March 26th will mark one year since i launched The 1919 Review. I want to mark the occasion by offering some advice for beginner bloggers.

1. Blogs Snowball

I had an old blog which I approached with zero plan or consistency, but on which I threw a lot of varied stuff over 5+ years. I have not posted on it since 2015. Somehow in spite of this complete neglect its View Count and Visotor Count coasted along with a combined 6,000 visitors in 2016, 2017 and 2018. It took years for engagement to fall away. Even now it’s a rare week the old blog doesn’t get 20+ views. For a lot of last year, the old blog was doing better than The 1919 Review!

There’s some good stuff on that blog and I’m happy people are still reading it. But my point is this: blogs snowball. Through some mysterious process, they develop a momentum of their own.

So…

2. Keep at it and be consistent

I launched The 1919 Review with a budget of zero but with a bit more planning and determination than I had put into previous projects.

For months, it got practically no views or visitors unless I shared something on social media. The base line default was zero.

One year on, the blog has organic reach. Social media shares generate a spike of views and visitors, of course, but now I have a steady base line of engagement between shares.

It might be the subscribers I’ve built up. It might be that, having built up a certain volume of posts, I’m casting the net wider on search engines. Unless it’s just some inscrutable trick of the algorithm that governs the WordPress Reader feed, it must come down to this: the blog has organic reach because I posted religiously once per week for a year.

3. Use social media

For me, this means Facebook; I don’t really use the others. I’m not a big fan of Facebook, for all the usual reasons, but I still use it every day, again, for all the usual reasons.

One good development over the last few years has been the culture of well-moderated and pleasant public and private groups. It is through sharing posts in such groups that I got some of my biggest spikes in engagement.

Be a member of the group for a while before posting your own stuff, and meanwhile contribute in other ways. Give more than you take. Before you self-promote, read the room and take a look at the rules.

4. Make a podcast

I linked in with Anchor and Youtube to make a very basic, rough-and-ready audio version of my series Revolution Under Siege. It’s not somewhere I expected to go, and it hasn’t brought massive traffic, but it was a lot of fun and it has potential.

5. Savour the little victories

Cut your cloth to measure. With no promotion budget and with many other commitments in my life, it was out of the question that I would be marking big victories and breakthroughs in the first year of The 1919 Review. But I hit every target I set myself, and that feels good. Celtic Communism and Sláine were the biggest hits of year one.

Rather than my usual rule of once per week, I’ve posted three times in the last few days. This is because I’ll be away from tomorrow until April.

Until then, thanks to all my readers, subscribers and sharers.