I had a conversation yesterday with someone who does a
small tech blog (I offered to put a link in this article,
but he prefers to remain anonymous). His problem: slow
growth. Not "no growth" - people are discovering his
blog and apparently at least a few must like it, because both his
overall visitors and RSS readers are growing.. but only by
a handful per month.

"If this were grass, it'd be a long time before the kids
could play on the lawn", he sighed. I know that feeling,
but just like grass, sometimes it's mostly brown dirt today
and tomorrow there's green fuzz everywhere.. if you've
done the right things, raked out the rocks, planted the seed
and watered when you were supposed to, all it takes is a little
sunshine and your lawn or your blog will grow..

I can attest to that: I've been publishing at this address
for over ten years and I've had periods where growth is very slow,
and then poof! up it goes in a big jump. And of course the
bigger you get, the bigger even "slow growth" is: I think of "slow"
now in much different terms than I did ten years ago. What is
now just "ordinary" would have been lightning growth back then.

What causes those big jumps? Usually it's that some bigger site
in your same niche discovers you and gives you a nice plug. Its readers
are people who are interested in what you write about, and some
percentage who follow the link like it well enough to keep coming
back on their own. That big site is your "sunshine" - it makes
the seed grow.

Yes, it is harder now than it was ten years ago. Back then there
were far fewer websites on any subject; the sheer volume of competition
for web eyeballs today is monstrous. It's obviously much harder
for your fledging site to get noticed. However, there is a flip side:
there are a lot more eyeballs. When I started publishing, most of
America still didn't have email, and if they did, they were likely
locked into a proprietary jail like Prodigy or early AOL: the Internet
didn't really exist for them. That started changing rapidly in the late
90's and today it's startling to find someone who isn't at least
aware of the Internet. You have a much larger potential audience
than we early adopters could ever have imagined.

At an earlier post entitled Late to the party, I had talked about this same subject, and
also mentioned that your competition often fades as quickly as it starts
up - these are "lawns" that got a bit of sunshine, grew quickly, but then
nobody took care of them so they died off. In fact, in that very post
I mentioned a tech site that had grown from nothing to two million hits
per month in just six months.. impressive, but if you look at them
now, they are aparently gone: no new posts since October of 2007. That
happens to a lot of blogs; people don't get the financial results they expected or run into "writer's block" and they fade away.. the grass dries up, the brown
dirt returns..

I can't guarantee that you will succeed if you just keep at it. As
I said at Raw volume vs. popularity, some if this is just luck: being
at the right place at the right time, having someone very big notice you,
hitting Digg or Stumbleupon at the right time.. but as Louis Pasteur said "Chance favors the prepared mind" - if you do give up, you have no chance of
success.

I have to go dig out some weeds now.. see you tomorrow.

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