New Blog Milestone: 10,000 Subscribers Reached
I have just reached a new milestone for my Blog.
As my Feedburner chicklet 
shows this morning, my Blog RSS / Email subscriber count has now finally gone over 10,000 people.
Driving home from lunch today I was thinking about the early days of my Blog when I only had a few dozen readers. When I mentor people in building Blogs I call those the “empty room syndrome” days.
The reason I call it that is because most of the time you write Blog posts and it feels like you’re talking to an empty room because in most cases you get very little comments when first starting out.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that 99% of people who read Blogs don’t leave comments. That doesn’t mean they’re not reading your content, it just means they’re either too shy or too lazy to leave comments.
In the beginning it’s so disheartening to spend a few hours writing a post, publish it and then get no feedback or comments from people.
Statistically speaking, my Blog gets about 6.9 comments per post I write now but in the beginning that number was much lower.
This feeling as if you’re speaking to an empty room is one of the biggest psychological reasons that people abandon their Blogs in my opinion. I try to teach my mentoring students to expect that to happen, so that they don’t get depressed.
One mistake that many new Bloggers make is writing a Blog post, publishing it, not getting any comments on it, and then assuming that the reason for getting no comments is because their content sucks. That is almost never the case. The reason most new Bloggers don’t get any comments is because they don’t have a large enough audience yet.
If you only have 10 or even 100 people subscribed to your Blog you may not be getting ANY comments yet, but that doesn’t mean that the people reading your content don’t like it. I have met people who have read my Blog for over 3 years who have never left a single comment, but they read every single post and really enjoy reading them.
So if you’re just getting started, don’t worry if you’re not getting a lot of comments at first. Focus on creating great content and build your email list from day one.
Where My Traffic Comes From
Another huge mistake I see a lot of new Bloggers making today is wasting way too much of their time on “Social Media”.
Many people waste so much of their precious “after work” time on sites like Facebook and Twitter, instead of investing time into developing content for their own Blog / Business.
It boggles my mind how people say that they don’t have the time to write Blog posts, or to create content, yet I see hundreds of updates from them on Facebook.
If you want to build a successful Blog, don’t waste your time on Facebook. Instead of posting dozens of snippet-sized mini messages on Facebook, organize your thoughts and write a Blog post that delivers value to your niche market, publish it on your own Blog and then just put a link to it on your Facebook profile.
There is a massive overabundance of snippet sized pieces of mostly JUNK information on Facebook and Twitter. Honestly, it’s mostly all just noise at this point and nobody really gives it any attention.
Everything you write on Facebook just disappears into the abyss after a short while anyways and you don’t even own your own content on there.
In the last few weeks I had a conversation with several people about building an audience using Facebook versus using a Blog with an email list. They made mention to the fact that they like Facebook because they make “friends” on there by clicking on the “Add Friend” button and many times people will “friend” them back.
One person told me they were adding an average of 3 new “friends” to their Facebook friend list every week. This is based on spending 1-3 hours per day on Facebook commenting on people’s photo’s, status updates etc.
I told them that as far as building an audience is concerned, I thought that was a waste of time.
They disagreed, until I logged into my AWeber account, and showed them a screen shot of how many new subscribers I added to my email list in January 2011.
The number is 1,027.
That is 1,027 new email addresses were added to my email list in January 2011 alone – all on auto-pilot. Now, not everyone sticks. About 30% of people eventually unsubscribe after downloading the “ethical bribe” I send them, but that is still about 700 new people added to my email list in one month.
In my opinion, I think Facebook is largely a waste of time as far as building your following / subscribers base or marketing your Blog.
I heard another person the other day saying “Facebook has completely destroyed Google. Google is pretty much dead now.”
What a pile of crap.
Google is still, by far the single biggest source of free traffic out there, especially for Blogs.
In the last year here are my traffic stats from Google, Facebook and Twitter. Meaning, here is the number of visitors that I have gotten to this Blog from these three sources:
Google = 165,603 visitors
Twitter = 675 visitors
Facebook = 718 visitors
I still get the majority of my traffic for free from Google, Bing and Yahoo. All the other social media sites are rather insignificant.
