The Best Blogging Technique To Attract Readers And Stick Them To A Blog
04. Mar, 2008 
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Do you know Rubik’s Cube? If you do, then you probably remember the frustration of endless hours, rotations and calculations, only to get into a bigger mess of colors.
And if you happened to have a brother like mine, who was hiding from me, and then came out with the magic cube solved, you can imagine how upset I was the day I discovered he was actually peeling off the stickers and stick them back again.
But once you got the technique, and you managed to solve the cube, suddenly the fact that your younger brother was doing that shameful thing became much less important. It was like a confirmation of a hierarchy you had in your mind regarding your abilities compared with your brother’s.
The Rubik’s Blogging Cube
This is pretty much like the relationship a blogger establishes with the audience: you have to know the secret to make them come, and once they are there, you need to learn how to make them stay, and even more, how to bring them back.
The more you know, the most successful you are in doing this. But in the beginning, without having almost any experience with readers, a blogger could get frustrated and demotivated when seeing others attracting readers like the fly paper attracts the flies, while she puts a lot of effort in writing, linking, commenting, socializing, writing again, linking some more, and yet seeing day after day how others come from behind and move forward in high speed.
You’d ask now, and you’d be right, which is that secret, that technique which sticks readers to your blog. Do you believe that Rubik’s cube has only one solution? I know two of them, and probably there are more.
Like this blogging and readers appreciation: there’s no unique way to get to it. Indeed, you can read guides on how to become an authority in your niche, you can assimilate the knowledge and the insights they give you, you can find original ways to know your readers better, and yet, when it comes to real life, you are faced with the reality of not getting the attention you’re worth.
If you don’t know Rubik’s cube, please watch this demonstration on how to solve it, and then you’ll get an idea of how complicated it seems to get to your readers. Then learn and rehearse the solution, and you’ll realize in fact, how simple it is. Just a bit of learning and a lot of rehearsal.
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To continue your analogy, you could solve the Cube by picking the stickers off once, but if you did it often, your stickers got dog-eared and messy-looking, and wouldn’t stick properly, and it was pretty obvious that you were cheating. Just like with blogging (or most things in life, I think): you can cheat for a while, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to learn to do it for real.
Lots of rehearsal is the key. You can’t jump from a brand new blog to grabbing all the attention in a couple of weeks. It takes time: for your readership to build up, for Google to pick you up, for advertisers and PR people and other bloggers in your niche to start taking you seriously. Because it’s so quick and easy to go to Blogger/Wordpress/whatever and get started posting, I think people too often forget that the other aspects of blogging, beyond just the writing, take a lot longer to get going.
Hi Simonne,
Great post! I loved your analogy. And that rubic’s cube gave me many frustrated moments but I did manage to solve the puzzle once. Now if I could just remember how I did that.
The demonstration page is great, if I still had my cube I’d actually try again. You brother sounds like a crafty fellow. But like Sue said, you can only cheat so much and in the end you’ll damage your own reputation and nobody will ever really trust you again.
I’ve also seen other bloggers appear from nowhere and take the blogging world by storm. Initially it used to bother me because I started to question my own ability and whether I was saying the wrong things to my readers.
But then I stopped worrying at all, since I am being myself and some people love me for that and others don’t. It is a simple as that really. I also stopped worrying (mostly anyway) what others think of me and just keep doing what I do best – write.
Solving puzzles like the rubic cube helps us to go deeper mentally and question the things we deem important but are not in the bigger scheme of things.
Thanks for bringing the cube back to my attention.
Sometimes I’d rather just throw the Rubik’s Cube against a wall and smash it to bits out of frustration!
Getting readers is definitely complicated. There are way too many factors to name, but I’m truly thankful for the readers we have here.
@Sue: you are perfectly right. Actually this is how I caught my brother cheating: the corners of the stickers started to wear off.
Yes, rehearsal is one of the keys, as important as learning as you go, and doing things better and better each time.
@Monika: this is the best approach, not to worry about others and be confident in your skills. I don’t have my cube anymore, either, and I suppose I forgot how to solve it. But it surely was fun when I was a child.
@Ronald: I’m also thankful for our readers. I think they are here to stay, and because they like what we write. It makes me feel good to be part of this team.
when we were little our uncle gave us a cheat-sheet on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. I haven’t practiced it that much so couldn’t solve the cube within a minute or two like my two younger brothers did after many hours of practice. So yes, practice is the key
I too sometimes feel frustrated that my blog is not growing the way some other more successful blogs out there, but then I tell myself that I can’t expect getting too much when I’m not putting into my blogging that much effort like those other successful bloggers do, and that I should just be grateful for the wonderful readers and friends my blog brought to me.
I really like your analogies, Simonne – they never cease to amaze me with how true and close they are.
Thank you, Vivien.
Hey, I was the Queen of my school at solving the cube. Nobody was faster. We had competitions in all the breaks, during that cube fever, which lasted quite a long while. If I would have trained myself at the school matters as well as I did with the cube, I’d be a scientist now
Regarding success, it’s much more fun to have a group of nice readers and to have a conversation, rather than 99 comments which do nothing else than worship you and kiss you in some places, hoping that one day they’ll get linked by you and they will be flooded by traffic
hahaha, Simonne… thanks for brightening my day with a laughter. As usual, you’re absolutely right: quality vs. quantity – that’s the golden rule indeed.
Getting repeat visitors and RSS subscribers is all very nice but do they really make your any money? If you’re just blogging for pure fun then getting these sorts of visitors is great. But if you just want them to click on your adsense, they’re pretty useless.