I like how you put that:

All in all, I think intention, authenticity, friendship and kindness are important factors that contribute to the “success” of a blog. My definition of “success” may be different from many others, but it’s my blog so I get to define the perimeters.

That says it so well.

Hi J.D.

That’s an awesome amount of page views for a month. Your determination really set you on fire, didn’t it?

I’ve been on your “work” blog. What you write about is usually WAY over my head, but I do like your posts about everyday stuff. It can’t be easy to maintain two blogs and write consistently on both.

Hi Eric,

Thank you.

You’re right. Many bloggers don’t say how long it took them to get to where they are. With my (major) target audience being new bloggers, I want to share what happened to me. In some ways I think my blog grew even slower than most as I didn’t use SEO properly, didn’t comment very much, and didn’t understand social networking. It may have hurt my numbers, but my blog grows at a pace I can handle and adjust to. Overnight success would overwhelm me.

Yes, dig in for the long haul and you’ll do great.

I really appreciate you sharing this with us. I think too many bloggers keep this information a secret from the rest of us new comers. How are we to know what to expect without some real numbers and insight to gauge our growth and success.

I’m pushing 1 1/2 months at this point with my blog and things have been going very well. But there are certainly times when I look at those ‘top blogs’ and ask, “How the heck am I ever going to even come close to building a community of that magnitude?” And it’s not the numbers but the people and their feedback/insight/interaction that I look forward to as I build a stronger foundation. But it’s realizing that it can take much longer than we expect in the beginning, that helps us pace ourselves and dig in for the long haul.

I love your blog and the posts that you fill it with, but this one really helps out a lot! Eric.

My school has a lot of filters on the computers. It doesn’t allow students to do any social networking. Ironically we can read blogs there but we can’t comment on them.

I do have a private blog just for my class. I use it to give them instructions or links to follow every time we have computer lab time booked. It really works.

Thanks for your kind words.

Hi Everyone,

I won’t be posting an entry today on my blog so I can comb through these comments and implement some of your suggestions.

Thanks!

Chase March’s last blog post..Meet The Teacher BBQ

It lit a fire. I found the eye of the tiger.

I decided I would do a blogging “improvement sprint” and write with might for a month. It doubled my monthly views from 100k, to 200k and I shot near the top. I blogged daily and sometimes three times a day. It was a memorable month.

I think it was the passion and the focus. Normally I wrote about tech stuff, but for that month I wrote to change people’s lives.

J.D. Meier’s last blog post..Social Loafing

When I started my blog, I didn’t know about “techniques”. I just knew I wanted to share my little experiences and my little weird thoughts, and hopefully use that as a platform to connect with like-minded people — numbers and hits didn’t quite matter to me. I figured if I could even manage to get a few people who’d genuinely want to befriend me after reading all that jazz, that would have been worth its while.

I was already following a couple of blogs with good streams of comments, so it was easy for me to discover new sites that were aligned to my interests. I’d leave comments and it always made me happy when I saw replies to my comments. I told myself that if I ever get comments on my blog, I’d definitely want to make sure I reply them all.

Then I discovered StumbleUpon, and I started using that as my “filing system” for some of my favorite sites and articles. And then I made more friends there and got some traffic flowing. All good.

All in all, I think intention, authenticity, friendship and kindness are important factors that contribute to the “success” of a blog. My definition of “success” may be different from many others, but it’s my blog so I get to define the perimeters.

It’s always good to come here … the community here is just buzzing with goodness! And thanks for introducing Chase’s blog to us. I’ll be popping over in a while.

Irene | Light Beckons’s last blog post..Epiphanies From Freaking Out