Labor Yields Fruits

I wanted to follow up on yesterday's post with an example: me. Or rather, Cheff Salad. I still consider this a personal blog. I do not advertise it, save for a few posts on Facebook, and I don't run it to make money. I continue this blog to continue writing. I do envision every post as a lecture or pep talk to fellow writers and aspiring writers, but I also still see it as a book in a library that never gets pulled from the shelf (mostly because the library is filled with way more amazing books). But that's not entirely true.

I periodically take a look at Cheff Salad's stats, things like traffic flow and page views. The first months of the blog had zero (0) [that's a zero in parentheses]. That means no traffic, no visitors, no anything.  Eventually that did pick up. I started averaging about 2 hits per month. I can guarantee they were the two times per month that I linked one of my friends to a specific post I had written that was relevant to a conversation at hand.

Time continued and so did I. I had a few followers of my blog, including such notable titles as "a couple of my friends" and "my mom". My traffic also increased from 2 per month to 2 per day. That's 30 times the traffic flow. That's 3000% of what it was.

As time continued to continue, and I managed to keep up with it, more interesting things happened. I noticed that I had even more followers. I had more followers than I had friends I kept in touch with. I had people following my blog who I didn't even know. My traffic also increased from 2 a day to 20 a day (at least on days that I update).

In the mean time, I have treated my blog no different now than when I started. One post a day about writing. Figure out the nuances on my own. If I miss a day, do two on the next day to make up for it. I still don't advertise aside from the occasional link on Facebook and in conversations where it's relevant.

I know that 20 hits a day is like a grain of sand on the beach in terms of the internet. That's not the point. The point is that when you put effort into something, you will be rewarded for it. I do not have a massive traffic flow, but I have not put my effort into that. I have put my effort into writing. This is a testament to the claim that making a good product and making it available are all you need to start.

It can be a great difficulty, but actually keep it up. Labor yields fruit. If you can put in 2 years of effort and still see no difference than where you were at day 1, you can give up. But until then, get crackin'.