Sharing Your Voice Versus Building a Platform

Yesterday was the best traffic day ever on this blog.  I checked and the 2nd best traffic day came in January of 2011 and the 3rd best in July of 2009.  In other words, it took a long time and a lot of work to reach yesterday.

Something else I noticed as I was going through my Google Analytics yesterday was to look at how the day-to-day traffic increased.  Today I would immediately know that something was ‘wrong’ if I ‘only’ got 500 visitors tomorrow, but back in 2010 or 2011, that would have been cause for celebration.  Hopefully in 2-3 years, if I get the same amount of traffic as I did yesterday, I’ll be disappointed as well.

Whenever we talk about the significance of blogging, people always offer that they blog because they want to share their voice.  I’m a huge believer in the power of blogging for this very reason.

But there’s also incredible power in sharing your voice and using your blog to build a platform for your ideas.  And I mean ‘build’ literally as it is a LOT of work to build a blogging platform.  Since June of 2009, I’ve currently written 655 posts here.  So many hours spent on creating content.  But that content is helping me to build a platform.  In June of 2009, this blog averaged about 84 visitors a day.  Currently I get that here every hour.  That’s a huge increase in exposure for my ideas.  And yet, as I was giddy watching my traffic go up yesterday, and as I saw yesterday’s post top 250 retweets, I realized there are many bloggers that see every post get that type of exposure.

Your platform has incredible value.  Yes, it takes a ton of time and energy to build it, but that platform can open doors for you.  It brings your ideas to more people.  If you are a brand, it expands the reach of your content to more potential customers.  It becomes ‘proof of concept’ if you want to sell a publisher on why they should buy your book idea.

Want to know a secret?  Many of the people that are viewed as thought leaders today in this space started building their platform 5-10 years ago.  No one knew who they were then, but today they have a blog that’s read by 100,000 people every month, they have 100,000 people following them on Twitter and have an email list with 50,000 names on it.

All because they invested the time and work to build a platform that would allow them to share their ideas with more people.  Isn’t your voice worth the same attention? 

Pic via Flickr user nigelhowe