I’m not saying that those sites are useless or that they shouldn’t be used. What I’m saying though is that if you’re trying to build a Blog or an online business, and you’ve only got 2-3 hours every night to work on your business, don’t spend all that time on Facebook. It isn’t going to get you anywhere!
Focus on creating quality content. Blog posts. YouTube videos. And then post them on your Facebook / Twitter pages with a link to your Blog post where people can subscribe and leave comments.
Get Reviewed on This Blog
Another thing I quickly wanted to mention since I haven’t written about this for quite some time is that I am once again accepting paid reviews on my Blog.
My current rate is $250 for a paid review which pays for my time to research and write a review of your company’s product or service and present it to my readers.
Since I now have a readership of over 10,000 readers you’re getting massive, targeted exposure for just 2.5 cents per reader.
Please note that paying for a review does not in any way influence my review of your product. I write my reviews honestly based on my opinion of the product or service you offer, but in most cases if your product or service totally doesn’t resonate with me or I don’t consider it to match my audience’s needs I will not accept the product/service for review in the first place.
A paid review can be a great way to get exposure for you company/product and many times my reviews appear in the first page of Google when people search for reviews of your product or service.
To find out more, check out my advertise page.
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Paul, that is amazing, man!! Congrats on the continued success; especially on the growth of your AWeber list!
You’ve been writing excellent content, and continue to do so. Thanks for everything,
Josh Lipovetsky.
PS: I share your links in one of my online ‘classrooms’ at my school, and my friend said that he loves your site!
Josh Lipovetsky´s last post was… The Real Story Interview Series 1 – Tim Brownson
Hi Paul congratulation! Yes I thinnk Facebook is wast of time if you are promoting internet marketing niche or make money niche. I’ve niche blog and the traffic come from Facebook and it didn’t related to make money or internet marketing, the respond of my list is good.
semmy @ Make Money Online´s last post was… Private Lable Tips- Interview With Private Lable Prince Edmund Loh
Congratulations! You have 5x as many RSS subscribers as me!
Mine has plateaued over the past 2 years
I think your paid review price is very overpriced though due to your audience demographic. Most of your readers are in the personal development area, not the “make money online” crowd, so I think it is difficult for advertisers to pay $250 for a paid review due to that fact.
You should price based on demand. How many paid reviews do you get per month at your current price of $250? I haven’t seen many here. Why not lower your price and raise it when demand increases? I’m sure you’d make MORE money by lowering it and actually getting advertisers rather than raising it and getting none.
When I started, my Paid Reviews were at $35… even lower I think. I slowly increased that price over time based on demand.
Well there are a few different ways to look at something like this.
If someone wants to order a review on my site but the only reason they don’t order is because the investment price is too high, then I agree that lowering my price might entice more buyers with smaller budgets.
However, there are two other factors to consider. Firstly, I have no doubt that my reviews deliver much more than value than the $250 price I charge for companies who have products that my audience members are interested in. For example when I did a review of the DXA scan I went in for, the owner of that company told me he got a lot out of the extra exposure on my Blog and had no problem exchanging $300 worth of DXA scans for the review. The Live Blood Analysis review I did also resulted in new leads for that client. So I know my reviews are definitely worth the money.
Secondly, if reviews were the only thing that I made money from then maybe I would start with a lower price and work it upwards, but I have to factor my time into the equation. Meaning, it can take me a good 2-5 hours to complete a review from start to finish so if I was charging $35 for a review that would mean I would be only valuing my time at as little as $7/hour. If I had unlimited time on my hands, it may be a good place to start but I have many other projects where I already make way more than that per hour so by saying yes to $7/h I would be saying no to +$50/hour projects which wouldn’t be very smart.
Also, at low rates like that even if I didn’t have any other projects on the go I would rather invest that time into other more meaningful things than working for $7/hour – like playing Rock Band 3!
Being a Polymath I always have way more stuff to do than time to do it in, so I have to value my time accordingly. If a company doesn’t see $250 worth of value in a review from me, it is either because I didn’t communicate/market that value clearly enough or the offer simply hasn’t been presented to the right person.
