Blogging has become increasingly popular in the last 5 years. Today it has become so mainstream that it is difficult for a new blog to establish itself simply because there are thousands of blogs on every thinkable topic.

Most Blogs Fail

It is widely known that popular blogs can generate a positive cash flow sufficient for a very nice lifestyle – this has further fueled the onslaught of new blogs.  The sad truth is that more than 95% of new blogs fail to gather a significant readership and will be abandoned soon after launch.

Today I am going to reveal the 2 most important things that you need to know to make your blog popular. These ideas are in fact so simple that almost everyone knows about them but most bloggers still fail to use these principles consistently.

The fact that I am writing a post on something that most of us already know shows how important these ideas really are.

Blogging Success Formula

Blog Popularity = Content + Marketing

The popularity of any blog is a direct result of the content the blog puts out and the marketing the blog is doing to get new readers.

Principle 1 – Produce new quality content

Content is the single and most underlying cornerstone of any blog. If there is no content there is nothing to read. If there is nothing to read no one will visit your blog.

Importance of new content

A potential reader can bookmark your blog after reading an interesting article but after several times of coming back and not finding new content the visitor will cease to return. Depending on the quality of your former blog posts it will vary how long this will take but after not finding new content the blog will sooner or later die out.

Importance of high-quality content

It is also important to make sure that the content produced is high-quality. If the articles produced are inferior to the blog posts of your competitors there are no real reasons for a reader to follow your articles.

There are probably hundreds of ways how a blog post can be low-quality – It can mean an article with a lot of spelling mistakes, a blog post that really doesn’t say anything new or a superb article that talks about something that is not interesting to your readers. Hopefully your blog doesn’t correspond to any of these categories.

What to keep in mind

Producing new content is by far the most important principle of successful blogging. One has to keep in mind however that only concentrating on producing new and quality content is the best way to fail at blogging. In order to become a successful blogger you have to be consistently producing top notch articles and at the same time excel at the second principle of successful blogging – marketing your blog.

Principle 2 – Market your blog

Having great content is not enough for success.

In order for your blog to become popular people will have to know that it exists.
If William Shakespeare had never published his books he would still be a great writer with the exception that absolutely no one would know of him – none of his stories would have been made into plays.

After writing a new blog post your goal should be to get as many people reading it as possible. If you don’t get people to read the exceptional content in your blog it can never become popular.

Be a proactive marketer

By marketing your blog you give people the chance to decide whether what they are reading is worth reading for them. If it is – you can be sure that they will let other people know as well. That means that the more you market your blog the easier it will get – people who like your content will tell their friends about it.

It is possible for a blog to grow big enough that there is no need for active marketing but this is only the case when a blog has thousands or tens of thousands of daily readers.

If you think that you have enough readers and you can stop marketing your blog you are wrong.

How to market your content

Choosing the marketing methods that work best with your blog or website depend on your niche and what exactly you want to accomplish. A good way to market could be anything from leaving comments on blogs with similar content or printing and handing out flayers in your the local mall.

What to keep in mind

Producing and marketing your content only work hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. If you have content but don’t have marketing you will never get any visitors. If you have marketing but don’t have any content your visitors will never return.

Keeping track of progress

Producing new content and marketing it are the two most important factors for a blog’s success. Contrary to what you would expect – at some point most people stop following one or both of these principles. As a consequence they will get little traffic, feel discouraged and eventually stop blogging.

My System

In order to combat the problem of not doing what I know should be done I created 3 simple graphs that help me stay in control of my article writing and marketing activities.

Here they are:

Graph 1 – goals for my everyday activities

At first glance this graph looks rather stupid – all the lines are parallel and they don’t seem to indicate much. The idea behind the graph is simple – it shows the every day goals of my blogging activities. The blue line represents the number of articles (1) I need to write every day this month. The yellow line is the maximum amount of time I am willing to spend on my daily blogging activities (4 hours). The upper line shows the amount of comments (10) I want to leave to other relevant blogs in order to market my content.

I printed this graph out and every day after finishing my blogging activities I will draw a line representing the actual daily figures. If the hand-drawn lines fluctuate from the pre set one’s it will indicate a possible problem.

Graph 2 – totals

This graph shows the total amount of work done after every day of reaching my goals. By the end of October I will have written 31 new articles, left 310 relevant comments on other blogs and spent about 124 hours doing it.

