Anne Truitt Zelenka

Through my blogging at Web Worker Daily, I got an email asking how to make a blog popular or hot. While my goal at Anne 2.0 is more personal expression than popularity, I have learned a few things about making a blog popular at Web Worker Daily:

1. Limit yourself to one topic. Your entire set of interests is unlikely to be matched by anyone else’s. Just because you like knitting, web development with Flash, Abyssinian cats, and geocaching doesn’t mean there’s a good set of readers for a knitting-Flash-Abyssinian-geocaching blog. Pick one area and stray outside it at your popularity’s peril. It can be broad (web workerhood is pretty broad) but if it is, it should be a broadly popular topic too.
2. Take a mainly objective stance towards the topic. Write like it could be out of a magazine. You might feel dumb at first, pretending like you know what you’re talking about. But that’s what people expect.
3. Eliminate the personal unless it is relevant to your topic. If you are interested in popularity rather personal expression, you shouldn’t be telling a whole lot of personal stories. What seems interesting and important to you about your own life probably isn’t all that interesting and important to your readers.
4. But let your personality show. If you are a little bit cynical and snarky, write that way. If you are a good-hearted and sweet person, let that run through each of your posts. If you are a crotchety curmudgeon, go with that. Be yourself; just don’t talk too much about yourself.
5. Think carefully about your headlines. I’m not a great headline writer yet–but I have realized their importance since beginning work on Web Worker Daily. With so many blogs competing for attention, you need to lure readers in and then fulfill whatever promise your headline holds. Check out Copyblogger’s 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work for tips.
6. Offer interesting links. This provides value to your reader way beyond what they get from just the words in your post. My most popular posts at Web Worker Daily have been those where I spent days or weeks collecting relevant links and then tied them all together into a comprehensive article. See 20 Different Ways to Manage Your To Dos and 10 New Ways to Make Money Online.
7. Try writing list posts. Why do people like list posts so much? Maybe because they offer obvious value to the reader. They’re also easy to scan for important points and they force the writer to organize her thoughts. List posts are much less likely to be rambling bullshit than a typical essay-type post.
8. Become a power commenter. On Web Worker Daily, we don’t need to do that to get attention. Instead, we have the power of GigaOmniMedia behind us. If you’re starting an individual blog, however, you’ll need to use different tactics. Build up a network one by one. Comment on posts you like. Reply to all comments you get. Read your commenters’ blogs.
9. Learn from the greats. My favorite bloggers on blogging are Darren Rowse of ProBlogger and Brian Clark of CopyBlogger. Check out Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users for a unique blog that’s raucously popular. Also, seek out the most popular bloggers in your topic domain and try to analyze why they’re successful.
10. Have fun! Your readers will be able to tell if you’re robotically following a list of tips from “how to make your blog popular” and your heart’s not in it. You need to love to write, to be passionate about the subject of your blog, and inspired by interactions with your commenters. It’s fun to write for a popular blog not because being popular is so fun in itself, but because it brings more of the same: more writing, more ideas, more people to interact with. So to wrap up… do it for fun, the popularity may follow.