It seems like most blogs start out pretty slow. Such is naturally the case with this blog. Do I expect it will get famous anytime soon? Not in the slightest. Do I expect that someday we could have a modest regular audience? Maybe. Even though I work for Google and specifically in an organization that specializes in the popularity of content on the internet, I really don't have a lot of clues as to how I could make my own content popular. I suppose I can hit the usual suspects like improving my SEO, and self promoting the content such that people might be tempted to share the content with someone they think would be interested. I have done a little bit of this so far, and I think that my hosting provider also has a bit of this built in.
You seem to get a natural amount of SEO with a Squarespace site and that is cool. If you were to directly search for the title of the site, you would probably find it easily on Google. This is great if you already have a following of people that are already looking for you. However, if you are like me and there isn't a reason in this entire world that you should be interested in what I have to say as of this moment, you are going to have a very hard time discovering me. It's not like anyone links into my content. And the generic terms that I write my posts about are certainly not going to be searcheable over content that is already popular on the internet. This has posed an interesting problem to me. Almost a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
One option I have considered is that I could seed the blogs numbers and viewership with a bit of cash. I'm not talking about something sketchy (or am I?), but I'm considering running an ad campaign for the site. I don't really care about making money on my content, but I would also care not to lose a ton of money on this site either, So I think it would be a pretty cheap and low-key ad campaign. Maybe some search advertising targetting some keywords like {blog|tech|writing|nonsense}. I worry a little bit about alienating my own potential readers though. Say you have the average reader of a tech blog and they see an ad for my blog. Are they going to think it's shit because I'm advertising it? Also consider that if this person saw the ad and visited my page that they might not yet like the page because there isn't a lot of content yet. Versus the scenario where if they found the blog organically sometime later when it's more flushed out, they might enjoy it more and would be more likely to be a repeat reader.
Well this is an exciting post. Side note: if you came to this post through an ad, then you are from the future and already know the outcome of my musings here. Good lord do I lust for your superior knowledge.