This guest post is by Michael Alexis, producer of WriterViews.com.
Trent Hamm's personal finance blog, The Simple Dollar attracts over 1.2 million page views every month. When I interviewed Trent earlier this year, he shared the top strategies he used to build his audience. This post includes five of the strategies Trent used to take his blog from zero to one million, and his best practices now that he is achieving his dreams. How does that feel? Trent describes when it first started happening: "it was a little scary, to know that I was reaching so many people," he says, but adds that now it feels good since he has become comfortable with it.
1. Get lucky by thinking strategically
Trent
Within a month or two of launch, The Simple Dollar had a few hundred thousand views every month. Trent says, "I was very lucky to get a few popular sites to link to me early on, and I didn't expect that." However, when pressed, Trent admits there was strategy involved. Trent started by looking "at a few very popular blogs at the time— Lifehacker and a few others" and then "tried to think a little bit about what kind of posts would be useful to their readers." Trent then intentionally wrote a few early posts with that in mind.
Action Points: 1) Find a popular blog in your niche, 2) Study their style, 3) Write for their audience.
2. Quit your job and commit to your dreams
Trent's impetus for starting his blog was a major financial meltdown. Married and with a newborn, Trent realized, "I was digging a debt hole and following a career path that would get me nowhere near writing." So, he committed to change. Trent started by sitting down for two to three hours a day to focus on writing. A few years later The Simple Dollar generated enough income that he could quit his job.
Trent remembers "it was very scary" to quit, but needed to be done because it was a "gigantic time sink."
How...
