confusedThe recent traffic surge at blinkdagger has gotten my mind thinking once again. In the last two weeks, blinkdagger has experienced a nice surge in traffic. While it isn’t on the level of John Chow’s ramp, it’s still a significant increase that we are quite proud of. You know how they say “More money, more problems?” Well, in the blogging world, it can be adapted to “More traffic, more problems.” What exactly do I mean by this? The increase in traffic brings with it higher expectations and increased pressure to continue delivering high quality content. If you are unable to keep pace, your blog will not be able to grow and expand to the next level. How do other blogs deal with this?

I’ve seen several scenarios unfold as a blog gets more and more attention. I won’t name any names, but I see some blogs not posting as frequently, posting content that isn’t as good as it was previously, or just outright stopping their posting. Then there are some blogs that take it into the next gear and just keep growing and growing and growing. Hopefully, blinkdagger can be one the successful ones! I noticed that once your blog starts to get noticed, there is more pressure to deliver value-packed content, to post more, to do more, to monetize, and a slew of other things. It seems that the more successful you get, the harder you have to work to maintain it.

Ever since we gained some recognition in the Matlab/blogging domain, we have felt the mounting pressure to keep delivering more quality content at a faster rate. Sometimes, this can be increasingly difficult. For the first package of tutorials that I wrote, it was relatively simple because I had a good base of knowledge to work with. But now that I’ve written so many tutorials, I have to start coming up with new ideas for tutorials. Sometimes, I have to do some extra research about the topic I want to write a tutorial on. I have to study the topic, study examples, work through examples, and understand the material inside and out because learning something is one thing, but teaching it is something entirely different. At blinkdagger, we have been working harder than ever to improve our blog in response to our success. But there is only so much that we can do.

When I think of the trials and tribulations associated with success, TV shows and musical artists come to mind. When a TV show has a successful rookie season, the viewers have high expectations for the next season. They expect excitement, intrigue, and innovation for the next season. They don’t want to see the same stuff they saw the previous season. Similarly, musical artists face the same challenges in creating new albums. Creating the same content usually doesn’t go over too well with your fanbase. And if we extend it to the blogosphere, we can see the same pattern! Bloggers need to continually provide new content to keep their readers interested, and this is probably one of the greatest challenges that we face as bloggers.

On the other side of the spectrum, there have been some blogs that have become so wildly popular that they can post whatever they feel like and still received a few hundred thousand hits. Look at John Chow for example, he blogs about whatever he feels like, but he is still able to bring in more and more readers who are infatuated with his ability to monetize his blog. But if you look at what he writes about, it seems that his content is taking a turn for the worst. In the long run, content reigns supreme. Subscribers and readers are not stupid. If they notice that a site isn’t posting as much quality material as before, they will probably stop visiting the site and also remove it from their reader in due time.

How do other bloggers deal with a new influx of traffic? How do you react when your popularity soars? How do you keep your readers interested? How do you take your blog to the next level? Please share your thoughts!