I wish someone had said something like this to be in the early days of my blogging:
“Many bloggers seem to be on a perpetual hunt for the front page of Digg. Sure, it brings you hordes of eyeballs, but then they turn around and leave. What’s the point of that, really?
I think that are plenty of tips you can follow to optimize your offering for this fickle mass group. But it’s still a crap shoot. Doesn’t it make more sense to incrementally earn the attention of a smaller, less glitzy but far more valuable group of people who actually engage with you? And the best part is, your odds of success are a lot better.”
Source – Seth Godin’s Blog.
I love what Seth’s said in this post. There’s a lot of wisdom in it.
However I’m not sure I’d throw out traffic from a site like Digg completely. I’ve written on this theme in Being ‘Discovered’ vs ‘Slow and Steady’ Blog Growth. In that post I recounted the story of three blogs that I’ve started and how each had a different way of growing (some grew one reader at a time and others on the back of waves from social bookmarking sites).
My conclusion in that post was to look for the opportunities to draw large amounts of traffic into your blog – but not to become obsessed by it and in the process ignore the smaller everyday tasks like building community, writing content that engages the needs of readers and networking with other smaller bloggers in your niche.
