The biggest reason anybody has for blogging is that we want subscribers.

Sure, you write for yourself to overcome problems in your life or you write for profits or you write because you have a genuine passion for the topic. You write for all these things. But the underlying fact here is that you want people to read and appreciate your work.

This story is my little case study of how not to build a community of loyal followers. Here goes…

From 0 to 2,500 in 3 Months

Way back in January 2008 I launched a site which was geared towards the FHM, Maxim type crowd. I wanted to take the articles from those magazines, things like how to be a pool hustler and advice on tipping waiters, remove them from all the breasts and gratuitous nudity and create something unique and informative.

So I wrote.

I wrote and I wrote and I created a hefty amount of content. I was publishing 4 articles a week and each one was 2000+ words in length.

Imagine my surprise when I didn’t get any traffic. Nada.

My initial tactic was to get my comments noticed on other blogs in my niche so that readers could find me that way and I did get a trickle of traffic and maybe 20 or 30 subscribers from that.

At this time I was not engaging in any kind of social media so that meant no tweets, no stumbles and no Facebook sharing. That all changed when I found Digg.

A competitor in my niche seemed to be on the front page of Digg on a daily basis and his site was crashing regularly because the traffic was so vast. Oh how I would have killed to have my server crash while serving 10,000 visitors in the space of an hour!

So I did what any novice blogger would do. I added 500 friends to Digg, some of them big influencers, and I effectively spammed them with my articles and asked for a Digg in return for me digging their stuff.

I wish I had the stats available to show you how much traffic I got, but the crux of it is this: in January, and with no search engine traffic, I had over 300,000 unique visitors to my site and just over 1,000 subscribers to my feed.

Comments were coming thick and fast with a couple of articles getting anywhere from 400-600 comments. I was living the young bloggers dream and everything was peachy.

What do you do when your #1 traffic source cuts you off?

The problem with putting all your eggs in one basket is that when you drop it, you’re left with yolk all over you and don’t get that omelette you were lusting over.

In my quest for hundreds of thousands of readers, I lost sight of the big picture. I wanted to make my fortune from Google Adsense and Digg traffic. Rookie mistake.

The articles started to become more and more self serving. I was writing my articles purely for Digg. Eye catching headlines were the order of the day followed by a healthy side of spam. The content was junk and it wasn’t what I was truly passionate about but I was getting unheard of traffic and couldn’t stop! 3+ Digg front pages a week can do that to you.

Then, at my peak, with just over 2,500 subscribers and an average of over 400,000 visitors a month – I was blacklisted from Digg in March.

Traffic crashed, comments slowed down to a crawl and subscribers seemed to be dropping at an alarming rate. I had no plan B, no skill, and no experience on how to deal with the situation.

So I did what any dumb rookie would do in that situation – I sold the site. (Okay so I did earn “a penny”, but the amount I sold it for wasn’t in correlation with all the effort and hard work I’d put in up until that point.)

And that was my chaotic, explosive, most successful, most disastrous, eye opening and first experience with blogging.

Did I learn from my mistakes?

There are three main things I learned from that journey that helped me to become a better blogger and a better person:

• Traffic is not made equal. If you try to please everybody, you end pleasing nobody. Be selective about the type of people you want to read and subscribe to your blog if you want a loyal following. I had lots of visits and subscribers, but I had zero influence over any of them.
• Trying to use Google Adsense and banner ads for Digg readers is not a good business model. Digg readers have major ad blindness anyway and my awful CTR is a testament to that. Offering real value to people that care about what you do is the best way to build a long term, sustainable business.
• Writing for yourself is of paramount importance. People say you need to write for your audience. I say that if you have selected your audience properly then writing for yourself is one in the same. Like minded connections will make blogging feel a lot less like work and if you write about what you love, you’ll stick it out during the tough times.

So there you have it.

I went from 0-2,500 subscribers in 3 months, had over 1,000,000 visitors during that time, wrote a lot of articles I did not care about at all, got abused by the lovely Digg crowd and sold the site for a stupidly low amount just to get rid of it. (The guy that bought it also introduced me to the world of site flipping when he sold it immediately afterward for 5 times the amount he paid for it. Fair play!)

Group Discussion

What is your worst blogging experience? Do you have a story equally as chaotic and explosive as mine? If so, what did you learn from the situation?