ALT Talks: Growing Your Readership
Friday, February 17, 2012 at 10:03AM 
Today I am featuring and illustrating the Growing Your Readership session from ALT Summit, in the same way that I did the talks from Camp Mighty. I found it to be such a great way for me to process all the information and also a great way to share it. You can click on the image above to link to a larger version that you can print out. (Edit: I also illustrated the Collaborations session!)
Growing Your Readership was hosted by:
- Jordan Ferney of Oh Happy Day!
- Kelly Beall of Design Crush
- Nicole Balch of Making It Lovely
- Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl
They had three main points about how to grow your readership:
1. ORIGINAL CONTENT
- Create a personal narrative from your own experiences. Examples included Jordan's move to Paris and Nicole's home renovation. Use these narratives to share tips and resources.
- Use your expertise for DIYs and tutorials. Showing people how you do what you do is a great way to gain readers. It's the old give a man a fish/ teach a man to fish parable.
- Do your own research and make something new. Don't just link to what other people have said or made, have a look at everything being done in a certain category or on a certain trend and do a comprehensive post that shows a complete picture and showcases your own insights.
- Make custom layouts, curate and remix. Creating your own content is key, but if you are using other people's content, be sure to ask first, credit sources and then present it in a way that is new. Add graphics, pair things up, put your own personal stamp on it.
2. CONSISTENT SCHEDULE
- Have an editorial calendar. Plan ahead and try to post on the same days every week. If people know what to expect, they will look forward to your posts.
- High quality posts are better than high frequency posts. Rather than post one item every day for a week in a series, consider posting all five at once on one day. Make it easy for your readers, don't space out content to have a post up every single day. Quality over quantity.
- Find the right amount of content for your audience. Kelly found that when she was posting three times a day, less people were reading, it was too much. When she scaled back she found more people engaged.
- Best times to post are 7am (EST), noon, 4pm and midnight. Know who your audience is and when they are more likely to be reading. Sometimes off times can benefit as well. Midnight is a good time for overseas audiences. Or you can just post it when it's done!
3. PROFESSIONAL LOOK
- Invest $ in your blog. Spend money on design if you are not a designer, quality giveaways for things people want, hire assistants and pay contributors, and make sure you have childcare so you can dedicate time to your blog.
- Masthead and URL should match. This means investing in a dedicated domain name and designing your header to be the same. Make sure you have a domain name secured before naming your blog.
- Good design is a prerequisite. Good design used to set blogs apart, but now it is common place. You must have a good design that is easy to read and navigate to be successful.
Additional tips:
- Put stuff out when you are excited about it and tweek it later. Execute the bare minimum of what you need to do to get it out into the world and then update it later.
- Join Communities, build communities, comment on other blogs (but make sure they are quality comments, not just "cool post"), post on Facebook (have a page for your site) and contribute to other sites that have a similar aesthetic, style and audience with your writing or artwork.
- Capture search traffic with unique seasonal and event based content. Check out what the trending topics are for the day. You can post about current events and holidays, but make sure it is not something that other people are doing. Make it special.
- Learn how to do SEO and tags. Check out Google tutorials.
If you are interested in learning more about Alt Summit's Growing Your Readership session, check out Nicole's twitter recap on Storify.
You can also check out the Alt Summit channel for fantastic online classes that cover many of the topics that were discussed at the conference, including Growing Your Readership.
Check out my other Alt Summit posts:
Alt Summit Talks, Bloggers, Blogging, Growing, Readership in ALT Summit, Creative Work, Illustration, Inspiration
Reader Comments (16)
This is such a great way to keep all the great tips in mind. Definitely going to print this out and hang it up by my computer as a reminder. Thanks for sharing.
wowoowow! super cool illustration! all on one page - love it!
I kinda think that this is better than the real thing was!
Thanks M.C.! Awesome to hear that you will hang it up!
TNDW: why thank you! I do these in my sm moleskine notebook and there was a lot of pencil erasing to figure out the layout!
Aw Maggie, you are too kind, this is the boiled down cartoon version!
Great illustration and fabulous points. I still struggle with the schedule. Last night I was up til 3am trying to make a Saturday morning post. Argh. Maybe need to work on my organisation skills. Lol
Jeanie, I am the same way!! It's one of the biggest things I have to work on, knowing what is coming next. I sometimes wake up in the morning, not knowing what to post. Mostly it just increases my stress to have to scramble like that and I know I'm not doing my best work. Thanks for the comment!
Great Illustration. Perfect for those of us that were not able to go.
