The Making of a Successful Blog

How do you draw people to your blog? There are steps to help drive traffic to a site, but the first order of business is to write a blog that will compel visitors to return. And that, boys and girls, can be the hardest part.

Let's assume a knowledge of how to write using clear and acceptable grammatical styles. Without that basic skill, the chances of a popular, successful blog are negligible at best, and the chances of personal humiliation are high.

A successful blog is PERSONAL

The whole idea of a blog, successful or otherwise, is to speak your mind.

If life consists of Aunt Mabel and her affair with the tamale salesman two blocks over, plus you're a movie star with two Oscars and a pending Emmy award, what are you doing reading here? People will read anything you write, even if you're functionally illiterate.

If life is substantially more mundane, content can be a little more tricky. Believe it or not, though, writing about day-to-day life isn't a bad way to draw visitors to your site. When going through depression or a chronic situation or illness, chances are you are one of thousands - maybe millions - who can relate.

Eliminating any major diseases and assuming an average Joe (or Jane) working through life? Congratulations, and welcome to the Homo Sapien experience. That means the rest of the world can understand and appreciate the things that matter to you.

A successful blog is UNIQUE

For the average person, there are umpteen-million other bloggers out there who also are writing about their everyday lives. The single biggest step toward a successful blog is to figure out what makes your life (and therefore your blog) special enough for readers to visit on a regular basis. Why would John Doe go out of his way to read this blog? It's that quality (or qualities) that should be the focus of the TITLE, and of any PROMOTION for the blog.

Maybe you go through life on the Pollyanna premise - that everything is happy. In that instance, play on the fact with a title along the lines of, "So darned sweet and happy I come with insulin shots."

Or maybe you're the Eeyore of the blog set. Glum and gray, everything is tinged with calculated melancholy and a touch of sarcasm. In that case, play up the fact with something like, "Yeah, so I'm dead. So what?"

Those blog titles (or subtitles) tell potential readers a little of what to expect when they read. The first example lets people know that you choose an upbeat look on life, but that it's served up with a giggle or two along the way. And while the second option is sarcastic and morbid, it's got an edgy humor that sucks in both the savvy and the unsuspecting. Whatever title you choose, stick with that style for the look and content. Continuity is important to keep people coming back. And isn't that the definition of a successful blog?

A successful blog is ACCESSIBLE

Some bloggers inadvertently prevent people from ever finding them. The reality of life is that in order for random people to find a blog, it must appear on search engines. Unfortunately the search engines can also bring along spam. Blocking the spam is understandable. In some cases, though, blocking spam can block readers from finding you. If your number one concern is traffic to your blog, grin and bear it and delete the spam. Or if the blog site allows it, set the blog itself to guard against spam.

Another aspect of accessibility is in the blog's design. Maybe purple-on-purple incorporates your favorite colors. Maybe that same purple-on-purple design is so dark on Reader A's monitor that they give up trying to read. Maybe Reader B uses a Mac or Linux machine and when viewing the page on those computers, the layout overlaps and half the content is covered up by something else. Or maybe person C is on dial-up and an mp3 player on the blog locks up their computer, requiring them to reboot. You can bet they won't ever come back to read. Writing isn't successful if nobody can access to read it.

A successful blog incorporates PICTURES

Readers love pictures. The reader-preferred picture, however, is a photo of the person writing the blog, or family members thereof, or the car thereof, or the music box thereof, etc.

Music files are large and consume space and bandwidth. As readership grows, a single mp3 file can kill a page. Bandwidth means the amount of information uploaded/downloaded in a given amount of time. Video files, for example, are measured in megabytes. If a video is 50MB, and 100 people are downloading it simultaneously, it's eating 5,000MB (or about 5GB) of bandwidth just for the video. For some sites, that's more than enough to flip a switch .

Does that mean no audio or video files, ever? That depends on how much bandwidth the blog site allows, how many readers (or potential readers) are on dial-up Internet and how patient those readers are. If there are three videos on the page, and the average size per video is 100MB, anybody with dial up Internet is going to leave and never come back. If they see a video at all, it will be displayed in jerky segments with the sound out of sync.

A successful blog is PROMOTED

Promoting a blog can be handled several ways. Some paid blog sites offer banners and other advertising materials as part of the package. Paying an outside site for banner ads can get pricey and may not get a good response. Outside the scope of the blog community, banner ads tend to focus on business sites. If banners advertise a personal blog on an outside site, a visitor who clicks on the ad may just scratch their head upon arrival and say, "Huh?"

The beauty of a blog community is similar to AC. To draw people to a blog and make it successful, sometimes all it takes is a visit (and a note) to their blog.

When anyone takes a moment to comment on something someone has written, especially on something as personal as a blog, it stimulates the guilt gene in a big way. There is an unwritten expectation that the person whose page you visited should immediately visit your page. While it's not 100 percent, most of the time it works. By a steady diet of visiting other sites and promoting by banner or other means, chances are it won't be long until you've got a dedicated core of readers.

A successful blog is CONSISTENT

No blog (or other Internet site, for that matter) can hold readers with irregular or widely-spaced updates. Even the most dedicated reader will drop off the radar if there are no updates for three or four months. Daily postings, while ideal, aren't always possible. After all, real life is what blogs are about, and real life has a tendency to intrude on Internet writing time.

Updates should occur with reasonable frequency. If writing once a week, it's not a bad idea to post a headline on the page stating that this blog is updated weekly on [day]. That allows seven days to compile content, write and revise, check for inaccuracies, inflammatory comments, typos and bad judgment. Does that mean you shouldn't post at a midpoint? That depends. If the post in progress just got hijacked by something in the news, it's better to rewrite and post on schedule. But if life just dealt a personal newsflash that doesn't change the content in progress, go for it. Just don't let the other post slide, because readers will definitely let you hear about it!

And what happens when real life smacks you with one hellacious curve ball that knocks you offline for several days or weeks? If possible, leave just a few lines as soon as possible, giving a brief reason for the absence and (if available) an estimated time of return. If the situation doesn't allow, consider phoning a friend and asking them to post a short note to the effect that an emergency requires you to be out of commission for the next XX days.

Truth be told, for a daily blogger who goes a week without an update, there won't be a need to let readers know something's wrong. Readers will burn up email and phone lines (if they have your number,) trying to find out what happened.

A successful blog is in the eye of the beholder

The definition of a successful blog varies from one person to another. For one writer, a successful blog may mean enough page hits to generate a certain amount in ad revenues. Another author might be more concerned with the number and type of feedback notes generated by their entries. Yet another might prefer a balance between readership and anonymity.