All About The Content

All right, I know that if I start this post saying that “content is king” yet another time, I will lose the interest of half the readers right there….
That is the topic of this post though. Last week Maki from Dosh Dosh announced that his blog had reached 10,000 RSS subscribers (it is already approaching 12,000 for the matter of fact). If you ever visited his blog, you probably know that the quality of the content is outstanding.
In order to reach such a big number of subscribers (in just over one year), however, you must think that he also carried all sorts of marketing techniques, networking tips and promotion tactics, right?
Well, that was not that case, and that is why I think this story is quite interesting. Here is a quote from his post, where he describes the things that he didn’t perform.

1. No Feedcount. I did not display my feed count on Dosh Dosh for its entire lifespan and yesterday afternoon was the first time I put up my feed numbers. My feed count was also deactivated until I reached 8000 subscribers, which means no one could discover how many subscribers I had until that point.
2. No Guest Posting. I have not written any guest posts for any site with the purpose of driving traffic back to my blog. I only wrote for Dosh Dosh.
3. No Contests/Projects. Never held any contests, group writing projects, blog carnivals or competitions at all on this blog.
4. No Advertising. Not a single cent was spent on buying ads to promote Dosh Dosh. Every single visitor that comes to this blog is organic.
5. No Incentives. Apart from the content itself, I have never offered any incentives to encourage subscriptions. This means no ebooks, free reviews or gifts of any sort.
6. No Guest bloggers. No one else has ever written any articles on this blog.
7. No Digg frontpages. A long time ago, an article reached the Digg frontpage and was buried in a few minutes. After that, all content from Dosh Dosh has been automatically buried by Digg’s internal system (a plausible theory).
8. No Frequent Posting. For the later part of Dosh Dosh’s lifespan, I wrote infrequently, sometimes only publishing one or two articles in an entire week.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that all the mentioned points are worthless for bloggers. Holding contests and competitions, guest articles, social media exposure and so on can be used to complement your overall strategy.
As Maki’s example illustrates, however, they are no substitute for solid and valuable content on the first place. Sometimes they are not even necessary. Here is his conclusion, and I agree with it.

What does this prove, if anything? That it’s very possible to get a decent readership even if you don’t overtly go after subscribers by purchasing ads or providing incentives. Creating excellent content and getting exposure for it through the right influencers and platforms is very important.