Introduction
Creating a YouTube channel and an Instagram page turned out to be super beneficial for me, because it allowed my blog to finally appear on Google’s first page results when typing its domain name. Having both made me change logos, because my previous one did not appear well with their profile picture sizes.
One month later, I am still anxious that they are not enough to get as much traffic as possible. I read that the most successful bloggers of whatever topic continuously recommended to engage passionately on the most popular social media platforms daily. Some would even pay (sometimes a fair bit of money, >1000$) for targeted advertisements on Facebook or everywhere just to boost their blog traffic. After witnessing all of those, I then thought to myself:
Should I create accounts on Twitter and Facebook and share promotional graphic posts about every new blog articles? Should I post randomly and constantly on Facebook on top of that and tweet multiple times a day using my blog related accounts just to boost the account activity? Should I design the graphic posts on Canva to make them eye-catching?
Is it possible for a blog to grow and succeed WITHOUT social media?
Read below to learn my take on it .
Online Research
Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, I could not find any successful blogs that succeeded without any external platforms. There are a lot of them out there that are purely public for the sake of being public, but I am not referring to those. Rather, I am referring to ones that are side-hustles generating sufficient income for their owners. By far, the BEST article on the topic that I discovered came from bloggingwizard. It is an honest assessment about it and even though it does cover some social media elements, the author does admit it while explaining clearly how to succeed without it. She experimented on her own, helped many bloggers and worked with big-traffic site owners for a decade to understand what she is talking about. When it comes down to it, this is as real as it can get.
Her advice on this is simply to understand carefully what’s working for you specifically depending on your niche or on how you savvy you are with a given platform. In her case, she had more success optimizing blog post SEO and creating relevant Pinterest Pins for them rather than creating tailored content for Instagram. She noticed that after posting new Instagram content 30 times for 19 days going as far as spending 25 hours over 3 days making images/videos/slides/stories, writing witty captions, researching hashtags, scheduling at the ‘right’ times to post (according to Insights), etc. Despite putting that much work, nobody still clicked on her posts which , in her own words, disheartened her deeply. Here ‘s what she had to directly say about it:
You do not have to use every social media platform — or, indeed, any of them. If you force yourself to learn and then use a social media platform you despise, you’ll resent it, never use it, and spend more time worrying about using it than actually creating or sharing content. Trust me on this, I know. At some point, if a platform doesn’t work for you despite all of your best efforts, it’s wise to stop wasting time on it and move on to something else. If you only have a limited amount of time or resources, don’t spread yourself thin by trying to master all of the different platforms. If you do, you’ll pump out half-hearted work, completed in half the time, with very little thought gone into it.
Kim Lochery
This is soo reassuring, because I am not passionate about Facebook nor Twitter even though almost ALL of the best bloggers use them heavily. Just opening Facebook for no real reason other than hoping for new followers, likes or comments notifications gives me anxiety. I am glad I am not the only who thought that they could potentially be a waste of time.
The Vanity Illusion
Most successful bloggers recommend to have at least 10 000 blog readers and 10 000 followers or subscribers across all corresponding social media accounts. This minimum number is the threshold to be recognized as worthy for advertisements, to be taken seriously by promoters and to have the chance of earning enough. After some research about it, I stumbled on the following statement by Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine:
To be a successful creator you don’t need millions of dollars, millions of customers or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only a 1,000 true fans (A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce). 1,000 true fans is an alternative path to success other than stardom. On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you’ll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It’s a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.
Kevin Kelly
He mentioned that the number 1000 is not absolute and it can even be less as long as one can earn enough from whatever number of fans they got. Thinking about it that way makes so much more sense, because not everybody can realistically enjoy my content nor become a true fan. Even worse, nobody in real life is even a fan of me 😆, so I am just not meant to chase after fame.
Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, had a similar rule which is that:
It’s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.
Paul Buchheit
He came up with that same observation while building Gmail and because he worked with thousands of tech startups. For instance, when he built the first version of Gmail, only a few of his co-workers loved it and he improved it based on their feedback. Fast-forward to today, it is used by millions of other people, because it evolved from those initial users who truly loved it.
Finally, MrBeast, the most prolific content creator of my generation, had this to say about the number of subscribers or followers:
The number of subscribers is just a vanity metric. Subscribers do not correlate with views even if a lot of people do care about subscribers or followers like on TikTok. On YouTube, a very few percent (even just 1%) of your views come from the sub feed.
MrBeast
This is reassuring, because I have only got 1 subscriber on YouTube and 0 followers on Instagram as of August 2023 😅. Although, it would be good to have way more, I should not stress too much about it and focus simply on delivering content on both and making sure the audience is engaged and redirected to my blog. It is not the end of the world if I notice any other beginner with more followers and subscribers. Good on anyone who can get views from them though!
On a personal note, I was so ecstatic when I got my first three followers on my Instagram page three weeks after launching it that I followed them back to return the favour. However, it backfired, because they unfollowed me back one day later 😱. I am not sure what happened there, but I now understand that I do not need to follow back any followers, because it literally creeps them out I guess 😂. At first, I was posting random pictures on Instagram while including locations for no reason and later, some random account liked one of my posts! I guess random posting can lead somewhere 🤷♂️. I also refused to pay a promotion service even though someone commented on one of my posts to DM them. I can only rely on organic searches and I can’t afford targeted advertisements or promotion hubs for now.
More improvement updates and observations to come, peace ✌️!
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