My Blog = My Life: followers

Today, let's talk about your blog numbers and what they actually mean.

How many blog followers do you have? 5? 10? 20? 100? 1,000? 50,000?

Sometimes, especially when starting out, it's easy to get discouraged or feel like your own follower count is insignificant when comparing it to other blogs. Here on WW4F, I keep hearing the comment "I only have x number of followers."

From here on out, no matter what the number, let's all make a conscious effort to change that to "I have x number of followers!" Be excited about it. Be thrilled! After all, it's amazing.

I remember what it was like when Single Dad Laughing was still fairly new and people were just beginning to find it; specifically, I remember when the first person who wasn't a family member or friend started following.
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Today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Losing blog followers is a part of blogging, and it’s going to happen to you. A lot. Don’t get frustrated about it and don’t panic when it happens.
It’s called attrition.
There is no doubt that most bloggers work hard to gain a following. Almost every blogger who's trying to build a following watches their subscriber and follower counts on a daily (or hourly, or minutely) basis, no matter how big their blog gets. They know when new people follow and they know when their numbers drop.
I remember when I started Single Dad Laughing and my Facebook Page still had around 200 followers. I remember watching that number, excited every time it went up one or two, and I remember how devastated I was the couple of times that I saw it drop one or two. I took it personally, wondering what I did that drove those people away, wondering what I did that wasn’t good enough for them, and wondering if there was any way to get them back. I spent a lot of time worrying about it, tracking down people who I noticed stopped following, and asking them for feedback to gain insight, etc. It took a while for me to realize that some people just stop following, and there’s nothing I can do about it, there’s nothing I necessarily did wrong, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening in the future.
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One of the questions I'm most commonly asked by bloggers is, how do I convert blog visitors into blog followers? How do I get people who come to my blog to subscribe via RSS or some other method while they're there? How do I get people to stick around?

While there is no magic formula, there are a few things you can do to increase your conversion rate (the number of people who subscribe to your blog after visiting you).

First, I must emphasize one incredibly important point. You really can't trick people into following your blog. People will not follow unless your content is good. And not just good, but consistently good. Generally, people who are visiting a blog for the first time, don't just follow after reading one post. They peruse a little bit. They make their way around to see if they want to follow or if they already found the only good thing you've ever put out.

In other words, if you are having an overly difficult time getting your visitors to follow, you may want to look at your content. Are you being to flowery or self-absorbed (I'll talk about that in the next post)? Are you boring people out the door? Are you being so diplomatic to all people in the world that nobody can actually connect with you? If any of these are you, take a step back, examine, and then mix things up. Get a little more risky. Be a little more simplistic in your approach. Do what you've gotta do to start getting those conversions to your blog.

So, with that being said, here are five tips for turning blog visitors into blog followers.
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The number one question of almost all bloggers (and a big one I get asked a lot lately) is, how do I get more followers? Nobody really knows how many blogs are in the world, but I've read "current" numbers starting at 50,000,000 and even as high as 150,000,000. Whatever the number, that's a lot of zeros to compete with.

Picture a bookshelf, twenty miles wide and twelve feet tall, crammed with people's personal journals and memoirs. You just added yours to the very middle of it, and now you're standing on the sidelines with 150,000,000 other people, watching lookie-loos choosing one here, choosing one there, just hoping that they'll stop and choose yours.

Kind of interesting to think of it that way, isn't it? Here's the thing. You can stand out from the crowd. It is possible.
When I started Single Dad Laughing, I looked up lots of websites which all claimed to know the tricks of building a blog quickly. Aside from the fact that many of them contradicted each other, I tried to implement as many of their common suggestions as possible here at SDL. Some of them were effective, some weren't. They did, however, seem to all pitch the same three common rules to blogging (if your goal is to attract a following).
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