Why You Only Need 3 People to Read Your Blog

Is your definition of blogging success stuck in a high traffic concept? Do you believe your blog needs millions of page views, bazillions of visitors, or an enormous subscriber count before you can call your blogging worth the effort? Is your idea of making money or making an impact on other people with your blog too narrow?

Maybe you’re mythologizing the wrong marketing plan — comparing yourself to high traffic blogs with advertising / click-thru monetization, looking at your piddly, trickling Google Adsense pay-out and thinking you’ll never Get There. Get your head out of your traffic logs and open yourself up to a broader range of incredible possibilities.

If you’re a new blogger, or still struggling to gain more visibility and attention, and beating yourself up about little numbers, it’s time you stepped back from the obsession with quantity.

I want to share with you why and how three readers, or five — or even just ONE — can result in a new definition of blogging success.

In the past six weeks I’ve been asked to read manuscripts by three different first-time authors of subjects within the Self-Improvement / New Age / Spirituality / Inspiration / Religion markets. One of these authors is already in contract negotiation with Hay House — her editor immediately started hounding her about getting a blog, like, YESTERDAY.

Three first-time visitors to Shift Your Spirits resulted in:

• Two months of consulting income
• Three PageCoach Problogging ebook sales
• Two advance sales of my PageCoach PDF tutorial (which hasn’t even been released yet)
• One $4000 full blog development project
• Three Red Pen manuscript reading/editing fees
• The opportunity for little ol’ me to work on a commercial project with a future Hay House author (THAT connection is absolutely PRICELESS)

These authors were not longtime subscribers to Shift Your Spirits, none of them has ever left a public comment on any of my articles, and they didn’t find me because of Technorati ranking or because I hounded them for the work.

They simply admired the quality of my writing, but were more impressed with the behind-the-screens potential of accomplishing something similar with a subscriber-based blogging strategy.

I mention my Red Pen professional service because it’s a perfect example of an indirect, off-line way in which my blog Shift Your Spirits generates opportunities and income that are completely independent of traffic/advertising monetization or even the size of a subscriber list.

You don’t need high traffic to monetize your blog. ONE reader — if it’s the right one — can make all your efforts worth it. It’s impossible to predict the details of how this may manifest — so don’t. Focus on the message you’re putting out there, listen carefully to what others ask of you, and be prepared to participate when the opportunity presents itself.

My PageCoach Red Pen and Blog Consulting service is not even something I’ve emblazoned across a banner ad, or jumped up and down shouting about — all three of these authors approached me for advice simply because they were impressed with my content and saw themselves and their self-publishing goals reflected in my work. The lesson I learned from this greatly impacted my decision to abandon four years worth of a web consulting practice that was drifting away from the direction my career was taking, to reel it back in and re-focus.

I was anxious about losing my income and finding myself back in a starving writer mode. This experience has shown me a new way to share my vision and fulfill my overall mission — by empowering and serving others.

This also changes my perspective on what you can do with a blog — I’m relaxing my expectations, and opening myself to a broader definition of success. I hope that by sharing this, you will give your blog a similar break, and continue blogging, encouraged.

Two of the authors I’m working with are local — which means they approached me live, in person, in the wi-fi cafe where I often take my laptop for a healthy change of scenery. NOT online, NOT via email, NOT through comments – yet still as a direct result of discovering my blog.

In a few of my earliest posts, I casually mentioned the Stone Cup Roasting Company, Chattanooga, as being my favorite local wi-fi nomad haunting grounds… The search engines indexed that tiny detail (hardly a keyword I was focused on) and these authors found me because of it — they found even more when they explored my site — and they both came looking for me in my native habitat.

Note how such a simple, specific detail included in what you share on your blog can lead to an enormous opportunity you could never predict. This is a perfect lesson in Manifesting — focusing on the What and not the How. One of these authors, after seeing me tip-tap-typing away day after day, came over to my table and asked what I was working on.

I learned a few years ago that, while working from home has many advantages, it is entirely devoid of the social aspects of the workplace. You can’t network while stuck deep in your cloistered cell. You don’t have to go around hungry-eyed and constantly on the prowl for the attention you hope to draw to your business or your mission, you don’t have to force business cards on everyone who says hello, you don’t have to cold call and send out boxes of resumes — you MUST come down out of the Ivory Tower of your creative trance and put yourself in the Flow.

Simply by doing what you do, sharing what you have to share, and being open to possibility, you manifest meaningful connections that don’t require you to hard-sell yourself, online or off.

I continue to be amazed at the passive power of taking genuine action — making my life transparent and available — from a place of integrity. I bet when you think blog traffic, visibility, audience, clients, prospects, opportunity, mission — even a great job offer — you’re not thinking about how exactly what you most hope to achieve by marketing your work online with a blog might actually manifest in an offline package.

Within only six months after starting my blog Shift Your Spirits, I was also approached three times by editors asking me to submit writing for publications and projects I’d never heard of, let alone could have known to pursue. Most authors (myself included) assume that to get someone else interested in publishing your work you have to steel yourself for reams of rejection letters; or that you must at least send off query letters and manuscripts to every agent and editor you can find contact information for in some voluminous Writer’s Market List.

An invitation from an editor who has already discovered your blog, explored your work, and knows exactly why your style, voice, and subject matter is perfect for her publication is sheer heaven compared to the old school route that features begging for attention, clamoring for visibility, and growing a thicker skin as a way to “prepare” for putting your writing out there…

You don’t necessarily have to do the leg work; you don’t always have to micromanage the complete path your work will take to find a home — this is another way blogging becomes the most authentic, straight-forward weapon for a writer, in addition to the pen and the sword.

Blog with focus and intention — and you’ve heard this advice before from a million blog marketing strategists — create valuable, audience-driven, key-word rich original content and the Rest will follow.

Whatever your mission is, wrap it in your words and put it out there, over and over again, in original articles that can’t be found anywhere else, and watch how that simple action grows in power. Don’t get caught up in micromanaging the How, or thinking you need a million page views to make a difference — or make a buck.

If the three authors who hired me to Red Pen their manuscripts were the only three people who had ever discovered my blog… So what? It would’ve been the right three — all that was needed to produce fantastic connections and results for everyone involved.

If only ONE person subscribes to your blog and finds value in what you offer — forget quantities — and see how quality can manifest abundance in ways you might never have imagined. You never know who you may reach, how you may impact your own life and the lives of others, and the form that karmic gift will take when it is reflected back to you.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.