The Secret To Growing Your Blog to It’s Potential

I recently had a blogger sidle up to me at a conference and ask me to share ‘the secret’ technique that would allow see their blog grow to it’s potential.

While the blogger was asking with tongue planted firmly in his cheek (he understood that there was no single thing that would transform his blog) I do sometimes wonder if some bloggers are looking for ‘the secret’.

The reality is that looking for a single technique to make your blog blog grow to its potential is as crazy as looking for a single technique to make your child grow to its potential.

Actually I like the analogy of children growing to their potential… lets go down that path for a moment.

I have 3 boys. They’re 2, 5 and 7.

They started small (of course). Here’s our 2 year old a few minutes after he was born.

He was little (although like all Rowses had a quite large head for his age).

I look back on that photo today and can barely believe that the 2 year old that runs around our house talking up a storm is the same person that I saw born just a couple of years ago.

I look at my 7 year old and am even more amazed at who he’s become already! He has grown so much – physically, emotionally, socially and so much more.

But how did he grow to become the 7 year old he is today?

The reality is that while it seems just yesterday that he was born, his growth has been little by little thing – every day since.

He certainly has had growth spurts where he’s shot up at a faster rate over a month than other months but he’s grown gradually and as a result of consistent feeding, exercise, sleep and nurturing.

As parents we can’t identify a single thing that has resulted in him reaching the point he’s at – it’s a result of small consistent and regular actions over time.

The same is true with your blog.

There’s nothing you can do that will suddenly make your blog reach its potential.

It will grow as you regularly add content, as you regularly look after the readers you have and grow community, as you regularly participate in places off your blog to find new readers and as you regularly nurture it by keeping its design and technical side up to date and working.

You will probably go through growth spurts where you see bursts of activity that results in growth in one way or another – but its what happens between the growth spurts that is just as important.

The key to success in blogging (and in many areas of life) is small but regular and consistent actions over a long period of time.

Tumblr Updates iOS App With Social Sharing

Days after it introduced its first mobile ads, Tumblr updated its iOS app to version 3.3.1, adding several important new features.

The new version lets users share posts via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as save content for later using Instapaper and Pocket. Also, users can now email an entire post and close a photo by flinging it up or down.

Other improvements include GIFs that now animate even while you scroll (works only on iPhone 4S or later and iPad 2 or later), and the "Following" list is now alphabetized and searchable.

Tumblr has recently been on an update spree. Besides introducing mobile ads, it launched a Windows Phone app and redesigned its Android app — all in the span of three weeks.

You can download the new Tumblr app at Apple's App Store.

Image courtesy of Tumblr

Tumblr Expecting To Be Profitable In 2013 After Introducing Mobile Advertising

The Vice President of Tumblr, Derek Gottfried, has announced that the popular microblogging site is expecting to make its first annual profit this year, after extending its web advertising model to mobile devices.

Tumblr currently hosts almost 100 million different blogs, both professional and personal, and registers around 15 billion impressions every month, according to statistics corporation Quantcast. Although currently not as popular as its web equivalent, Tumblr’s mobile app is closing the gap, having quadrupled its membership in the last six months.

Gottfried, who has previously expressed his disdain for traditional web advertising, has implemented a different advertising system on Tumblr: companies can pay Tumblr to promote their blogs and blog posts to wider audiences, but it is up to them to make the content original and interesting. The better the content, the more likely it will be that other Tumblr users repost adverts on their own blog or heart it (similar to a Facebook “Like”): the more users interact with the advertising, the wider it will spread.

Advertisers are not able to purchase ad space or use keywords on Tumblr, but the promoted blog post system, which costs just under “just under six figures” a pop according to Tumblr’s head of sales Lee Brown, can be very successful – success which is measured in the number of reposts and hearts posts receive. Brown also emphasised the uniqueness of Tumblr’s ad model:

We’re not bringing them a template or format to complete, we’re giving them a canvas. That takes a lot of time and a lot of thought […] Marketers have become accustomed to buying scale as opposed to earning it. We’re not really selling ads, we’re promoting their content.

Companies are advised to advertise on Tumblr subtly, creating content that will spread through the site organically. Coca Cola’s “Happiness Is” Tumblr blog, for example, which features images and gifs similar to those most popular on the site, has promoted Coca Cola without the need for blatant branding.

The advertising model has been so successful and lucrative on the web that it is now being introduced to mobile devices, a move which Brown expects will lead to profits. Tumblr has already tested mobile advertising behind closed doors, tests which thus far have been successful, and is now opening the service up to companies who want to use it.

Have you seen any advertising on Tumblr? Did you like it?

"Tumblr" now a more popular Google search than "blog"

“Tumblr” has surpassed “blog” as one of the most searched terms on Google.

Tumblr overtook blog in December for the first time since the microblog network was started in February 2007, tweeted Laura Olin, Outbound social media director.

According to Google's search stats, the word “blog” has been on a decline since May 2009, which is around the same time Twitter became the third highest ranked social network according to visits. (Tumblr was not ranked in the top 25 at this time.)

The decline of the traditional blog was foreshadowed in June 2009 by The Guardian's Charles Arthur in a story aptly titled "The Long Tail of Blogging is Dying."
"Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting," Arthur wrote. "People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude."

In November 2012, Tumblr became one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world, with an audience of about 170 million people per month, according to statistics from Quantcast. The network also collects about 20 billion pageviews per month, Tumblr founder David Karp announced.

“This isn’t meant to be a brag – though you should definitely try our new Android and iOS apps if you haven’t yet – but a credit to all of your brilliant creative efforts,” Karp wrote in a blog post. "You guys have earned an audience bigger than the biggest TV networks, and you continue to make some of the most thought provoking, insightful, inspiring, funny, diverse, and compelling content being created today.”

The word blog was coined by Peter Merholz in 1999. Thanks to early blogging networks like LiveJournal and Blogger, blogs became known for their "raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality," the Economist reported in 2006. The sudden rise of blogging may have also been its downfall, the New York Times reported in June 2009.

"According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days,'" The Times added. "That translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled."

Thanks to streamlined blogging networks like Wordpress, which powers about 22% of websites in the U.S., the traditional blogging model is certainly not going anywhere fast. But with Tumblr powering 87 million blogs, and growing, Wordpress' days of dominance may be numbered.

Image courtesy of Flickr, jessaax