MadlyClumsily - That's great to hear. Thank you!
this post makes me feel very inadequate about my own experiences with alt summit classes :) your drawing is amazing- so fun to look at and also informative. as the author of a new blog myself, this information is so helpful. it's also nice to know that there are others are in the same boat! i know a blog takes time to grow a readership, and everyone I've talked to preaches the importance of patience, but just curious if in the class they gave you an idea of what kind of growth is considered successful for a new blog? did any of the speakers talk about how long it took each of them to grow a readership?
thanks again for sharing all this great info!
Hey Dalton, thanks so much! I think you have to figure out what success means to you. In the talk Jordan mentioned that she had been blogging for 4.5 years and during the last year, when she began to take it seriously and implement many of the tips above, her readership grew by 264% in one year. Jordan's page view numbers are WAY, WAY higher than mine but if I compare my page views from the last 30 days, to the same period last year? My readership has grown by 283% too! (BTW, I am just doing the math about this now because you asked and honestly I am surprised!) So then, based on just percentages, my blog has grown as much as Oh Happy Day in the last year. Well, that's amazing, isn't it?
It does take time. I've been blogging for seven years, but I've really just been serious about it for the last year. It all depends on how hard you work at it & how much time you can spend on it. I don't know if my blog will ever be at those top levels, at least maybe not in it's current incarnation. I think more clearly defined niches (like weddings and interior decorating) have a greater potential for large readerships. I guess you just have to keep working at it and trying new things until something works. Ironically, this post gave my blog a huge jump in traffic on the day that it was posted.
Some people think success is measured by how much money you are making. Advertising is a world I haven't entered yet and I am still trying to figure out if I can offer a service or product, related to this blog, that could generate an income for me. For now, I measure my success by the emails and comments I get from people who are learning from, enjoying or relating to what I am sharing. Like you. Thanks.
Like Dalton, I've been feeling inadequate with my blog too. Despite a lot of time, energy and love I've thrown into blogging the past couple months, I'm not seeing the stats I keep hoping for. As I wrote in my post for today, I'm trying to remember that doing my best and writing from my heart does not depend on feedback--either positive or negative--from others. So ... I'm trying not to look at the stats, and I'm trying to keep plugging away and being authentic. (Coincidentally, I got similar advice through a TED talk yesterday: be passionate, be patient.)
And like you said, Leslie, it does take time. Thanks for your insights. I always enjoy learning from you and interacting with you!
Hi Heather, I know exactly what you mean. Deciding WHY you are blogging can help you make decisions about how to grow. If you are blogging to just put your thoughts and ideas out into the world, as a kind of public journal, then statistics probably shouldn't matter. If you are trying to meet certain numbers, or promote a product you might have to adapt what you are writing to better match what people are looking for. You know what I mean? Also - I've found increases in my readership when I have joined communities, taken classes, joined writing carnivals and done blog link ups. You have to have good content, a good looking blog and a consistant schedule, but you also have to get yourself and your writing in front of people. Hopefully if you have done all the work listed above, once people see what you are offering, they will stay and keep coming back. Keep at it! I love your motivational writing style and the topics you cover. I wonder if there are any sites/communities out there that you can contribute to? I've also bee thinking about redesigning so that content that is more instructional is more accessible, less blog-like and more website-like.
Leslie, thanks again for all of this insight- and congrats on your own boost in readership! Your response was not only thoughtful but also informative! You have definitely gained a reader with me. I look forward to hearing about how any other alt summit classes go for you!!
Thanks Dalton! I am planning to do graphics for two or three of the other panels that I attended at the conference. The next one will be Collaborating, which is another great way to grow. Best of luck with your own site!
Thank you so much for sharing this post, it is really helpful :)
We are trying to encourage people to follow and post on our blog but are finding it a little tricky. We have been posting for about 2 years now and are a little disheartened by the lack of interest. We have a lot of people viewing but few stick about and comment :( We tweet, pin, comment, blog photos and diys... its a tough market! We would like to do some ad swaps or exchange features but as we have so few people following us we feel a little concerned that other blogs wouldn't want to do a swap. If you have any advice we would love to hear it!
Thanks again for taking the time to write these tips and spread the love :)
-Vivid
www.vividplease.me
Hi Vivid! Thanks for reading! First you should ask - what is the goal of your blog? It looks like you are selling a product on Etsy, so if your goal is to sell more product, then maybe you can approach your blog posts with that in mind. DIYs could be focused on the kind of product you are selling, and you should be trying to get your products featured on other sites. Don't think negatively, just try to find other blogs that are complimentary to you and at your level and ask them. Keep asking around until you find people that say yes. You just have to keep trying new things and figure out what is working and what is not. I'm working on a new graphic for the Collaborations panel and there might be some tips in there that can help. There was also a panel at ALT Summit called Blog to Shop, that I didn't attend but that presented information about how to use a blog to promote an Etsy shop. Have you attended any conferences? Good luck!!