Graph 3 – results

This graph represents the expected rise in visitors and RSS subscribers if I manage to fulfill my daily blogging goals for October. Currently I have on average about 315 daily visits and hopefully it will rise to 571 by the end of the month. The amount of average RSS readers will hopefully go from 72 to 130.

This is the only graph that represents the things that are not under my direct control. I can control how many articles I write and what I do to market it, but I can not directly control the amount of people coming to read my content – I can only make educated guesses.

Remember

Control the controllables – focus writing new articles and marketing your blog. These are the only 2 things that you have direct control over. By consistently doing these activities you can influence more people to read your content.

Never forget:
Blog Popularity = Content + Marketing

EDIT:

This is a repost of an article I wrote in October 2008. Since that time my RSS subscriber count has gone from 70 to over 350 and the average daily readership of this blog fluctuates between 600-1000 people per day!

Keep in mind that all this has been done without any money! If I can do it, you can do it as well.

For more insights about making your blog more popular sign up for our full feed RSS or sign up via email.

The second week of 2009 is almost over and I just figured out that there is an important post missing about last year.

Most read articles of 2008

10 – Quotes that make you act

A series of quotes that I have collected over time and that give me the motivation to keep going.

9 – 10 reasons why you are still poor

10 things that keep you from obtaining wealth.

8  – Illustrated guide to face reading

Is it possible to know what someone is like just by looking at his facial features? Although not proven – some scientist seem to think so. For example – a person with a large chin is usually the one who has the last say in important matters.

7  – How to get what you want

A series of pictures about the former US president Lyndon Johnson showing how he used his almighty body language to get what he wanted.

6 – What does 1 million pennies look like?

Have you ever wondered how much space 1 million pennies would take up and what would it all look like? Look no further – it’s all in this post!

5 – Top 10 countries with highest press freedom

Iceland, Norway and Estonia are the top 3. USA is way back at 23rd place.

4 – Top 10 countries with cheapest gas prices in the world

While gas prices in USA are currently about $2 per gallon, you can expect to pay just $0.19/gallon or 0.05$/litre in Venezuela

3 – 3 experiments with money

Clever psychological experiments that show why people often act irrationally with their money.

2 – Top 10 happiest countries

Ten happiest countries in the world and what makes them tick!

1 – Top 10 world’s richest countries

A list of the worlds richest countries with explanations on how they generate their wealth!

Some statistics for Financial Jesus in 2008

Here are some stats starting from May, when my blog was opened.

Total unique visits – 82 539

Total pageviews – 130 968

Best single day – 3 430 unique visits

Average daily visits – 366

Liked what you read? Don’t hesitate to sign up for our free email updates or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Something nice happened on May 24th 2008 – I got stumbled! The fallowing is a detailed analysis of the traffic that StumbleUpon.com sent me during the 13 days that I was Stumbled.

What is StumbleUpon.com?

StumbleUpon is a social media toolbar that is used by more than 5 million people to find new and interesting websites. It lets you specify your interests and afterwards presents you with a button that takes you to a random page that matches your pre-selected topics and that have been recommended by other StumbleUpon users.

StumbleUpon allows you to give a thumbs up when you like a page and thumbs down when you don’t. This teaches the program what you like and ensures that it will refer you to websites that most match your interests.

The more thumbs up a website gets the more traffic StumbleUpon will send it.

Total Effect from Being Stumbled

On May 24th one of my articles – Top 10 richest countries of the world – got stumbled.

During 13 days from May 24th to June 5th FinancialJesus.com got a total of 4313 visits from StumbleUpon.

During this time the total number of visitors to FinancialJesus.com was 6787 – over 63% of my traffic came from StumbleUpon.

Highs and Lows

During the 13 day period I got an average of 308 visitors from StumbleUpon. During that time the number of visitors StumbleUpon sent to FinancialJesus.com was in no way consistent.

Best day – 1082 visits – 8th day after being Stumbled

Worst day – 30 visits – 13th day after being Stumbled

Daily unique visitors from StumbleUpon.com

As you can see there are actually 2 peaks on the graph. The higher one on May 30th and the first one on May 26th.

This is because there were actually 2 different articles Stumbled. The first article was Stumbled on May 24th and the second one on May 30th – that’s why the sudden jump in visitors. The second article that was Stumbled – 3 experiments with money – experienced a lot more sudden increase in traffic than the first one.

During the first day the post 3 experiments with money (2nd article that was stumbled) got a total of 981 unique visitors from StumbleUpon. I was initially expecting the article to get a slow but steady flow of traffic just like I got with the first post, but I was wrong!

