Practical advice on what to expect from your Tumblr I will admit that there is no sure fire way to predict growth rates but, this is the range of milestones that I look for from our network blogs. This doesn’t necessarily overlay with blogs that only reblog content or for personal blogs very well. Aside from having also been through much of this with dozens of different blogs personally, I have also had the displeasure of watching blog after blog after blog go through the things on this list for many years now. 0-400 Followers - Your blog has no content propagation power. Unfortunately, this is when most people put a lot of heart into their posts. Realistically, a big chunk of your followers are people you probably beat up on Facebook/Twitter to follow your Tumblr. When you get substantial notes on a post, it always gets you excited. If this is your personal blog, you probably have some incredibly annoying layout that is impossible to navigate and has a mouse cursor with glitter and shit. You also probably have autoplay music on it and you don’t see what the problem is even though you read blog after blog of people openly explaining how horrible it is but nuh uh. They aren’t talking about you. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear 30 seconds of Kanye over an over again? AM I RIGHT? At this point your blog does not have the ability to generate revenue.  400-600 Followers - Your blog still really has very little content propagation power. Now and again you might see a post spike with a few hundred notes or get picked up in an Explore tag. I really consider this a hump or tipping point for most blogs. The reason is that after hitting this milestone, followers seem to trickle in at a consistent rate. Now you realize that a ‘Next page’ button near the bottom of a page is something the reader might find handy and you dump the shitty layout and the autoplay music. You will gain 800-1200 followers at double or triple the rate as your first 400-600. You probably still think notes indicate follower growth at this point. At this point your blog does not have the ability to generate revenue but you are starting to think about it. You are wrong. 600 - 1500 Followers - Your blog is starting to have content propagation power but it isn’t always predicable. Some posts will take off without reason while other posts that you put your heart into, just don’t pick up notes outside of your core audience. Like the day you wrote about the pain of losing your mother to cancer and it got 4 notes but the animated gif of a dog humping a Pikachu doll which you jacked from another Tumblr got 800 notes. You might even start bitching about how your content never gets on the radar yet that goddamn picture of the massive swarm of manta rays was on the radar 3 different times!!! Even though this phase is much faster than the last, it can feel slow because for the first time ever, your dashboard always has notes popping up in it. You finally realize that notes do not equal followers and you stop doing dumb shit like reblogging your own posts thinking for some reason that it will help. You start blogging up a storm at this point pissing off a huge amount of readers. Your content loses focus and you start doing anything you think people might like. You start answering questions publicly like you are one of the fucking Beatles which has ZERO value to your audience and a bunch of them unfollow you because they think you are a bit of a twat. You make a rant post about people unfollowing you and more people unfollow you because of it. At this point your blog does not have the ability to generate revenue even though you really think otherwise. You are still wrong.  1500+ Followers - At this point your blog has a sustained content propagation level. You have a reasonable average notecount on posts and things become predictable. Your note spikes can be pretty high and your content might be getting picked up by blogs outside of Tumblr. You are probably already doing some really tacky bullshit and adding links to other content on every post (this can be done well but you are just milking hits out of your readers) thinking that it will increase your audience or get you more hits. Your audience devalues your content because of this but you don’t realize it because you find yourself too busy to measure ‘likes’ in relation to ‘reblogs’ or check on how often people simply delete what you created. You also fail to realize that even though you are picking up more and more followers, more and more of those are spam. You start a Facebook page for your blog like the world gives a fuck. They don’t. The only people that follow you on Facebook are avid readers that you just gave the ability to skip your page completely and read your content elsewhere yet when those same readers you ALREADY had click in from Facebook, you count that as extra traffic. It isn’t. At this point your blog doesn’t have the ability to generate revenue but you don’t believe me so I’ll say… maybe a few bucks a month and that’s probably from ads that you and your friends are clicking on. At best you are using Adsense and they will catch you and ban your account for this. You will post a rant titled “Fuck you Google” and send them an email promising at first that you didn’t do anything, and another later admitting that you may have clicked a few ads but promise that you won’t do it again. They don’t respond. At worst you have some horrendous ad network with dreadful flashing mouse cursor ads or autoplay Swiffer ads that scare the shit out of everyone. These ads pay 1 cent for 1,000-2,000 hits (I’m serious) but you think otherwise because you now think you are Mr. Ad Mogul. Months go by and you don’t hit the minimum $100 mark needed to get sent a check.  5000+ Followers - It is up in the air from here. If you are lucky, your will has been broken by now and you can just shut the fuck up with all of the big time blog talk and go back to making the posts that built your core audience.  Bloggers go wrong when they forget what got them where they are. Hopefully you realize that people just like someone to find cool stuff for them so that they can reblog it. You start looking for cool content again and stop giving your opinion. You start to be aware of the world around you and credit the source and start reblogging other blogs that post related content. Final note: Like I said before, I have been through much of this as well as witnessed blogger after blogger attempt to do these same things an outsmart the system. As far as understanding followers goes, I really do pay very close attention to these things. Pretty soon we will hit 500,000 followers and it’s reasonable that 1 million followers will happen this year. 

