A guy wakes up in an unfamiliar hotel room, laying in a bathtub partially filled with ice, and a terrible pain in his lower back.
He’s rushed to the emergency room, only to find that one of his kidneys has been surgically removed–apparently without his knowledge and presumably for illicit sale on the black market.
I’m sure many of us have heard some variation of this chilling tale via a ‘friend of a friend’ which has been propagated by thousands of people, but with dubious conformity to any facts.
An urban legend, or more accurately, a contemporary legend, is a kind of folklore that gets passed around in third, fourth or fifth hand accounts, modifying as it circulates and accruing credibility (at least by some listeners) as it spreads.
Some well-known ‘truths’ about building a blog audience are like urban legends.
If they go unchallenged, the truth becomes ambiguous, or worse, these inaccurate concepts become the conventional wisdom of the day, passed as fact from one rookie blogger to the next.
Let’s dispel some of these non-truths, so that you can begin to build a blog audience without folklore getting in the way.
Myths of Building a Blog Audience (and Some Truths You Should Follow Instead)
1. If You Build it They Will Come
There are well over 164 million blogs online, and that number is growing daily. Can you even fathom the statistical odds of your sparkly new blog being found online? The odds of someone reading one of your posts? To the end? And actually taking the time to leave a comment?!
It’s staggering. Yet many writers pound out a few blog posts and then wonder–impatiently–why their posts aren’t being shared wildly and their comment section has only one comment:
“Great job, Honey! Love, Mom xoxo”
Even great content needs distribution. And sharing your posts with the few followers you’ve managed to scrape together on your social media accounts doesn’t really count. [Read more…]