One Month of Blog Promotion Misery

The day my blog went live, I remember being super excited, wide awake in the night. The idea of this new venture, that was my very own occupied my mind completely. I imagined myself as a writer, a blogger and a budding author! My mind raced through monthly, quarterly and annual plans. And then feeling content with the exhaustive planning, I dozed off to sleep.

My first blog was live and whatever the heck I wrote, was out in open.

The first week after my blog went live was a “hello world” moment for me and I was excited about people reading my blog. I turned to one stop for all audience – Facebook.

I joined umpteen communities in a day, all dedicated to writing, reading and blogging. Naive and hopeful, I shared my first blog post with all the groups at once

Within minutes, my phone started buzzing with numerous notifications. Excited to see what the members thought, I jumped to see notifications. What I saw next was completely crazy!.

Disappointed but still determined, I tried another hot spot – the Twitter. I chose my best post and crafted a catchy punchline. Meticulously, I selected the most trending hashtags and sent out my first blogging tweet.

Within seconds, came a pile of new tweets on top of mine and mine literally vanished from the screen. I scrolled through the window endlessly but could not find my own tweet. It garnered no likes and no comments and shamefully brought zero blog visits.

Discouraged, I dozed off to sleep that night.

I imagined week two as another start and decided to explore Instagram.

Few clicks here & there and my Insta account was setup in minutes. I gathered modest following within a day, mostly including my friends & relatives. I followed people who were deemed “Influencers” & dedicated their profiles to food, travel or Art. And soon, my Insta feed was filled with images of clumsy dishes to child like paintings to amateur travel videos.

Realizing all content garners engagement on Insta, I became optimistic. I drafted my first post – a photo from my blog with a smart caption & link next to it. And there it went live – My first Instagram post!

I was tired after two weeks of this rigorous regime that got me no where with my blog’s visibility. All popular channels, I knew, were already explored, used and discarded. My blog visits remained stagnant and I wondered if I had any more options.

It was then, I read about Reddit. It seemed to be a discussion forum where many communities existed & surprisingly, they all showcased two way communication. I strolled through some interesting communities and joined all of them. I drafted my first Reddit post and pushed the submit button.

Two days passed in fury and resentment and then it dawned on me that I did not try LinkedIn. Now, I was fairly active on professional networks and wondered where I could share my blogging posts.

I scrolled through pages of relevant groups and quickly dropped in a join request.

But many of those groups already had thousands of members and no longer accepted any new members. So, I was left stranded on their waiting list.

Exhausted from my previous attempts, I finally looked up – what Word Press had to offer. I was amazed to see thousands of posts about blog promotions. Many boasted about using plugins and I thought – Maybe this could be it!

To my dismay, all plugins came with paid plans and the price of those made me anxious. I wasn’t thrifty but I wasn’t a spender either. So, three weeks of my agony couldn’t push me into buying anything. Instead, it pushed me to stop looking before I go nuts!

So, in a bid to remain sane, I decided to stop thinking about blog promotion anymore.

By the end of the week , normalcy started kicking in and I started regaining my focus again.

I felt unburdened and somehow relieved by not having to think about viewership.

And then, I started writing again – writing with the sole purpose of writing.