The Jason Salas Experience

A few weeks back I interviewed my friend Leo Babauta on my station's live television talk show.  We discussed, among other things, the mammoth following his blog ZenHabits has amassed in a fairly short amount of time.  His site offers suggestions on topics such as self-help, healthy living, stress management, increasing productivity and lifehacking.  With such a diverse scope and relevance to anyone willing to consider its teachings, ZenHabits has built up quite the sizable fan base. 

Leo can boast about having nearly 79,000 users subscribing to his RSS feed, better than 4,500 people following him on Twitter and scores more befriending him on Facebook.  Leo's site traffic outpaces that of TV news affiliates for Guam and Honolulu.  He's constantly a happy victim to The Digg Effect, and referenced in perpetuity by mavens like Steve Rubel.  His readership now almost eclipses the circulation of the newspaper where he previously worked.  The revenue he earns from AdSense allowed him to quit his day job and support his family by blogging full-time.  His digital labors even gave rise to a real world spin-off product, landing him a book deal.

All of these metrics are unprecedented for a small market like Guam.

His achievements and rise to prominence as a constantly bookmarkworthy destination is a classic case of a local boy done good...by not staying local. 

I have fun everyday doing neat things at KUAM.com with content delivery, pushing our local news coverage out in a ton of different formats and over a variety of digital devices, but I always eventually reach a point where I can't expand our audience anymore.  With our target audience being those interested in what happens in Guam, the interest in our information is finite, and with Guam being a small market, with a set scope. 

Guam's got about 150,000 residents living here without about that same number of ex-pats scattered across the globe.  We've satisfied as many people as can be and that's it - at some point our exposure inevitably taps out.  So much to my chagrin I'm forced to live with the burden of limited reach.

Leo's secret sauce is that he broadened the scope of relevance of his information by not confining it to a specific community.  His posts, not unlike the Zen his domain preaches, are universal in their appeal.  He's made a living for himself by writing about things everyone can enjoy.

I was reminded of the power of having a truly global audience this past May in covering Guam's participation in the Clinton/Obama presidential caucus.  With Guam 17 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast all eyes were on us, so our web traffic saw a spike unlike anything before.  Over the next 40 hours KUAM.com served up more page requests than it ever had in any previous month, and that included that past January - itself a record-setting period due to a local election and the accompanying aftermath.  Our traffic quadrupled that previous high water mark because the world, even if for a fleeting moment, took interest in what was happening out here. 

Immediately after our load returned to normalcy and we resumed serving our prime userbase, operating in our little predictable sandbox.  But it was one of those rare times when we were able to truly tap the global online audience.  For a moment, I got a glimpse of what eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google and the other web heavyweights go through each and everyday with tons of people logging on from everywhere.  Various events have drawn such surges in visitations (i.e., military accidents, visits by delegates, odd and offbeat headlines, etc.), but those are rare.

So I appreciate and applaud Leo for his ability to sustain success and grow his audience.  I'm incredibly proud someone from our island has attained such notoriety and is rightfully reaping rewards for his efforts.  Being able to build an online business by taking advantage of the 'Net's worldwide connectedness - a theory so often taught in web marketing but so rarely actually put into practice - makes for a great case study.

Leo's figured out that the key is building community while not being trapped to the limitations of infrastructure, platform or geography.  Make that happen for your own project and you've got yourself a winner.

// posted by Jason Salas @ 11:00 PM