Just a quick note following up on the results of followers from last week's blogfest:
Before the blogfest I had 8 followers. After I had 38! (That deserves an exclamation point.) And that doesn't include people who signed up to follow by email or put the blog in their googlereader, etc. I think that's pretty good results from one little fest.
This is probably a good place for me to mention something about followers in general. I usually do not put a ton of emphasis on followers when measuring blog popularity. I tell my clients to pay more attention to their stats and page views. That doesn't mean that followers aren't important - they're your loyal customers and deserve lots of love (Love to you, my awesome followers!). Anyway, other people also put a lot more emphasis on how many followers you have than they should.
Example: A new reader comes by and wants reads your fabulous blog post. They then decide they are going to blog about your awesome blog post but they look over and see that you only have (gasp!) 12 followers. Oh, no! they think. This blog is obviously not worth my time.
People really do base a blog by its followers, sad to say.
Because of that, I will often recommend that if you don't have a lot of followers (less than 200), it's not a bad idea to leave that off your blog template. Your blog should stand on its own, not on how popular you are. But if you are popular, take advantage of the fact. Tell people, "Hey, I'm popular, why aren't you following me?" Believe me, it works. For myself, the only reason I am including my followers is because this blog is all about transparency and seeing how I grow through media.
And you - have you grown through blogfests? Do you show your followers? Are you influenced by popular blogs? It's ok if you are, we won't judge.
