Like most bloggers do, this morning I checked my Feedburner stats and see that my blog Cats Who Code had 6000+ RSS subscribers. I decided to check out how many readers I had one year ago. I wasn’t surprised to read that I only had 900 readers at the time.
So, how did I manage to get 4000 new readers in 2009, while I only managed to get almost 1000 the previous year? This is what I’m going to explain in this article.

Let’s start with some stats

Before going throught exaplanations, I’d like to show you some stats. As you know, transparence is one of the “success keys” of Cats Who Blog.
Let’s start with December 2008 stats. As you can see on the screenshot below, one year ago I only had 900 RSS subscribers.

Now, have a look a December 2009 stats. I currently have 6000+ readers:

Patience is everything

So, what I’ve done to get 4000 subscribers in one years, while I only had 1000 during the first year? The answer is pretty simple : I’ve waited. Of course, I’m not saying that I didn’t worked and 4000 people decided to subscribe to an inactive blog. No, I worked a lot, but I was patient.

Another good example is the very popular web design/web development blog Six Revisions. When I subscribed to their RSS feed back in February 2008, there was 6000 RSS readers. take a look at the same site, 20 months later : They have more than 42,000 loyal readers!

Time is one of the blogger best friend. As time go by, more people are aware that your blog exists. More blogs links to yours, more people tweet your posts. And with time, you’re getting more and more experienced as a blogger. This is called exponential blogging.

I receive lots of emails of beginner bloggers who said that they’re getting discouraged because they only have 50 RSS subscribers. To these people, I always answer that unless you’re born in a rich family like Paris Hilton, you have to start small. In fact, you start as the smaller. As you work and as time go by, you’re becoming bigger and bigger.
If you have 50 RSS readers after a month of blogging, chances are that you’ll have at least 1000 after a year.

Exponential blogging

According to Wikipedia, the exponential function is the function ex, where e is the number such that the function ex equals its own derivative. The exponential function is used to model phenomena when a constant change in the independent variable gives the same proportional change (increase or decrease) in the dependent variable.

And why exponential functions have something to do with blogging and website traffic? That’s simple : As time go by, assuming your keep working hard, if you get only one visitor the first day, you’ll have two the second day, four the third day, eight the fourth day, and so on.

Of course, maintaining a 100% traffic growth isn’t realistic. But as shown in the Feedburner stats above, the more established your blog is, more traffic you will get.
As a blog becomes older, the following happens:

More posts : The more posts your blogs, the most chances you have that people will find your blog using search engines. On Cats Who Code (which have almost 150 published posts) 10 people are coming to the blog from Google every two minutes in two minutes. In comparison, it takes 1 hour on Cats Who Blog, which have 25 posts.

Authority : The more your blog grow, the more authority you get as a blogger. People will be more likely to trust an established blogger who have been in this busines for years instead than a newcommer.
As an example, a blog with 5000 RSS subscribers will get more people subscribing to the feed on a daily basis than another blog with only 100 RSS readers. Why? Simply because an established source always appear more trustable.

Search engine love : Just like people will trust more a blogger with some authority, Google gives more importance to established sites. A two years old blog will probably got a higher Pagerank than a 3 months old blog and will appear first in Search engine results.

And you, what about your blog? How old it is? Did you experimented the cool effects of exponential blogging after six months, or one year? Let me know!