If you’re on Spice Up Your Blog, then your interested enough to learn more about what you can do to make your blog better. The Internet is loaded with perhaps tens of thousands of blogs that deliver articles and content for a specific audience. Many are great, some of them are not really that intriguing. Maybe yours has gotten a lot of talk and shares within a small community, which is great.
But then you have to look at the blogs that really get a lot of attention; the blogs that speak to a large audience and are able to sustain themselves on the basis of its popularity. What kind of blogs am I talking about? I’m aiming pretty high, but think about the work of Mashable, Engadget, Perez Hilton; the big guns of the blogosphere.
The wrong thing to think is: “I’ll never get to where they are. They’ve been in the game for a much longer time and their resources are way beyond mine.” Sure, they have a lot to back them up, but it wasn’t always like that. The reason why these blogs are as widespread as they are is because they speak in a way the few can.
Whether you’re starting up or are still trying to break into the scene, there are plenty of considerations to be made that might turn some more heads. Every popular blog does things differently, but there are some universal characteristics as well.
1.Popular Blogs Have Relatable, Provoking Content
Look at any blog, and try to figure out why their content gets so much traffic and shares. The content is often provocative, provoking, and can strike up a conversation. The reason why Perez Hilton got as big as he did was that he (in his own ways) was able to get the juice on the celebrity world, and people couldn’t rush enough to it. That is not to say that your blog should be a hub of rumor and gossip, but it is helpful to see how Hilton wasn’t afraid to go after what he knew would bring eyes to his site.
Even more so, the content is accessible and relatable to the general public. Even Mashable, which is generally seen as a tech blog, has since branched out into various categories. The content in each of them is always first rate and to the point.
2.Popular Blogs Are Media Rich
This we all know. Big time blogs tend rely more on media than they do articles, since that’s really all people want anymore. Every year, the Internet audience wants a quicker channel to gratification, and whether you like it or not, reading is losing momentum.
This would explain the explosion of infographics throughout the past year or two, and even that has gotten the attention of Matt Cutts at Google. Cutts said a few months ago that he would start taking away some of the “juice” that Google gives to infographics, especially if the information is inaccurate.
Regardless of that, big blogs are loaded with media, and the audience eats it all up in a flash. That’s not to say that there is no written content at all, but it instead acts as an anchor rather that the primary medium.
3.Popular Blogs Aren’t Too Specific
This point is a bit difficult to access since some blog owners don’t really care so much about gaining thousands of followers, but really just want to share about their specific expertise. Please, don’t make any compromises with that. There are some blogs that make it clear they are trying to surpass that barrier to entry for popularity, but just can’t seem to get enough behind them.
It’s tough, I know. But when you look at the big picture of blogging, there are few blogs that gain a big following when it’s an extreme niche. Many successful niche blogs don’t go too deep. For instance, if you look at blogs from New York City covering a music scene, many of them cover all around genres of burroughs of the city. A blog that covers various scene of Brooklyn will more than likely get more attention than a blog covering the experimental/avant-garde scene in the area. Still, that content can be covered in the all around blog, and nothing is left behind.
There are so many other factors behind successful blogs, many of which can’t even really be described in accurate ways. You could say that many were just started at the right time, and everything just took care of itself. Stay proactive, pay attention to the trends of others, and keep plugging away!
By Guest Author – Doug Glaston is a blogger and internet marketer involved in content creation for DirecTV from Aspire, as well as a writer in tech and social media.
