There’s an interesting thing about blogging and that is that it casts a shadow. Let me explain. Back in July I set myself a goal of getting 1000 website visitors to my blog in a single day. Check out my post “how to get 1000 website hits in one day without paying“.
At the time, I was getting on average around 200 hits on my website. So 1000 hits was a bit of a stretch for me. That’s what a goal should do though. A goal should motivate and inspire you to take actions which you previously were not taking! My goal definitely inspired me into action. I blogged much more than I would otherwise have done last month.
I didn’t quite hit 1000 hits though, in a single day. I got pretty close to it though hitting over 800 hits on many days. Checkout my stats below and you’ll see my goal definitely pushed up my traffic: (see also the importance of goal setting).
An Interesting Thing About Blogging
The thing is though, before I set my goal my traffic stats showed a much lower amount of daily traffic. When I set my goal, I was inspired to write more blog posts and to promote them (on social media) and share them every day with my list. I did this for about a month without fail.
Then a funny thing happened. I burned out and gave up! I got busy with other things and my blogging took a nose dive. However, what was interesting is that my traffic didn’t take the same nose dive as my activity did. In fact the opposite happened. My traffic kept going up! I posted a blog once a week or so, but nothing like the frenzied activity I was used to doing.
It’s now been 2 weeks since my last blog post which was aptly titled dealing with overwhelm! However, my traffic has remained fairly consistent and stuck over the 500 daily hits mark. Checkout the stats below:
An Interesting Thing About Blogging – The Shadow Effect
The “shadow” effect of blogging is the lagging activity which happens from the actions you’ve done previously. So, for example, when I write and share this post on social media, it might not get seen for a few days by some. So I might get a visitor from that social media share, but it doesn’t happen straight away. Also, I post my freshly published blogs to my email list. Well, someone on my email list might only read my post the next day, or the next week, or even a month later.
I’ve heard some subscribers tell me that they put the emails in a folder to look at at a later date.
When I share via my email autoresponder, there’s also an option to share the content with my social media business pages; which I do. So my posts get syndicated out to my Facebook pages, and other social media platforms such as X.com.
I also use a software called Revive Old Posts, which syndicates older content out to social media automatically.
All this activity leaves a shadow – a trailing digital footprint which can lead to later actions and visitors to my website. So, even though I stopped blogging for a couple of weeks after burnout, my traffic continues on.
The Tipping Point Of Blogging
I’ve written before about the tipping point in blogging. That’s where your cumulative efforts eventually “tip” your blog into the big time! The effects of SEO, continued blogging, promotion of posts, email list and your creeping results on the search engine results pages all factor in to your overall traffic. Eventually your previous efforts results in organic traffic which grows and grows culminating in a curve which grows exponentially:
However, there’s also the tipping point of the “wave” which reaches its peak and starts to fall away! I believe I may have reached this point, benefitting from the work I did over the last month or so. Ultimately the traffic will start to drop again, as it reaches the point where the “shadow” of my previous work has reached its limit.
Today my stats show nearly 500 website hits. Not bad for free and considering that I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks! However, if I continued to do nothing, I’m sure this would slowly drop over time.
Summary
An interesting thing about blogging is the shadow it casts and how your previous efforts culminate towards a rising “peak” of the traffic “wave”. Blogging has definitely taken much longer than I anticipated to get to the point of consistent traffic. Google is constantly changing their algorithm and this effects the organic traffic you may have earned previously.
We also have artificial intelligence now which is becoming almost unrecognisable from human content. That means blogging is getting more difficult! So if you want to make blogging work for you, I suggest picking a topic you’re wildly enthusiastic about so you can enjoy the process and so that you won’t get too unhappy when things don’t go according to plan. They undoubtedly won’t!