One final note. If you read the book “Predictably Irrational” – Chapter 2 explains that the theory of “Supply and Demand” is pretty much totally false. He explains it in great detail and cites all the different studies they have done at Harvard which clearly show that the supply and demand theory doesn’t work.
I obviously felt that the 3 to sometimes 8-9 hours I would spend on paid reviews were not worth the $35-$40 I was charging, but I didn’t price it solely on demand. I wanted to show other potential advertisers how good my reviews were, and whenever I posted a paid review, I was basically pitching them to other advertisers.
Then there are other perks such as the fact that most of my advertisers are repeat advertisers. Some of the advertisers who purchased paid reviews actually came back later and ordered another 2 a few months or a year later, and at my higher prices. I may never had gotten them if I didn’t have a lower entrance price.
When you overprice, you put a halt to all of that. You don’t build up a momentum and history of advertisers, you just alienate them all.
Also, you have 5x the amount of RSS and possibly traffic as me, but only a fraction of the blog income, so there must be SOMETHING that’s not right here.
Good points, I’ll take that into consideration. I’m going to try the scaled pricing method with the membership site I want to create.
Oh yeah, also relating to your “Plateau” on your site. If you create a Bribe of some sort, you’ll get way more subscribers to your email list. It’s good you finally put up a pop-up thingie, but i think a bribe would be even better.
Why not write a short report / eBook on YOUR point of view of making money online. I am sure lots of people would want to read it.
Another thing you could experiment with is reducing your Blog broadcast settings to send out an email more often. I think u have it set to 10 right now, and I would prefer to get an email more often – like either after every post or after every 3 posts. Waiting for 10 posts before being notified of a new post sucks, and then I almost always just read the first post on the list and ignore the other 9.
Just a thought.
Good suggestion on the blog broadcast. I originally set it to 10 because I didn’t want to overextend my welcome in people’s inbox’s. Then I started to really slow down on my post frequency, so the e-mail would only get sent out once a month or so!
Even though one of my goals in 2011 is to post more frequently (and I’ve been doing a great job so far, if I may say so), I agree that every 10 posts might be a little too long, so I just changed this to 5. Hopefully it doesn’t bother anyone… but it shouldn’t since that will be about one e-mail every 10-12 days.
Tyler Cruz´s last post was… Watson on Jeopardy- Conclusion
Hey Paul, congratulations! I’ve been a fan and been reading your blog since before you switched over to the new http://www.paulymath.com domain. That’s a huge milestone!
As to your other points, it’s so true, it sucks to spend 2-4 hours writing a value filled post and see 10 unique visitors and no comments. (Shhh. I’ve been approving spam that says “great post your a good writer, helped a lot”, and taking out the link lol – don’t know if this is good or not).
The good thing though, I’ve cut WAAAAYYYYY down on my TV and facebook since starting my blog.
You’re an inspiration!
Stephen Pendar´s last post was… How To Be Well Liked And Become Popular
LOL. I cut down on my TV watching so much that today I actually canceled my Cable because I realized that I haven’t watched any TV for almost a year. Meaning, I still watch movies and shows like Entourage etc. , but I never watch any more “normal” TV anymore. I don’t watch the news, and I don’t watch any sports teams, so there’s really no point paying for Cable.
I’d much rather invest the money into something more useful.
Wow, that’s really a great milestone! Congrats on getting over 10,000 subscribers!
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Congratulation paul for your new milestone for your new blog. Yeah, its one of the nice and informative post, thanks for your new ideas paul.
Kavya Hari´s last post was… IPage
Congratulations Paul, that’s a very high milestone indeed. Been reading your blog for a good many months now and always enjoy it very much.
Way to go Paul on your subscriber count! I know what you mean about the facebook traffic, and concentrating more on your blog. At the end of the day, you need your blog to have great content, and consistent as well, because without that you wont have an audience. Plus I find it hard to get the facebook people to get away from their facebook dependence and convert over to your own website.
-Jean