Different kinds of traffic

StumbleUpon has the ability to drive different kinds of traffic.

1. Consistent traffic

Here is a graph of the traffic that my first article generated. Notice that after the traffic slows down by May 29th, it suddenly gets a small boost and stays consistent for 5 days.

The day this post got a sudden boost – May 30th -  is also the day my second article got Stumbled. Could there be a connection?

Statistics

The average StumbleUpon visitor spent 2 minutes and 21 seconds reading the article - slightly less than the post’s average of 2:44.

The bounce rate was 83%. This means that 83% of visitors from StumbleUpon decided to leave FinancialJesus after reading the article without bothering to read other posts. After taking a look at Navigation Summary in Google Analytics I discovered that for some reason 9% of visitors reloaded the post. This probably means that the actual bounce rate was over 90%.

I managed to get the average bounce rate down to about 75% by May 28th and keep it there by putting a larger than usual link at the end of the article to one of my other posts.

9.93% of all the people clicked on this link:

I also use the Similar Posts plugin to recommend other posts but it seems that writing the link larger than usual has a good effect on click through rates.

2. Sudden burst of traffic

Here is a traffic graph of my second article getting Stumbled. Notice the sharp increase and then the sudden decrease of visitors. The traffic to this article form StumbleUpon is totally different from the traffic I got with my first post.

The article in focus gathered fast popularity on May 30th in StumbleUpon.com – It got picked to StumbleUpon Buzz which is kind of like the front page of Digg. Some sites picked the article up from Buzz and that gave me additional traffic.

Additional traffic from hitting StumbleUpon Buzz

Popurls.com – 93 unique visits

Jimmyr.com – 55 unique visits

Charlierb3.blogspot.com – 29 unique visits

Theweblist.net – 20 unique visits

Statistics

The average StumbleUpon visitor spent 2 minutes and 41 seconds reading the article - slightly under the post’s average of 2:54.

The bounce rate was 89%.

I managed to lower it down to 75% by June 3rd by taking a similar approach as mentioned earlier – I put a larger than usual link at the end of the article to one of my other pages.

Unfortunately this link couldn’t get the overall average bounce rate down, since almost 90% of visits came before I added the link – on the first day of getting Stumbled.

Here is a graph comparing traffic from StumbleUpon to both articles

Article 1 is green Article 2 is red

By May 29th I wasn’t expecting much StumbleUpon.com traffic anymore to the first Stumbled article, but it seems that the discovery and popularity of the post 3 experiments with money gave a boost to our first Stumbled article. It remains unclear whether these events are connected to each other or not. It could be possible that the StumbleUpon algorithm is built in a way that when a certain page on a domain gets a sudden rush of “Thumbs Up” it will also increase the amount of traffic sent to other Stumbled pages on that domain.

A boost in RSS feed readers

During the 13 days of being stumbled I got 26 new RSS readers. That was a big jump from the 13 readers I had a day before getting Stumbled. On my best day Feedburner reported a total of 52 subscribers (a 400% rise). It seems that some of these people unsubscribed the next day – RSS readers dropped from 52 to 33. After that the total number of RSS feed readers kept crawling up – on June 4th it had climbed back up to 39 (300% rise).

It took an average of 165 unique visitors from StumbleUpon for one person to sign up for my RSS feed.

Conclusion

StumbleUpon can generate different kinds of traffic. It can give you a steady flow of visitors or a sudden peak. The visitors are not eager to click on links to other posts but their behavior can be influenced by adding an extra large link to another article at the end of the post.

StumbleUpon also gives a decent amount of RSS readers of whom some unsubscribe a few days later. Depending on your current amount of readers the boost can be significant or you may not even notice it!

After 14 days of getting decent traffic the flow of visitors has dropped significantly but has yet to come to a standstill.

For more in depth analysis of traffic from different social media websites sing up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via e-mail

Does your domain pass the phone test?

Good news everybody!

FinancialJesus.com has been up and running for 15 days straight and it looks that things are getting better by the day.
Sunday(that’s yesterday, baby! ) was our record breaking day with 579 unique visitors.

Here’s what happened during the first 15 days

FinancialJesus.com has a total of 34 posts and exactly 70 comments.

The comments part is what I am particularly satisfied with! It shows that there is already starting to form a small community around this website and that is exactly what I have been trying to do!

During the first 15 days I have had 1596 unique visitors! This is an average of 100 visitors a day! I am very satisfied with this, but to tell you the truth this number is very far from what it will be. All my next efforts will be made in order to get more visitors to FinancialJesus.com and eventually get the average to 1000 unique visitors per day.

