How to Stimulate Blog Growth When You Start to Stagnate

My site is growing and shrinking at the same time. Facebook likes has increased from a dozen to almost 150 in the last month, there are legitimate fans posting comments and lots of user interaction with the content — even sharing it (5–10 average FB shares per post, plus Stumble & Twitter). Yet, somehow, my daily visitors is dropping. I suspect it has something to do with not having a steady influx of new eyeballs on the content (I was lucky to write a few guest posts for fair sized sites early on), but I can only approach so many people to do guest posts every month, and I can only spend so much time finding related sites to interact with/reach out to. I know that growth takes time, but I do not like seeing any stat trend downward. Given that my content/site seems “proven” to retain readers, how would you recommend I proceed with my growth?

- Zane Claes, Life By Experimentation

Hey Zane!

This honestly doesn’t sound like something I’d worry about too much. In my experience, there just tend to be down months. I’d only worry if this continues for a long period of time (say 3 to 6 months). However, to curb the trend I have a few suggestions:

• Though you have a limited amount of time for them, more guest posts will definitely help you reach a new audience. You might want to focus just on the biggest and the best, maybe trying to write another post for sites you’ve already written for.
• Form a mastermind group with likeminded, similarly-sized bloggers. The purpose will be to promote each others stuff and to share growth advice. It’s definitely easier to grow a blog if other people are involved.
• Connect with the influencers in your niche. Talk to them and be as helpful as possible. You might gain a mentor or be given opportunities you might not otherwise be given. At the very least, something as simple as an influencer tweeting out your post could put thousands of new eyeballs in front of your site.
• Start a newsletter with a freebie. If monetization is your goal, collecting email addresses will make things easier in the future anyway. Create a freebie that is so remarkable it markets itself.

Those are just a few things you can do. If you want to know my honest opinion, you are in the best possible position right now. Of course you don’t want your blog to stagnate, but you seem to have a devoted following. Devoted followings trust you, love you, read everything you write. They are true fans and true fans are the ones who trust you enough to spend money on you and to spread your message.

You might not have attracted the number of people you want to, but you have attracted a very concentrated group of the RIGHT people. Yesterday, I received an influx of visitors from Hacker News. About 5500 compared to my average 150 to 250 daily visitors. These people visited one page on average and stayed for about 11 seconds. They weren’t very highly engaged.

I have a hierarchy of what I want visitors to do when they get to this site:

1. Subscribe to the email list
2. Contact me via the contact form
3. Like the page on Facebook
4. Follow me on Twitter
5. Share articles
6. Subscribe via RSS

Of these, only a few of that 5500 did either of the top two, none did 3 or 4. Those are the most important actions my visitors can take. I got a higher number of Facebook and Twitter shares than usual and I doubled my RSS readers, but that doesn’t mean much to me.

The point is, large audiences don’t necessarily mean a better blog, so losing daily visitors isn’t a huge issue as long as the ones you have are engaged and dedicated. You’re in a great position and you’re only going to grow from here, even if it does turn out to be a slow process (which I doubt it will be.)

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