I dish out a lot of advice about things you can do to grow your fanbase and create opportunities for yourself. But I probably don’t share actual success stories from comedians who have implemented my advice as much as I should.

So, I’m going to start sharing Connected Comedy success stories every once in a while. If you’ve implemented my suggestions and seen good results, please shoot me an email and tell me about your experience so I can include it in a future post.

To kick things off, here’s two recent success stories I’d like to share with you…

Comedian Marty Simpson Finds A Football Niche, A New Audience, And A Paying Gig!

Marty Simpson is a comedian and Connected Comedy reader who decided to take me up on my repeated advice to broaden his comedy content offerings. As a former University of South Carolina football player who is still passionate about the team, Marty decided to start blogging on his website about South Carolina football.

Marty recently reached out to tell me about what happened after he started doing this – here’s what he had to say:

“One of the first articles I wrote went “mini-viral” among Gamecock fans. The Sunday morning after I posted the blog I had 3,600 unique visitors and have averaged over 1,000 a day since! I was happy because, honestly, I just figured my normal 12 subscribers would read it.”

But getting more exposure for himself and his writing was just the beginning. Marty’s writing also caught the attention of GamecockCentral.com, which then hired him as a paid columnist to break down each week’s games. You can see his first column here.

And Marty’s not done yet as he hopes this will be a launching pad to bigger and better things.

“I am holding out hope that it could grow quickly into something bigger. Without your blog I would not really have even thought about leveraging my other areas of expertise into my content sharing/comedy career.”

Good luck, Marty. Keep me posted.

Comedian Ward Anderson Takes My 5 Day Challenge And Grows His Website Traffic By 1,000%

A couple weeks ago, I challenged readers to create content on their website for 5 days based on some specific suggestions and guaranteed that if you did it, you’d see a substantial increase in the number of visitors to your website.

Toronto-based comedian Ward Anderson took the challenge and emailed me the following update about his results:

My readership has been decent.  I went from 10 to 20 hits per day to an average of 50 to 70 hits per day.  One day I had 30.  One day I had 80.  But, in general, it averaged out at 60.  Not bad for one week and simply tagging things on facebook.  I posted the article links on fan pages, as well, whenever it was applicable, like “Comedy” fan pages on facebook.  I mean, that’s an increase of five times the hits.  So, even if I’m not getting thousands (yet) of hits, I still more than quadrupled what I was getting.

I’m going to keep posting something new, at least five days per week, and see if readership continues to increase.  It will be interesting to track it and see what happens.

After that initial email, Ward then wrote back to tell me that his traffic continued to grow and he’s now averaging 100 visitors a day. He also added that he’s found his list posts (which he calls “My Fives”) have consistently attracted the most traffic for him – something that reinforces my recommendation that you write lists in my article about 5 Types of Blog Posts That Get Good Traffic.

I look forward to sharing more Connected Comedy Success Stories with you soon – if you’ve had some success as a result of something you’ve learned on Connected Comedy, please email me and tell me about it.