Successful Blogging Is 10% Blogging And 90% Marketing

The title is a quote from John Chow’s post, If You Build It They Won’t Come. You may not agree with the percentages, but it’s hard to argue with someone who has close to 8000 RSS subscribers. You can have the best content in the world, but if you’re not marketing, how will anyone find your blog in the midst of the millions of blogs on the web?

John Chow admits,

There are tons of small blogs that can write better content than me.

However, because he focuses so much on marketing, he has a much more visitors than those small blogs. He writes,

Learning how to generate a buzz will get you a lot further than learning how to write a better blog post.

Here’s my theory. A blogger who posts twice a week and spends 4 hours a week marketing will have much more traffic than a blogger who posts 4 times a week and spends 2 hours a week marketing.

Check out this comment from John’s post:

One of the best things I did is cut my posting down a little bit and spend that extra time promoting and since then my RSS is up and traffic has increased five fold!

Marketing dictates how much targeted traffic you will get. And targeted traffic dictates how much money you will earn. And don’t think I’m saying, forget about content. High quality content is crucial to the long-term success of any site. However, you probably don’t need to create as much weekly content as you think. Quality over quantity. And then, market that quality content like crazy :)

Write less. Market more.