Yeah, that number puzzled me. But that number is right!
The title of this e-book is “How I Got 100,000 Subscribers in Two Years: Lessons from Zen Habits.”
But wait. I just went to check his blog. As of today, the subscriber number has increased 75% since the time the e-book was published. It’s 175,000 now.
The sad part to me came from the fact that I didn’t know anything about this guy. Leo Babauta.
To me, he came out from nowhere.
I never heard his name, never read about him in Technorati Lists for example, and basically no one that I know in and out of the Internet ever mentioned about him until I join Problogger community.
When I got my copy of 31DBBB e-book, Darren Rowse added his interview with Leo as a free bonus. But honestly, I really didn’t have time to listen to that interview yet, the same reason I haven’t completed the 31 tasks of Darren’s e-book.
I got interested in Leo simply because Darren wrote an introduction about him on Problogger.net yesterday, promoting an upcoming boot-camp for bloggers that will start in a few hours from now.
The most amazing part, however, was what I found when I visited his Zen Habits blog for the first time after reading Darren’s post.
I really love the simple design and of course, I love its contents even though I haven’t had a chance to go through the whole contents myself.
By reading Darren’s post and clicking through the links I also landed in the download section of his e-book above. It’s only 37 pages, and it took me less than an hour to get through the book and this is what I have learned:
- Leo Babauta, started blogging in January 2007.
- That was 18 months after I started my first blog.
But as soon as I finished reading his e-book, I realized what has separated us, putting him sky high with almost 175,000 subscribers and me deep down in a dark hole with no subscriber. 
Basically, aside from my language handicap, in my first blog I was doing internet panhandling, while Leo was providing solutions to solve people’s problems.
No matter how noble the reasons were, panhandling took me nowhere, eventhough down the road I helped others building their blog and promoting their charity, or soliciting helps for people in need.
Panhandling was the reasons that have put me down the sink into the deep hole, since it went against the first point that Leo has asked his e-book readers to focus on. To me what Leo has written simply means: “Be the source, not the sink! Be the giver, not the receiver!”
If we go through the three things Leo asked us to focus on, then I can summarize it this way:
- Be the source with great content that are:
- relevant to your potential readers,
- extremely useful, pack with information they need,
- coincise and not too wordy
- accessible, scanable and have great headlines
- Be the source to promote your blog with great content
- Be the source that:
- Write for the readers,
- not for you or about you
- write for things they care or they need
If we follow what he wrote and focus on these three things, our blog would become the source, not the sink the way mine were when I asked people to help other people by donating money.
My next suggestion is, download the e-book here and read it yourself. Then come back to share with us your impression here.
If it’s not too late, please check the information about the boot-camp. Too bad I don’t have time to participate this time.
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