magazine
Productive! Magazine interview with Leo Babauta
Zen,
Habits and Minimalism
Be passionate about what you’re doing. If you’re not, it’ll be hard to motivate yourself. If you’re excited about your work, you’ll jump out of bed to do it.
Michael Sliwinski: Let’s start with your blog – you launched it about the same time I launched Nozbe (early 2007) and I’ve been tracking it from the beginning and the growth over 2007 has been incredible, from just a couple of hundred of subscribers to tens of thousands by the end of the year, how did you do it? What were the key components to your success? Leo Babauta: The main thing I’ve done is try to produce extremely useful posts, perhaps 4-5 times a week. I experimented a lot by doing different types of posts and posting schedules, and I’ve found what’s optimal for my readers, for growth, and for my schedule. The key part of this strategy is giving away really useful content that solves readers’ problems. If you keep doing that, they’ll keep coming back, and once you get a decent reader base these types of useful posts also tend to get popular on social media sites such as delicious, stumbleupon, digg and twitter. Of course, you have to let people know you’re out there, so my second winning strategy has been to write as many guest posts as possible. When you write a guest post for another blog, preferably one that has a lot of the type of readers you’re going after, you’ll reach a lot of new readers and you’ll show them just how great your content is. Then they’ll go to your site, and if you’ve created a lot of great content there too, they’re likely to subscribe. I’ve tried other strategies as well, but these two strategies are what have been most effective for me. Michael: Your blog is more than 2 years online now and it’s one of the top blogs on the Internet (not just among productivity blogs), I see you’ve changed your design to be more „zen” like, what is your next
by Michael Sliwinski
step? Next action? What plans do you have for your blog this year and beyond?
#03/2009 www.ProductiveMagazine.com
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