Blogging with success

Keith Robinson had a recent article in his blog www.dkeithrobinson.com/asterisk/ an article about a successful blog. After reading the entry I pondered the message for a few days and today I read an article about service in Finnish leadership magazine Fakta and decided to form my own thoughts.

I have categorised the required items into two categories: crucial and good to have. If you fail with the crucial ones, you are doomed to be unsuccessful. If you fail with the good to have ones, your visitors do not get fully excited about your blog and you may loose them easier.

There is no good measurement for these things; it is more about how does it feel — about “the warm fuzzy feeling” or teddybear effect. People want to hug your blog.

First, let’s go with the crucial ones:

• Good content. You simply live or die with this one. If you cannot write anything interesting, why somebody would be interested in your writing? Be consistent, write to the point. Be witty. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it. Don’t allow your blog to degenerate into a link list or a collection of other people’s thoughts. Don’t get stuck to one or two subjects. Remember that to gather big amount of people to read your writing, you need to something that is universally interesting or has special appeal for certain niche.
• Update frequently. Have something to say at least once a week. If you update less frequently, people tend to slow down the pace for checking updates on your site.
• Know your audience and allow them to know you. Blogging is bi-directional activity. You write, they write. Provide thought provoking content and then get responded, argued and bashed by your audience. Interact with them! Show that you care that they care.
• Allow people to leave on better mood. People should be happier or wiser after leaving your blog. Serve them well, make the blog your labour of love. Be funny, be witty (once again), make people laugh (with you, not at you).
• Personality. You have to be a personal experience for your audience, not part of the masses. If you can’t spot the difference between your blog and randomly selected blogs, do something for it. Be proudly yourself and make friends through blogging.
• Get incoming links. Superb content doesn’t help, if nobody can find your blog. Post your links to several places, interact with people, get your blog to blogrolls, have proper Google rating and spread the word. Be so interesting that your audience spreads the word for you.
• Patience is virtue. No man is born as an angler. Learn while you go and publish your learnings, it makes your blog more interesting and can be really helpful for somebody in your audience. Don’t dream on success, act for it. But steadily, rushing will just repel your audience.

And then the good to have ones:

• Vocabulary and grammar. If you cannot write proper English or you have limited set of words in your arsenal, you are seen unintelligent. How’s that for a label? Study and practice. Being native in English doesn’t usually help, as you may still be bad with the language. I’m not native (and it sometimes shows), but I try my best and I’m going to improve over the time. Oh, one more thing: avoid profanity.
• Openness. Write about those things that you feel strongly. Remember that you don’t have to be open for every detail of your life — you act as in role; you are a blogger that may not be completely the same person as you are. If some topic is a sore spot for you, don’t touch it. Remember, onsistency and honesty are the keys here. You are not just writing a story, you are the story.
• Usable and well designed site. Your site has to provide means for visitors to go around and reach all the corners and dark alleys, the buried content. With ease. It doesn’t hurt, if your site is visually pleasing. These all add credibility for the site. Don’t get too excited with visuality, as world is already full of good looking blogs with not much content. Images add eye candy to your posts; use them wisely.

As the last advice: don’t overdo anything. Find the balance in content, design and attitude towards your audience.