Practical advice on what to expect from your Tumblr

I will admit that there is no sure fire way to predict growth rates but, this is the range of milestones that I look for from our network blogs. This doesn’t necessarily overlay with blogs that only reblog content or for personal blogs very well. Aside from having also been through much of this with dozens of different blogs personally, I have also had the displeasure of watching blog after blog after blog go through the things on this list for many years now.

0-400 Followers - Your blog has no content propagation power. Unfortunately, this is when most people put a lot of heart into their posts. Realistically, a big chunk of your followers are people you probably beat up on Facebook/Twitter to follow your Tumblr. When you get substantial notes on a post, it always gets you excited. If this is your personal blog, you probably have some incredibly annoying layout that is impossible to navigate and has a mouse cursor with glitter and shit. You also probably have autoplay music on it and you don’t see what the problem is even though you read blog after blog of people openly explaining how horrible it is but nuh uh. They aren’t talking about you. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear 30 seconds of Kanye over an over again? AM I RIGHT? At this point your blog does not have the ability to generate revenue. 

400-600 Followers - Your blog still really has very little content propagation power. Now and again you might see a post spike with a few hundred notes or get picked up in an Explore tag. I really consider this a hump or tipping point for most blogs. The reason is that after hitting this milestone, followers seem to trickle in at a consistent rate. Now you realize that a ‘Next page’ button near the bottom of a page is something the reader might find handy and you dump the shitty layout and the autoplay music. You will gain 800-1200 followers at double or triple the rate as your first 400-600. You probably still think notes indicate follower growth at this point. At this point your blog does not have the ability to generate revenue but you are starting to think about it. You are wrong.

600 - 1500 Followers - Your blog is starting to have content propagation power but it isn’t always predicable. Some posts will take off without reason while other posts that you put your heart into, just don’t pick up notes outside of your core audience. Like the day you wrote about the pain of losing your mother to cancer and it got 4 notes but the animated gif of a dog humping a Pikachu doll which you jacked from another Tumblr got 800 notes. You might even start bitching about how your content never gets on the radar yet that goddamn picture of the massive swarm of manta rays was on the radar 3 different times!!! Even though this phase is much faster than the last, it can feel slow because for the first time ever, your dashboard always has notes popping up in it. You finally realize that notes do not equal followers and you stop doing dumb shit like reblogging your own posts thinking for some reason that it will help. You start blogging up a storm at this point pissing off a huge amount of readers. Your content loses focus and you start doing anything you think people might like. You start answering questions publicly like you are one of the fucking Beatles which has ZERO value to your audience and a bunch of them unfollow you because they think you are a bit of a twat. You make a rant post about people unfollowing you and more people unfollow you because of it. At this point your blog does not have the ability to generate revenue even though you really think otherwise. You are still wrong. 

1500+ Followers - At this point your blog has a sustained content propagation level. You have a reasonable average notecount on posts and things become predictable. Your note spikes can be pretty high and your content might be getting picked up by blogs outside of Tumblr. You are probably already doing some really tacky bullshit and adding links to other content on every post (this can be done well but you are just milking hits out of your readers) thinking that it will increase your audience or get you more hits. Your audience devalues your content because of this but you don’t realize it because you find yourself too busy to measure ‘likes’ in relation to ‘reblogs’ or check on how often people simply delete what you created. You also fail to realize that even though you are picking up more and more followers, more and more of those are spam. You start a Facebook page for your blog like the world gives a fuck. They don’t. The only people that follow you on Facebook are avid readers that you just gave the ability to skip your page completely and read your content elsewhere yet when those same readers you ALREADY had click in from Facebook, you count that as extra traffic. It isn’t. At this point your blog doesn’t have the ability to generate revenue but you don’t believe me so I’ll say… maybe a few bucks a month and that’s probably from ads that you and your friends are clicking on. At best you are using Adsense and they will catch you and ban your account for this. You will post a rant titled “Fuck you Google” and send them an email promising at first that you didn’t do anything, and another later admitting that you may have clicked a few ads but promise that you won’t do it again. They don’t respond. At worst you have some horrendous ad network with dreadful flashing mouse cursor ads or autoplay Swiffer ads that scare the shit out of everyone. These ads pay 1 cent for 1,000-2,000 hits (I’m serious) but you think otherwise because you now think you are Mr. Ad Mogul. Months go by and you don’t hit the minimum $100 mark needed to get sent a check. 

5000+ Followers - It is up in the air from here. If you are lucky, your will has been broken by now and you can just shut the fuck up with all of the big time blog talk and go back to making the posts that built your core audience.  Bloggers go wrong when they forget what got them where they are. Hopefully you realize that people just like someone to find cool stuff for them so that they can reblog it. You start looking for cool content again and stop giving your opinion. You start to be aware of the world around you and credit the source and start reblogging other blogs that post related content.

Final note: Like I said before, I have been through much of this as well as witnessed blogger after blogger attempt to do these same things an outsmart the system. As far as understanding followers goes, I really do pay very close attention to these things. Pretty soon we will hit 500,000 followers and it’s reasonable that 1 million followers will happen this year. 

Tags: lol