I’ve been feeling pretty frustrated lately. I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress at all in recent weeks. Subscriber numbers are not going up.

I spent time looking through some of the blogs in the technorati top 100 today. If I’m missing something - please let me know! Sure, a large percent of them are tech or political blogs - but dooce is still there, at least a couple science blogs, etc. The actual topic of the blog doesn’t seem to matter much. I saw some blogs that are very niche and some that write about just about everything. I saw some with one writer, some with many bloggers. Some with just personal opinion and stories and others with very detailed, factual information. I didn’t see a trend except that they all have a lot more readers than I do. And quite honestly, some really aren’t that good.

One good thing however is that I seem to be able to write faster. At one time long, long ago it would literally take me an entire day to write one post. A couple weeks ago I wrote 4 posts in one day for my women’s site and last weekend I wrote 6 posts in one day for herproblog.

Granted those were either simple posts or things I could write right off the top of my head. But the simple posts seem to do better anyway. In July I wrote a post called 3 Execises Every Woman Should Do without putting much thought into it. It got 12 comments - pretty good for me - and was picked up by other sites through Blogburst.

When I actually put more thought or time into something it doesn’t seem to do as well. Maybe if I keep writing the simpler posts I will do better. I may run out of ideas like that though, I will have to see.

But, if in general, I am now able to write faster and write posts that get more comments - that’s good.

What I still find difficult is the promoting/marketing stuff. I don’t have money to advertise so what I’ve been doing is leaving comments, participating at social networking sites when I have the time, trying to contact individual bloggers, etc. All that is very time consuming and doesn’t seem to help a lot.

There must be a better way. A smarter way. Advertising, if I had the money would seem to be smarter. I do have a lot of entrecard credits saved up to use soon. I don’t know if that will help much or not.

Maybe if I restricted my commenting at the most popular blogs - with lots of readers - that would be better. Or if I could guest post at more popular blogs. I don’t know. Those are things I need to try.

Either way I need a smarter way to promote/market/get more readers.