Really [great post from Rian van der Merwe][1] about growing a blog audience:

> This is a story about deciding to take a route that avoids most of these traditional content marketing methods. It’s a story of how a struggling blog with an insignificant number of readers has become not only a source of great joy and expression for me, but also a source of non-insignificant income. This is definitely not a story about how to get to 1 million page views a month. It’s a story about how to make your page views count.

Getting traffic is pretty much a black art, tanking your traffic is easy though. ((Just add a paywall.)) I don’t agree with everything in this post (but the shoutout was all too kind), but what I do know is that people can tell when you don’t care. It simply isn’t interesting to read blog posts about topics the author doesn’t care about — if the author doesn’t care, why should you?

I think that is where larger, multi-author, sites get into trouble — it becomes more about “freshness” and less about writing about topics the writers are interested in. Watch out for that.

[1]: http://www.elezea.com/2013/11/how-to-build-an-audience/