The Challenge That Every Blogger Faces

Picture by Matthew Bowden

You are reading these words for one of three reasons:

1. You are a blogger and you can’t help but click on a post about the challenge that every blogger faces.
2. You are a blogger and you hope that I am going to provide you with the solution to that aforementioned challenge.
3. You are originally from cleveland and can’t help but come listen to me bash your hometown.

Or alternatively you love my writing and can’t wait to tell me that you are going to do everything in your power to see that I am given the notoriety you know that I am due. In any case it doesn’t matter to me because I am grateful that you are here and am going to ask you to stick around because things are about to get even more interesting.

There is a writer named Chuck who should be a friend of mine, but isn’t. Not because he doesn’t like me but because he doesn’t know me. Ah hell, if he knew me he still might not be my friend in which case I’d have to accuse him of having no taste. Or is that because he has taste. Hell if I know.

So Chuck wrote a great post called Twenty five Lies Writers Tell (And Start To Believe) that is worth reading more than once. But for the purposes of this post we are going to focus in line item number 9 in which he says that we don’t write for ourselves, we write for others.

He is write, I mean right.  Many if not most of us hope to grow our blogs and turn them into something more than they are. Quite a few of us hope to use them to become published authors of books, public speakers and or find other ways to monetize them.

When Opportunity knocks I'll see it.

Self Promotion- The Challenge That Every Blogger Faces

That means that Self Promotion is The Challenge That Every Blogger Faces. Yep, we all have to figure out how to let the people know that we are out here because if they only knew that our blog would be the solution to their problem they would pay real money to read it. If only three million people were willing to pay a dollar a month for this material I’d be a very happy man.

But they don’t know I am here. Oh sure, the 17 long time readers do. They have been hanging with me for 8 years and I have been damn lucky to meet/pickup a bunch of others along the way-but you are not enough.

Or are you.

Hell, I want you to feel valued and appreciated. You could be enough. One of you lurkers could be the person who has the ability and or connection to make my blogging dreams come true, or maybe not.

Since we haven’t connected I have to believe that I need to continue to work on growing my blog. There are lots of ways of doing that, some of which I hate. In theory I could  write, beg, plead and or command you to do what you can to make Babble crown me one of the world’s best Dad bloggers.

In conjunction with that I could try to become a speaker at one or more of the blogging conferences. Dad 2.0, Mom 2.0, BlogHer, BlogWorld, Jack’s World- damn I could be the keynote at any or all of them. Damn, I hope that I would be a part of the problem with blogging conference speakers.

Enough About Me What About You

Someone tell the guy in the back row to stop heckling me or I am going to defenestrate him myself. The reason I can write about me is that these words also apply to you. When I look at my efforts to promote my blog I see myself walking a fine line between being cool and a douchebag. I try not to make every comment about me or to always include a link to my blog.

I try to balance the output of links and broadcast messages on Twitter, G+ and Facebook. Ideally everyone should feel like there is a two way conversation going on and not just some father screaming “LOOK AT ME.”

But it is not easy.

Sometimes I think that I have made a mistake by not building a newsletter list or doing more to get people to subscribe to the blog.  Instead I have tried to rely upon a more organic process of building this joint. It is not an exaggeration to say that I am building a more dedicated and devoted readership this way, but I would be lying if I said that I haven’t wanted to make it go faster.

So let’s turn the floor over to you. What do you have to say about all this? Would you like to see things change here?  If you are a blogger what do you do to promote your blog? What do you think about all this?

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