Learn how I grew my blog readership by 1000% on a $20 budget

With this as your challenge – what do you do:

Pick a colleague’s post, and explain why you chose that one. Outline a plan for the post to get 1,000+ views. Imagine that you have a US $20 budget to work with.

You resort to crazy tactics surely? Like creating click bait worthy blog titles! If I could re-engineer a colleagues post, I would change the title to that: Learn how I grew my blog readership by 1000% on a $20 budget and then try and promote that article in as many free places as I could.

But then, I suppose that is essentially what we should be doing if you want to grow your readership to your blog in general – create content that is click worthy.

Of course, its important to define what is click worthy as you may get an immediate flood of readers with a article title like that, but unless you actually have relevant and interesting content, that 1000+ views is only going to last as long as one blog post and then it will dissappear as fast as it appeared – and I think, to me at least, that is where the key to this exercise lies. You can promote something as much as you want – but unless you are promoting relevant content to the right audience, you will just end up getting frustrated and give up.

If I had to look at this challenge in that context, I would look for the article that I felt would or could have the most impact based on what I am aware people are interested in reading about right now, and then look to find the best possible free channel to promote this article though – so rather than try use my $20 to promote my post, I rather look to suggest the article to various sites/services that curate content around a specific subject matter – which in this specific case may be something like: https://sidebar.io/

If I was picking an article to share with that audience it would probably be this one about running and effective remote design team. I know that in this case, Sidebar themselves are looking for good content to share – and you can freely submit things to them (you can sponsor a link too – but that way exceeds the $20 budget) – if it was accepted – this article would go out to around 40k subscribers, get around ~1.5k uniques views on the day it appeared on the homepage of Sidebar and also be promoted to their  22k Twitter followers and/or Facebook audience (2.3k likes).

I may also go so far as to adjust the articles title to something more like:

• Lessons learnt running effective remote design teams (before remote work became so trendy)

as a first stab, I am sure there are even better versions than that first take.

Now that, in and of itself may or may not get the intended 1000+ views, but the knock on effect of people sharing the article via their own social following could only exponentially grow the reach of the article to a wider audience, and in turn grow the sites entire readership.