Right Wing News (www.rightwingnews.com), has an interesting discussion about building up your blog's popularity.  I feel a lot better having read it because I thought I was the only one who felt some of the frustrations he's felt.

JoeUser.com hasn't "officially" launched yet. We're still technically in beta (i.e. we haven't done any promotion).  Our Alexa ranking is around 25,000. Sometimes it shoots up when something written here gets particular attention but generally it hovers around 25,000.  We don't have a good traffic monitoring system on yet.  We do, however, know how many people are on at once and that number typically hovers around 200 to 300 depending on the time of day.

In the link (shown at bottom), John puts forth the simple rule of blog success: You have to keep at it for a long time.  Years.  And like me, he's faced frustration at not getting his articles linked to by the "elite" blogging sites such as Instapundit. Sometimes it does but it's few and far between. A handful of blog sites really have almost all the traffic with the rest scraping for the last bits.

That was what inspired JoeUser in the first place. I got frustrated with writing something that I thought was "good" (Relatively speaking, I'm barely literate <g>) only to have it just die off in the ether.  But if we could build a community of bloggers where we promote each other. Then it works out much better.  I think it's safe to say that the typical blogger here gets vastly (100X) more readers than they would on their own.  And together we are able to skip years of grinding effort to get noticed.  I have Right Wing News's website shown above precisely to make that point: In about a year, we've already passed it in daily traffic. 

While we have the readers, and by we I mean all of us combined, we don't yet have the respect.  We rarely get mentioned in blog round ups still. Hopefully that will change when the site is launched and the marketing people start doing their thing.  But for now, we're on our own to carve our own success  based on the quality of our collective writing abilities.

So keep at it, and you will build your own base of readers for your blog. JoeUser's unique system jump starts that base but it still takes effort and more importantly, persistence over a long period of time.