Q&A Friday #8: How Long Did It Take To Build An Audience?

by John Hawkins | December 3, 2004 4:59 pm

Question: “How long did it take before Right Wing News built a decent blog audience? As a new blogger, can you give any advice for “sticking with it” even though it seems as though the masses remain elusive?” — PunditGuy[1]

Answer: This is either going to be a very encouraging answer (for bloggers wondering if they should have already been successful) or very depressing (for bloggers who want thousands of people reading their blogs yesterday), but it takes a long, long, time to build your audience.

Like I’ve said before[2],

“Remember that you will have to be very, very, good, for a very, very, long time, while working very, very, hard to promote your work and you will be very, very, underappreciated the whole time.”

Just to show you that I’m not kidding about this, I decided to try to piece together how RWN’s traffic has grown since I started the blog. Do keep in mind, that this may not be perfectly accurate because I’m putting this together largely from memory, but here’s what I came up with…

November 2000: I decide to start a political blog.
January 1 2001 (I think): RWN starts up
August 2001: 300 daily uniques per day (*** I switched formats at this point ***)
November 2001: 1000 daily uniques per day
November 2002: 3000 daily uniques per day
November 2003: 5000 daily uniques per day
July 2004: 6500 daily uniques per day
November 2004: 10,000 daily uniques per day
December 2004: 8,000 daily uniques per day

As you can see, it has been a long, slow, climb and I think that’s fairly typical. Sure, there are some blogs that have hada rapid, meteoric rise to the top, but they’re the exceptions, not the rule. Most of the blogs with decent traffic have followed the “very very rule” mentioned above to build their audiences over time.

In truth, what it really comes down to for most people is that you have to like blogging so much that you’ll happily work like a dog, day after day, week after week, year after year, in order to get to the point where you can build a big audience….and that’s if you have the talent.

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/qa-friday-8-how-long-did-it-take-to-build-an-audience/

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