My number 1 traffic source?

StumbleUpon.com – I can’t recommend it enough! I spend a lot of time on StumbleUpon to find new interesting stuff, and to tell you the truth I have submitted a few of my more interesting posts to StumbleUpon as well… If you are a user, add me as a friend

Most viewed post

My most viewed post is Top 10 richest countries of the world. I wrote it only 3 days ago, but it has already got 1134 unique visitors and 1253 page views. Nothing compared to big sites, but pretty OK for FinancialJesus.com.
The traffic to Top 10 richest countries of the world has mostly come from StumbleUpon. Guess who adds his own content to StubleUpon? That’s right – ME I only do it for posts I feel are StumbleUpon material, so, to tell you the truth, I don’t feel bad at all.

What have I learned?

Basic things actually.

1. If possible make lists – they are easier to read.
2. Use a lot of titles and highlighting – This make it easier for visitors to read your content as well
3. Use spell check – you always make mistakes!

Ads?

As you have maybe noticed financialjesus.com is ad free. But it is not my intention to keep it ad free forever. In fact just about 2 hours ago I added some Google Adsense ads to my top post – Top 10 richest countries of the world. Since I have almost no experience with ads I have yet no idea on how it will turn out. The reason I decided to post some ads is to make a small case study for myself – that way I’ll get a little experience on whether the ad formats and positioning that I used work or not!

For information on how my next 15 days will go and how the “ad placement project” went, sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

This is a list of 15 most important WordPress plugins that you should install in order to get a blog that has excellent functionality and high traffic.

The plugins are in order of importance. If you feel that you don’t want to install all of them in one day be sure to start with the more important ones!

1. Feedburner Feedsmith – This plugin detects all possible ways a user can access your WordPress installations default RSS feeds and replaces it with a Feedburner feed. Among others the biggest benefit of having a Feedburner RSS feed is that it can tell you how many subscribed users you really have.
2. Google Analyticator – Google Analyticator allows you to use Google Analytics to track visitors to your blog without having to add the tracking code manually to your WordPress blog. To get an small overview about the information Google Analytics provides, check out my post 10 days since the launch of FinancialJesus.com
3. Akismet – This plugin automatically checks all the comments and trackbacks people leave to your blog to see if any of them is spam. It is totally automatic, so you don’t have to do anything (if you don’t want to). Akismet comes together with WordPress, but in order to activate it, you need a API key. You can get one by signing up at wordpress.com
4. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML sitemap of your blog each time you write a new post and lets Google and other search engine know of new content. Without Google XML Sitemaps it could take Google weeks to make your new article findable from their search engine, but with XML Sitemaps they will always know if you have new content.
5. Post Plugin Library and Similar Posts – These plugins analyze the posts that you have written and display a list of other posts that are similar to the one your visitor was reading. The first plugin does nothing by itself – it only gives your WordPress blog a framework that you could run Similar Posts
6. Subscribe to Comments – This plugin gives your readers an opportunity to subscribe to comments left to a particular post. New comments are automatically emailed to the user.
7. Brian’s Threaded Comments – This plugin gives an opportunity to reply to individual comments. The default WordPress setup automatically puts the newest comment at the end of the list. This plugin gives the user an option to reply to other peoples comments so that the answer will be displayed directly beneath the original comment.
8. Show Top Commentators Widget – This plugin automatically counts who are your blogs top commentators and shows them with a link to their website on a sidebar. This is a great way to increase the comments left to your blog because it gives your readers the chance to benefit from your blogs traffic. For instance being a top commentator in John Chow’s blog got me 84 visitors during 10 days.
9. All in one SEO pack – This plugin gives you tons of possibilities to make your blog more findable by Google and other search engines. It gives you detailed tweaking options to how Google can see your blog.
10. Auto social – This plugin will automatically submit all your posts to del.icio.us. Great for extra traffic!
11. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget - This plugin gives you a button under all your posts that your readers can use to submit the article to different social bookmarking sites. Again – great for traffic!

Whatever plugins you use, keep in mind that no plugin can get you traffic when you don’t have any content.

