Mark Evans

Four Reasons Why Blogging is Easy; Getting Traffic is Hard

Every day, there are more than 100,000 blogs launched as more people climb on the user-generated content bandwagon.

While starting a blog is a snap, attracting traffic is a major challenge for most people.

To test this theory and start a new blog with fairly unique content, my brother, Sean, and I created Four Reasons Why in August 2007. The approach was simple: provide four or five reasons about a variety of topics. E.g. Why I love Pancakes; Why Google is Evil; Why Online Dating is Better than Real Life Dating; Why Bert and Ernie were Pioneers.

Rather than announce the birth of 4RW on this blog, which has a fairly healthy following, we decided to grow it organically on its own merits. With more than three years of blogging under my belt, I figured that I knew many of the tricks to attract an audience, so off we went with high hopes.

Nine months later, the results are mixed.

From a content perspective, it’s been fun, satisfying and creatively challenging, which is the reason we started 4RW. From a traffic perspective, it’s a bit of different story. The number of pagviews/day has averaged about 75, although there have been a few glorious days with a 1,000 pageviews, most recently after StumbleUpon users latched onto “Why Aquaman is the Lamest Hero of All Time”). Meanwhile, the number of RSS readers has plateaued at about 70. Not bad but not great.

It hasn’t been for a lack of trying. We’ve used a bunch of tools and techniques: StumbleUpon, which delivers a lot of “dine and dash” traffic, Digg (little impact), del.icio.us (none), Facebook (fairly good response), comments on other blogs, posts about posts on Techmeme (haven’t been able to get 4RW on it), Reddit, and the list goes on.

The lack of success from a traffic perspective probably has something to do with the fact 4RW covers a variety of topics as opposed to being focused on a single theme or sector. That has made it difficult to become part of a particular community. A design with more sizzle would probably help as well.

It may also have to due with the reality there’s so many blogs out there, and the market for readers is fragmented to the point where only blogs associated to well-known brands and bloggers have a chance to attract critical mass. That said, there are always exceptions to the rule. A good example is Stuff White People Like, which has become a huge hit because it’s, well, different.

In the case of 4RW, we continued to carry on in anonymity looking for the big break if someone with some street cred would notice our efforts, and lead us to page view and AdSense glory. Sadly, that has yet to happen but that’s okay.

In the meantime, our stealth project became less stealth - probably because I kept putting 4RW posts on Facebook and have it on MET’s blogroll.

So now we’ve decided to come out of hiding. Why? Partly because the experiment has run its course; partly because quite a few people know who’s writing 4RW, and partly because AllTop has been nice enough to put 4RW on its Lifehacks channel, along with some terrific blogs, including 43 Folders, Lifehacker, LifeDev and Make Magazine.

It’s been a nice behind-the-scenes run but we’re looking forward to a new beginning!

More: There’s no lack of advice out there on how to make your blog more popular/successful. For some interesting reads on starting a blog, check out these posts by Dosh Dosh (here and here), and this post “101 Ways to Make Your Blog More Popular Successful” by SEO 2.0.

Technorati Tags: AllTop, Blogging, Blogs, Four Reasons Why