This post has been submitted by Neil Patel. Neil is co-founder and CTO of ACS) and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising.
Engadget, The Huffington Post, Boing Boing, and TechCrunch all share the common thread of being wildly popular and successful. While that seems entirely wonderful and we’d all hope for the same thing with our blog, the reality is that most of us will never have blogs that popular. I’m hoping that people will step up and prove me wrong and to give everybody a head start, here are some things we can all learn from the success of these blogs:
1. There is nothing wrong with blogging once a week, but the more you blog the more traffic you will receive. All of these blogs put some merit in quantity and blog a ton of content, yet they try and not sacrifice on quality either. This isn’t easy to accomplish by any means, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that quantity doesn’t matter.
2. Like any normal business, you are going to have a good amount of competitors or in this case people writing about the same thing and fighting for those RSS subscribers. Again, like any normal business you need to carve a niche of your own and really differentiate yourself in the crowd. Pick a passion and become a thought leader within the confines of your niche and your blog will grow in popularity.
3. If you want to make tons of ad revenue you need to focus the topic of your blog and capture a highly targeted audience. This will put you in the right place to charge more money for every thousand ad impressions. Another great thing about focusing your blog on a specific subject is that you also start making money from contextual ads such as AdSense or YPN.
4. Breaking news is an important factor to the success of a blog. If you can scoop others and break news first people will see much more value in your blog. Once you start growing your audience, others will start tipping you off however until this happens you’ll have to put in a lot of effort and let your fingers do the walking in order to get these scoops.
Creating a successful blog isn’t easy, but it is not impossible either. Just like any other business, you want to learn from others who have had great success and more importantly learn from others who have had multiple failures. If you can spot why blogs succeed and others fail you can increase your chances of success. Take a moment to really examine the successful and not-so successful blogs and try to figure out what works out there.
