers as individuals rather than as a group. How do you think blog contests fit into that philosophy? It seems like contests could be too much group oriented, rather than focused on taking care of individual readers.

I think your approach of offering personalized suggestions to many readers (as opposed to frequent contests) deals with this well - it still attracts attention, is likely to generate links (that are actually relevant, and probably recommending your site), and makes individual readers feel appreciated.

Oct 20th, 2007
David LaFerney

This is a great series of articles. Unless there is some reason not to I would humbly suggest that you consider adding previous post / next post navigation so that when someone lands on one of these gems in your archives they can easily use the entire set.

Oct 20th, 2007
Alex Kay

Great post! (again) I see this series as becoming a vital resource for many bloggers starting out in the future - at least I will do what I can to make it! Keep pumping out great stuff Skellie. - Alex

Oct 20th, 2007
Michael from Pro Blog Design

This is the one that I was really looking forward to. Reading through series has pointed out to me that I haven’t really changed my strategy. I still comment a lot (Though not just as much as before), and I still participate a lot on forums (For personal enjoyment now. I love forums).

I’m yet to try much with viral content; but I will certainly change that soon. Hopefully it will work out well.

Oct 20th, 2007
Mason from SmallFuel Marketing

I absolutely echo what Michael said about really looking forward to this one…

Imagine my surprise when I was quoted : )

This is a truly great series though, Skellie; thanks for putting it together for all of us. And of course, thanks for the mention.

- Mason

Oct 21st, 2007
skellie

@ Travis: That is one potential problem with contests: they tend to treat readers like a mass rather than like a group of individuals. I’m still not quite sure whether they’re a good strategy or not, as they have both good and bad aspects. While they encourage links they might also discourage loyal readers… so it’s something to think about.

@ David: Thanks for your suggestion. I’m not sure how to do that but I will turn the headings in the overview post into links.

@ Alex: cheers!

@ Michael: I hope it works well for you

@ Mason: It’s no problem — you said it better than I could.

Oct 21st, 2007
Patrick

Great series here Skellie. What I’ve really gotten out of it for myself is to analyze what I should spend my energy doing at this point. I know I need to shift from just cranking out articles, and move towards promotion efforts.

It’s hard at the beginning though because you have to populate your site with content before you really start promoting. I’m excited because today, my first guest post was published over at “One man’s goal.” Click my name to check out the guest post. It will be interesting to see if it brings in any new readers.

Oct 22nd, 2007
Smart websites make money

Good points mentioned here. Indeed, everybody says on the net:all the time do this, this and this, but I also believe that there are different strategies for various stages of traffic development of a website

Oct 22nd, 2007
skellie

Great job, Patrick! I notice the article is doing well on StumbleUpon, too :).

Oct 22nd, 2007
Jon

Treating readers as individuals can be a key point in keeping them involved. Replying to comments and e-mails can be very time consuming, but completely worth the effort.

Oct 22nd, 2007
Adnan

Another fantastic post, and again echoing Michael and Mason, one which I was looking forward to the most. The idea to guest-post high is certainly a good one, and one which I havn’t experimented with myself up till now. In the next few days, I should have a high-profile post or two coming out, and I’ll let you guys know how that affects the balance of things (traffic and RSS readership).

Can’t wait to read the next post Skellie.

Oct 23rd, 2007
Boris

More good reading!

Oct 25th, 2007
David LaFerney

@ David: Thanks for your suggestion. I’m not sure how to do that but I will turn the headings in the overview post into links.

I hope this displays correctly. No telling until I submit….

In WordPress Administration click “Presentation” then “Theme Editor” now on the list of theme files on the right side at the bottom click on “Single Post” Now look at the code and find where you want the navigation to appear at the top or bottom of the post then insert several blank lines and paste in the following:

Click “Update file” and take a look, if it doesn’t appear where you want it to then delete it and try again. It’s probably a good idea to copy the original code out of the theme editor and paste it into a text editor so that you can put things back like before you started fiddling around - Just in case. It’s pretty easy, if I can do it I’m sure you can. BTW, the code comes from the default WP theme.

Oct 27th, 2007