You’ve seen them – the content-mill blog with a hundred posts a month, none of them good, selling posts to advertisers and doing nothing else for the world. Or the blog with 6 posts, from 2011, and nothing since. As bloggers, we have a number of goals. We want to deliver a message, develop a following, and make money. When any one of these goals is neglected, it jeopardizes the whole enterprise. The only way to make blogging worth it is to balance each of these necessities, the elements of the well-made blog. Whether you run a finance blog or a makeup site, these rules apply to you.
It has been estimated that 95% of blogs fail. Don’t let your blog be among their number.
- Blog With Purpose. Have a message and stick to it. Offer your readers real value. This is the quality Your identity as a blogger should be more than the sum of your SEO analytics. It should have something to do with who you are as a person. What do you have to offer the world? What is your area of expertise? What can you talk about for hours? Blogs without a clear purpose founder. They don’t draw fresh readership because no one has any reason in particular to seek you out. Stand for something or you’ll stand for nothing. Also, invest in good material. This is either an investment of your own time and skills or in the service of talented writers. Your blog is only as good as its content, and unless you keep it stocked with intentional material, it won’t work for long.
- Blog a Lot. The best bloggers have invested thousands of hours in their space. It is a real business, and these people are hardened entrepreneurs. Now that you’ve got quantity down, start working on quantity. Have great material circulating through your server weekly, daily, or more. You will develop an audience that connects to your passion, to the fact that you constantly deliver on your given niche. This is how you become an authority on a subject.
- Blog With Exclusive Content. This is the only way to elevate yourself from the pack. There are thousands of middling blogs, all covering the same issues. What separates the wheat from the chaff? Unique content. Do you have the reach and the ambition to get interviews with real industry players? Do you have the journalism skills to find out about breaking news in your field before the blogroll works the story to death? Are you more up to date on your niche than literally any other writer in the world? If you can say ‘yes’ to any of the above, then you are likely already one of the internet’s top bloggers in your area of expertise, or on your way to becoming one. If your answer is ‘no’ then you’ve got a lot of room to grow.
Blogging is the logical conclusion of traditional journalism. As with the journalists of yore, the world’s best bloggers are people who deliver unique content, reliably and often. By taking these attributes into the construction of your blog, you will buy yourself staying power. You will be a thought leader in your field. And you will have a career. What more could you want? Not everybody can pull this off, but if you are serious about blogging, you should think long and hard about these qualities that make a good blog great.
