Pssst! Want to have a more popular
blog? Add 300 hits a day in just a few days or your money back? Without even
mentioning sex?
There is no real secret to blog popularity. It requires a mix of focus,
timing, good content and self-promotion. Like any product, your blog has
to fill a void, a need, in the blogosphere. When a new topic of great interest
arises, you need to be first, and to be seen to be first, to offer either
excellent links to sites on that topic (if yours is a 'linker' blog), or
original insight, research or analysis on that topic (if yours is a 'thinker'
blog).
Two principles, which I've written about
before,
mitigate against 'breakout' blogs and must be overcome to break out. Shirky's
Power Law basically says that, once a community of blogs (or of anything
else) has been established, it gets harder and harder for newcomers to "break
in". It's like trying to start a new daily paper in a saturated market. And
Gladwell's Tipping Point says that, in order for your blog to be 'contagious',
so that word of it spreads like wildfire or like a virus, you need to have
three things going for you:
- A memorable theme or style or some other attribute that
gives your blog 'stickiness', so people remember it and come back regularly
after they see it the first time,
- A well-tested and consistent writing process that has been
proven to build allegiance and regular readers, and
- An infectious quality that leads readers to recommend your blog
to their readers in words that their readers relate to.
I recently did some research of my own, on seven 'breakout' blogs that suddenly
soared in popularity, to see what their lessons were. Here are their stories:
The Agonist
: Sean-Paul's blog started last year with the purpose of discussing and analyzing
political events. When the Iraq War started, however, he chose to become
the first to aggregate and report the minutiae of the war: minute-by-minute
details of troop movements and other events, with no waiting, no analysis,
no repetition, something not even CNN was doing. This kind of one-stop-shopping
detail is addictive to war fans, and Sean-Paul was quickly racking up
two million hits per day, posting new details on average every ninety
seconds. First, unique, and consistent (he was apologizing for taking
bathroom breaks). He's still incredibly prolific, posting dozens of times
per day.
The Agora: Doug Anders' Salon blog averaged a decent 50-100 hits a day
until his blog appeared alphabetically at the top of the blogroll of the
above-noted Agonist's blog. The exhaust alone of appearing at the top of
the blogroll of the most active blog on the blogosphere increased Doug's traffic
by an order of magnitude. Doug got noticed and blogrolled by an
A-list blogger. Doing so requires self-promotion and tact. You have to
write something that the A-lister would want to report to his/her readers
(some original research, exceptional compilation of useful links, great synopsis,
great find, unique insight etc. on the subject the A-lister normally writes
about that he/she doesn't have the time to do). This involves real
work, not just providing a few links or personal commentary, no matter
how high their quality. Once you've 'broken out' you need to sustain that
hard work to stay on the A-lister's blogroll and keep the traffic coming.
Alas, the Agora appears to be currently down for technical reasons.
Marprelate Tracts
: This Salon blog had started as an interesting but rarely-read political
'linker' blog.. But Martin Marprelate was one of the first to offer
a substantial and well-researched, well-considered philosophical explanation
of a hot topic -- the Matrix Reloaded movie. Google did the rest,
moving him from an average of 50-100 hits a day to over a thousand a day
over the last two weeks, including dozens of daily visits from each of a
small hard core of Matrix fanatics.
SARSWatch
: Originally done for a lark by Tim Bishop as an adjunct to his political
Geodog
blog because no one else was writing about the disease, SARSWatch became
so popular so fast that Tim gave up Geodog, trademarked the name SARSWatch,
and devoted his full time and attention to aggregating news on SARS. Averaging
over 6,000 hits per day, this site was the first to pull together in
one place all of the news and data on SARS worldwide. Interestingly, he's
started recommending the Agonist's SARS site as a backup so he can take a
break from time to time.
The Gothamist
: This is a group blog focused on first-hand reporting of New York City events.
New York based A-list bloggers like kottke
and anil dash
merely mentioned the group's unique and original photos of city
celebs at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in their 'remainder' sidebars,
and Gothamist jumped to the top of the Technorati Interesting Recent Blogs
list.
J-Walk Blog
: This quirky blog is by John Walkenbach, a guy who really digs into
the Internet to find the weird and wonderful. He rarely reports news, favouring
product websites with unusual offerings, and humorous writing. One of his
original compositions, a clever spoof of the notorious Nigerian
e-mail scam, caught the interest of A-lister
slashdot
and brought a 10-fold increase in daily hits and an amazing 35 new inbound
bloglinks in one day for John's site.
Whiskey Bar
: Blogger and humour writer Billmon did some exhaustive research
and came up with a series of
chronologies
of all the major quotes by the Bush administration on WMD and other lies
about Iraq. The political A-listers like
daily kos
lapped it up, and Billmon's incoming blogroll has ballooned to over 300
(putting him in the top 100 of all blogs in the world) as a result. Read the
adoring comments appended to the chronology link above -- this guy now has
an audience for his plays, which is what his blog is really about.
If you want to study some more breakout blogs for more ideas, look at Technorati's
Interesting
Recent Blogs
list each morning (it changes every day). For each breakout blog listed,
look at the five largest blogs that have recently linked to each (they're
listed directly underneath them) to see what has caught readers' attention.
In summary, the top six techniques seem to be:
- Do some real research to create new insight on a topic many
people care about. This will take a lot of time and hard work.
- Be the first to write extensively on some new and important
or interesting subject.
- Write very clever, incisive, original material on topical subjects.
- Do something completely novel that isn't available on other
blogs or in the media.
- Ensure you're noticed by the appropriate A-listers by e-mailing
them with a brief message linking to one excellent post you've
written (I've tried this -- it works).
- Once your blog has broken out, reinforce and refresh it by repeating
whichever of the five techniques above that got you there.
Not easy, and, like giving up your beloved poetry-writing to make a living
writing a Celebrity Watch column, it may require you to compromise your writing
principles somewhat. But if you have talent, patience, technique, timing and
something unique and interesting to say, you too can have a breakout blog.
Until then, don't give up your day job. When it happens, you may have
to give up your day job to keep up the good work. That's my excuse
for staying below breakout status, and I'm sticking with it.
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