Increase Your Pageviews by 1000%

Last year I started a lot of projects, launched a number of blogs and made plans to launch a number of others. Many of those plans were public and to the careful observer of the Sugarverse this year might look like a failure as I repeatedly put things on hiatus, changed direction, and disappeared for weeks on end.

Here’s what happened and how it taught me to make lemonade.

My plan was to build a network of blogs, I knew blogs grew fastest when they had a lot of posts, and I was crushingly aware I didn’t have the time to write 40-50 posts a day. The answer seemed obvious. Gather a team of talented volunteers and trade shares of the profits for their time. As long as blogs with more posts have more readers, more readers mean more pageviews and more pageviews meant more revenue, a bet on a fast growing blog looked like a no brainer. I’d give up a little profit and gain a team of people I couldn’t afford to pay, united in a desire to succeed with blogs they had a stake in. Trading a few months work for a successful network was a great deal for all of us.

Did you see my mistake? I’ll give you a clue - I’m a glass half full kind of guy.

If you guessed ‘a few months work’ stop gloating and pour yourself a drink. Naively, I asked for three months to turn a profit and should have asked for 12. A wise man would have asked for 18 and an accountant a full 24. Without dollars advertising or Googlebatics you have to be prepared for the long haul when building a site. Every reader is a relationship and relationships take time. When I promised a quick return I assigned myself the increasingly difficult task of motivating people who felt mislead and let down.

Meanwhile the growth that wasn’t happening fast enough required two sets of server upgrades to manage and all my time for weeks on end. The result was a system which costs thousands to maintain and which made profit sharing even harder to achieve than the steady growth suggested.

Personally, without the blogging income I’d predicted I spent more of my time on planes having lame conversations with celebutards, international conglomerates and other people interested in my fecal veneering ability. Every time I spent less time on the network things got worse and I had to fill the gaps with other jobs.

Finally, forced to slim things to the bone after losing most of my volunteers, I put off some of my own plans (e.g. podcasting), crunched the website statistics through Excel and went to work. I had no time for niceties, and simply focused on what I could show to be effective. It wasn’t pretty but I was confident it was right.

A graph of the year is the best way to see what happened:

Going from a team of 20 to one of less than five we managed to begin a 60 day cycle of doubling traffic which continues to this day. The ’secret’ is simple enough to put into a handful of bullet points.

5 keys to rapid growth

• Predict the worst - When working anyone (including yourself) find the people who’d do it for free and then tell them they’ll probably never see a dime They’ll be thrilled when you succeed, work hard until you do, and give you time to make smart mistakes.
• Change your mind - Sticking to a plan which isn’t working is a bad way to run a war and a worse way to run a website. Being prepared to admit you were wrong is a big step towards being right.
• Spread yourself thick - There’s only so much time you can devote to any project and the more projects you have the worse job you’ll do overall. Putting things in storage is better than letting them rot in the open air. Don’t be afraid to step back and regroup.
• Be patient - YouTube happened fast, as long as you discount its founders university education and prior careers at PayPal. Steady growth isn’t anything to be ashamed of and leads to all the same places. Let things progress organically and if you can’t accelerate them, enjoy the ride - you’re moving in the right direction.
• Watch your data - There are many ways to look at numbers but most people don’t get far beyond bar graphs. If you don’t look at your data in the right way you’ll miss what you should be seeing and any opportunity to learn from it. If there’s ‘nothing to see’, turn everything round and look again. Graphs with logarithmic scales are useful. Clusters on point graphs mean something. If you’re not sure where to turn you probably don’t need better data, just better ways of looking at it.

If I said I’d have predicted the last 6-8 months I’d be lying and if I said I had no regrets I’d be stupid. That said, it’s been the most interesting, most productive and most exciting year of my life. Sometimes ‘experience’ means taking your lumps and learning where you went wrong. I’m pretty experienced and learning from me is less painful than making my mistakes again. Good luck.