Blogging Your Way to Success

Introduction

As the profile of blogging is reaching new heights and millions of new blogs are created each year I think it’s about time to start asking some questions, like: who are all these people? What are they saying? And why are they inviting random web users to read their writing, view their images and videos and asking them to post their own opinions about it all? I believe that most of these people have a story to share and the blog is the medium in which they have chosen to do it. I think that each blogger defines success differently, but that each blog is an attempt to create a body of work that achieves that success. Whether it is measured in how many times they can make Aunt Trudy laugh or whether they are seeking to support a family of five on a blogger’s salary, I believe that most bloggers share a common goal: success. My goal in this post is to define success and to give my audience some tips on how to achieve that success.

Success for some might mean an office with a view.  Image: stufftuftspeoplelike.com

Blogging is becoming an increasingly popular way to write and publish rhetoric. According to Nielsen, in October 2011, there were over 181 million blogs worldwide (blog.nielsen.com). There also seems to be an audience for all this digital text. Wordpress reports over 2.5 billion page views a month on Wordpress blogs alone (wordpress.com). These are staggering statistics, considering that most bloggers have only been sharing their ideas online for four years or less (technorati.com). Blogging is such a new tool for creating rhetoric that even the so-called experts on the exercise of blogging have relatively little practical or analytical experience. 

There is no shortage of information on the web, however, about how to create a successful blog. In fact, entire blogs, such as problogger.net, have created blogs on blogging. But much of the advice derived from these websites comes with a caveat: this works for my blog, but no two blogs are the same. What works for me might not always work for you. It is in this spirit that I offer my analysis of what it takes to create a successful blog. I attempted to focus on the fundamentals – some of the most basic elements of creating a blog such as gaining traffic, holding an audience and perhaps even making a modest income from a blog. This is by no means a comprehensive list of success strategies, but merely a kind of introduction, a big toe placed gingerly in the vast ocean of the world of blogs.

Defining a Blog

Blogs live on the web, but they’re not like your typical commercial website. Blogs are set up specifically to create fresh content on an ongoing basis. Often, the audience is invited to share opinions in the form of comments. Blogs are generally easy to set up and several free versions of blogging software are available. Blogs began as a way for the average person to express his/her opinions to the world. But they are increasingly becoming the domains of powerful interest groups and corporations. Blogs range from the personal diary of a dog named Wimsey to a blog by a group of oil company executives, no doubt edited by some of the smartest “word guys” in the communications business.

Here you will find a compilation of a few quotes from around the web. They all pretty much say the same thing, which is that blogs allow rhetoric to be posted online, generally in chronological order, by almost anyone with a computer and an internet connection. The focus of a blog is the rhetoric and the audience for that rhetoric is generally reading it in order to engage in a specific topic. There are blogs for all kinds of things, from poetry to pottery. 

Blogs differ from news outlets in that they can generally offer opinions, rather than unbiased works, as the majority of the text. The focus of a blog is typically an online, rather than a print, audience. Bloggers are rarely held to the same standards as a journalist writing for a traditional print, radio or television organization, though this is not always true. Often, journalists are also bloggers. They may write blogs on their own, or write individual posts for various news organizations. The lines between blogs and news are certainly beginning to blur. Perhaps the best way to describe the difference is that all journalists could be bloggers, but not all bloggers could be journalists.

An often cited example of that blurring line is the HuffingtonPost, which seems to be having it both ways. It is an “online newspaper” and a blog. Whatever you call it, most bloggers would certainly like to have the traffic that the Huffington Post creates with its daily dishes and digs.

Defining Success

First I believe the word “success” must be defined. In the online world, this seems to be a murky term. Who can forget the “dot-com bubble” in the 1990’s? Billions of dollars were lost on companies whose success was measured by visitor traffic instead of hard data, such as how much actual revenue these companies were bringing in. In the short term, many of these companies were successful, being able to raise billions of dollars in venture capital. But in the long run, many failed miserably.

In my random searches on the term “blog” I have come across dozens of seemingly abandoned, or ghost, blogs – websites whose last post was in 2009. But there are also those bloggers out there who have been blogging every day for two years and who have less than twenty followers. Is this success? Not unlike the dot-com bombs, it seems like only a matter of time before these bloggers burn through their motivation and eventually decide that they’d rather spend their time doing other things, like making money or pottery or waxing their legs.

In their survey of over a thousand bloggers around the world, Technorati compiled the following graphic:

The x-axis shows percentage of respondents who measured success by the terms on the y-axis. Graphic: Technorati.com

It should be noted that the dark blue bar represents "All" bloggers that took part in the survey. Obviously, numbers matter a lot to a majority of bloggers. But "personal satisfaction" ranked the highest for all bloggers. Personal satisfaction may be as hard to measure as success. In this survey there is no clear indication what makes blogging satisfying. But it's telling that so many find intrinsic benefits in the act of blogging.

Numbers, by contrast, paint a completely different picture. Statistics such as unique visitors, page views, number of subscribers, etc. are easily measurable and seem to be of high importance to bloggers, no matter what their genre. More than half measured success by the number of unique visitors to their blog. This would seem to indicate that the goal of sharing information with as many people as possible ranks high as a measure of success. Likewise, sharing of their content on other websites ranks high on the scale of success. And interaction among readers on their blog in the form of comments also ranked high.

This may be how bloggers measure success, but what does that success actually look like? If you measure success by the size of your audience and that audience is only ten people a day, is that success? Furthermore, what does a successful blog look like? Click here to learn more about what it takes to create a successful blog.