The Secret of Popular Blogs
I’ve discovered the secret of making a blog popular. You’re not going to like the answer. Mainly because the answer is a few hundred words of me ranting: but herein lies wisdom I have recently accrued through my adventures in blogging.
The story begins when I started writing on DailyJS. With no bullshitting around it has almost 1400 feed subscribers. Granted, that’s not massively popular by any means, but it’s more popular than any other blog I’ve started. It’s actually pretty stellar given how many readers most blogs get.
However, it’s 2010 and blogs are old news, so if you’re thinking about starting a blog and reaching Copyblogger numbers and sitting on a beach living off Google Ads money, I can’t help you. If you want to start a blog on a topic you’re passionate about, I have some advice.
Niche is Important
DailyJS is a blog all about JavaScript. JavaScript is going through a transitional stage and becoming more popular, so people are interested in reading more about it. As I’m excited about the area, and there aren’t many exceptional blogs with original content, I thought it would be a great idea to write about it.
If your niche is too broad thinking up good posts can be difficult. If it’s too focused you just won’t have much to write about. If you really are passionate about a relatively obscure niche, you might be surprised at how much you can find to write about.
For example, Centauri Dreams is about deep–space exploration, which isn’t high up on most people’s lists of things to do or read about. Despite this, the author mines all kinds of space–related publications and events and finds incredible content. He blogs about it daily!
Content that Writes Itself
A regular series can be great for generating articles. I’m writing about building a JavaScript framework — it’s a lot of work but the content writes itself.
Avoid Bullshitting Around
When you’ve just started your blog, post it to relevant social networks. Relevant is important. I slaved over a detailed post in the early days of DailyJS and posted it to reddit, and I got an incredible response. There’s a lot of programmers on reddit, so they appreciated my article. It would have been totally buried on Digg — in fact, a lot of the readers might feel I was just trying to get traffic.
Of course, technically you are trying to get traffic — you’re not writing a blog to entertain your keyboard and web server. There’s a difference between politely sharing a new site and trying to get all your buddies to game Digg.
Post every day and carefully hand pick the articles you want to share. If it doesn’t work, stop sharing before you make an idiot of yourself. Plus, once you’ve got some readers people will share for you — one of my articles got high up on Hacker News, but I didn’t even know until I saw my stats.
Buttons
Social network buttons are a load of shit. They look idiotic and some even slow down page loading. I had reddit buttons on DailyJS because I wanted to make it clear that I like reddit. It didn’t increase the number of reddits, but I did like supporting reddit.
It’s worth remembering that people want to be the first to post your blog to a social network. They want the kudos of being the original person on Digg who posted something that got 300 diggs.
If you have a button on your site, readers probably already dug it before visiting the article — I digg and reddit things so I can read them later.
Guest Posts
Review your stats to see what the biggest referrers are. It’s nice to say thanks to people for featuring your posts, and this can lead to useful relationships for future articles.
We’ve had a few guest posts on DailyJS. They’re good because they bring in new audiences, based on the author’s audience. Even regular programmers have an audience — if someone has a few hundred GitHub followers that can be as useful as hundreds of Twitter followers. You don’t have to reach a rockstar hacker to have some impact.
Work Like a Bastard
I love writing but after 7–9 hours work programming, spending another 1 or 2 hours writing can be tough. If you can’t do this then your blog isn’t going to be any more popular than the one you’re reading. That’s fine depending on what your goals are.
Keep it up for a few months as well. Even though Internet trends start and die overnight, a blog with well–written content may take a while to gather steam. I’ve given up on unpopular blogs after 6 months of solid writing. That might even be too much.
The Secret
Sadly there isn’t one succinct secret; one nugget of money–printing truth. And finding a niche, planning your content and working hard sound like obvious tips. In fact, Copyblogger probably wrote about this 3 years ago when people were still excited about blogs.
But let’s be realistic: you aren’t helping yourself if you choose to be too broad and end up writing about nothing.