I see a lot of stuff on the Internet that suggest there exists a magic bullet¹ to growing a blog audience. I don’t know if any of those magic bullets work, but I have decided to share my secret for growing the audience on this blog. Here it is:

Try hard to write consistently good content for a really long time.

I think the last part will turn some people off. I started this blog back in November 2005, which mean, for me, “a really long time” is about 9 years. Of course, “consistently good content” is entirely subjective, but I think it is an important ingredient to the success of a blog. I begin with “try” because I had no idea what I was doing when I started out, and to some extent, I’m still winging it.

This is no different than the secret to selling stories: write really good stories and submit them to the best markets out there. When you get rejections, learn from them and try to do a better job next time.

I suppose there are other ways of growing your blog audience, faster ways, but I don’t know if they result in the same high quality audience that visits this blog every day. In any case, I’m pretty happy with my results. Your mileage may vary.