Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com wrote a good post called “Why Bloggers Fail“
One key point he made is that bloggers spend too much time creating content and not enough on promotion.
Time-Waster #1: Creating Too Much Content
When I asked bloggers, “How do you spend time on your blog?”, they said “I spend about 80-90% of my time on creating content.”
This makes ZERO sense.
Here’s the deal: When you run a blog that has a few readers, adding more content doesn’t help you get more readers. The math just doesn’t work.
Let’s say you have 100 readers. What are the chances that one of those people will love your content so much that they tell ALL of their friends about it? 1%? 2%? If that?
Whatever it is, it’s low, and at that rate, you might get 1 new loyal reader. Going from 100 readers to 101 readers isn’t how you build a blog readership.
To build a blog readership, you’ve got to go from 100 readers… to 500 readers. Then, from 500 readers to 700 readers, and so on.
How do you do it? The secret lies in your ability to promote the content you already have, because if you’ve got something that was only seen by 100 people, chances are there are at least 10,000 or 100,000 other people in the world that can benefit from what you wrote.
What Should Bloggers Focus on?
I know I’m guilty, I focus on getting content out, but don’t do much guest posting or other promotion.
Another related problem is what bloggers spend their time on. We all know it’s important to network and connect with others, however, spending hours a day on social media, or on other non-critical tasks like reading blog posts, isn’t going to help build our businesses.
So if we all know that 20% of our efforts generate 80% of results, why do so few of us focus on that 20%?
The first step is identifying what that 20% is. What are the absolutely critical focal points of building an online audience, and therefore growing a business?
Critical Blogging Success Factors
1. One long form, extremely detailed post per week. Preferably with links to other bloggers to get their attention and support.
2. Two quality guest posts per month. Although, in another post Derek talks of the benefit of grouping all of these posts in a short time frame to ‘launch’ your internet presence as wide as possible.
3. Be Everywhere. Pat Flynn’s approach of doing of great posts, video, podcasts, attending conferences, etc. seems to be very effective, although it takes a lot of time. I’m not sure about this one.
What do you think? Should more time be spend on promotion than content creation? What are some of the best ways of promoting that content?