A funny thing happened when I stopped blogging.
For more than three years I built a site called Appstorechronicle.com. Between my freshman and senior years of high school, I wrote over 800 articles for it. Traffic grew gradually, but I never made more than a few dollars a month, and traffic usually stagnated around 250 readers a day. The best year I ran it, it saw 200,000 sessions and 250,000 pageviews.
Eventually I decided to move on to other projects, but The App Store Chronicle was breaking even, so I left it up. As I expected, traffic slumped.
But then, something unexpected happened. It started going up, and up, and up. I used to push up numbers with viral hits, but day-to-day the non-viral App Store Chronicle is now getting more traffic than ever. Weekly traffic has doubled, year-over-year, without my help.
In the last year, there have been over 104,000 pageviews, and by next year that number may double again.
There is a lesson in all of this.
Results can’t always be measured in the moment.
When I was building Appstorechronicle, it seemed like no matter how many articles I wrote, the needle wouldn’t move. Viral hits would bring in 40,000 visitors in a week, so I questioned whether I should keep writing the long-term helpful articles that were my specialty.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that all of my work, the hours I put in every night, was building a foundation for the long-tail. I made the mistake of doing long-term work, but looking for short-term results.
Seeing The App Store Chronicle grow without me has motivated me to keep building for long-term results, and to believe in the process, even if the results aren’t there yet. If you do your job, the traffic will come.