For more tips about getting traffic to your WordPress blog sign up to our full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

Day 2 of being a top commentator on JohnChow.com has ended. What are the results? Here’s a traffic update

While getting only 12 visits to FinancialJesus.com on the first day the 2nd day was even worse. I got 8 visitors

The interesting thing is that I have a feeling that Google Analytics is not working as it should. For some reason it thinks that I  have clicked on a link to FinancialJesus.com on a specific page at JohnChow.com for 14 times. I know for a fact that this can’t be true! (Unless I’m doing it in my sleep)

The understanding here at FinancialJesus.com is that there are better ways to market yourself online than this. But since I have promised myself that I will pursue the “top commentator” strategy for a week I will stay true to my goals!

Next week I’ll look into the ways I can use Yahoo Answers to generate some online traffic!

If you want to be the first to know how much traffic I generated with my online marketing strategies feel free to sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email. After all, it’s free!

The first day has passed from starting my first ever online campaign.

So what are the results of becoming a top commentator in John Chow’s blog?

Well I got a bit less traffic than what I was hoping for, but it’s still a start. And leaving comments is a great way to build links back to your website. So I really can’t complain for starters.

Within the last 24 hours this blog got a total of 80 visits and only 12 came from John Chow’s blog.

If you can count – this makes a total of 18 visits but I am pretty sure that all the visits from Estonia are by me. It’s such a small country I live in that I’d say that it’s safe to assume that I am the only visitor to John’s blog from Estonia

It is my intention to some day write an article about Estonia – people from the U.S rarely know about it and mix it up with Elbonia from the Dilbert comics But Estonia is actually a highly developed country and I feel that it is necessary to write about the things happening in Estonia’s technology market because we are a few years ahead of the general trend.  Things happening here are probably going to happen all over the world after a few years.

Why so little traffic?

The answer to why I got less traffic than expected actually has several parts.

1. The majority of John’s readers are people in the internet marketing business – therefore they know the tricks someone could use to get their attention. For instance – If I had used the same marketing strategy on a high traffic blog that talks about cooking and food – I would have gotten a lot more traffic. It’s difficult to use the same tricks to get traffic that everybody knows and a lot people are using. You have to be creative to be successful
2. John’s blog has over 20 000 RSS readers. Most of them read John’s blog from a feed reader and therefore never saw the link to Financial Jesus as a top commentator.

The rest of my traffic came from StumbleUpon where I submitted one of my articles myself. Evil, I know One of these days I intend to make an internet marketing campaign in Stumbleupon as well.

Today I am going to leave comments on another blog to test how many visitors I will get from there. Check back tomorrow to find out which blog I am talking about!

The best way to do it is to subscribe to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

You might already know that I started my first online internet marketing campaign today!

I’m excited!!!

But I also have some questions that I feel need to be answered. The most important is this:

It’s a tough question to answer and to tell you the truth I don’t know the answer. It depends a lot on what kind of a website you are running and how many visitors you have.

The only certain thing is that in the long run you should always focus on content. You should make sure that your blog has a lot of high quality content.

There is a saying that you can keep in mind

“If you will write it, they’ll come and read it”

Having a lot of quality content ensures you basically 2 things – search engine traffic and word-of-mouth advertising.

If your blog already has quite a following there is no point to spend a majority of your time on marketing.

But if you are just starting your blog?

Yes, what if you have a starting blog like Financial Jesus and don’t have any readers?

Well you can spend all your time on writing posts, but what’s the point when you don’t have anyone reading what you are writing? Since it is definitely better to write when someone is reading, a startup blog should spend some of it’s time marketing.

As I found out today, marketing can be difficult and take a lot of time. I spent more than 8 hours today on writing comments at www.johnchow.com hoping that by being the number one commentator I will get some traffic back to my website.
The life of a marketer is uncertain, so I don’t even know yet if what I did pays off! Crazy, I know

There is however something that I have already learned today.

Content comes first

You should always start your day by writing your content and then spend the rest of your time on marketing. This ensures that you will be able to write the number of posts each day that you have set as your goal. I promised myself that I will write a minimum of 3 posts a day on Financial Jesus. However I spent so much time on marketing today that it is already way past my bedtime – it is 4 am in where I live and I am writing this post in order to keep a promise I gave to myself.
If I had written the blog posts in the morning and after that spent my time on getting traffic and marketing I would already be asleep. Well, I guess we all learn from our mistakes!

My advice is to write the minimum amount of content that you are satisfied with and use the rest of your time getting more traffic to your blog. After achieving your daily marketing goal it’s up to you if you write more content or spend more of your time on getting more traffic. But keep in mind – when you don’t have any content you won’t have any readers so it’s usually more important to write new stuff than to try and get more readers.

If you like the common sense advice I give on writing blog posts and marketing your website be sure to subscribe to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.