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Whatever your goals are for having a blog, there are a general set of Key Success Factors to reaching those goals.
Your blog must be:
- Remarkable–A unique viewpoint, a rare tip, a useful resource (e.g., “flagship” content). All of these things (and others) make your blog remarkable. Simple rehashing of content found elsewhere is much less remarkable but generous linking out to useful content goes a long way to making your blog remarkable.
- Easy to understand–A blog is an “engaging” (i.e., a dialogue between you and your subscribers) and a “transmitting” (i.e., a vehicle to convey your thoughts) medium. A prerequisite to both is that your blog must be easy to understand. Get away from jargon (unless your audience is generally familiar with such jargon).
- Elegant looking–A blog should be elegant. Elegant design goes a long way to generating inbound links from other sites. People view elegant looking websites as conveying more authority and “expertness”.
- Linkable–All of the previous key success factors make your blog “linkable”. Links are the currency of the web (how many times have you heard that?) and without them, your blog voice will never be heard.
[I tip my hat on this post to Chris Garret for his excellent article on creating Killer Flagship Content (where I got the idea for KSFs) and Jeremy Wright's Blog Marketing book (for the discussion on "engaging" versus "transmitting" websites).]
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collis 02.28.07 at 10:35 pm
I think the ‘remarkable’ bit is a real key. I view so many blogs daily and most replicate other blogs. The most common thing being to find a successful blog and then emulate. The problem is that although that might have worked for the original A-list blogger, theres no reason to subscribe to the immitation when the real thing is just a click away…
Philip Liu 03.01.07 at 5:45 pm
I don’t think emulation is a bad way to go. Emulate is different than “copy”. There are many differences in niche topics that one can focus on differently.