How do you have a popular blog? The answer looks simple to me, and is the answer to a similiar question: How do you get people to be interested in what you?
Be interesting. That’s it.
It’s a simple answer, but it’s not easy. You can break it further down; be interesting by doing interesting things or writing about things in an interesting way. Preferably both.
Do Interesting Things
Nobody wants to read about boring things. Chris Guillebeau travels the world and writes about it on his blog The Art of Nonconformity.
Write Interestingly
Not everyone of us can travel the world, but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to a boring blog. Frank Chimero writes about design and creativity, and he writes about them so beautifully his blog is a delight to read.
Do Interesting Things x Write Interestingly
The most interesting bloggers are the ones who do both. They do interesting things and write about them in interesting ways. David duChemin is a photographer who travels the world, and he writes about photography and living with passion. It’s an unexpected mix, but it sure is an interesting one.
The combination of doing interesting things and writing about them in interesting ways helps make a blog popular, but to aim for popularity as the goal first would most certainly be uninteresting. Instead, aim to do interesting things and write about them interestingly.
1. How do you make people interested? Do interesting things. A friend of mine writes about making natural remedies. Another is writing about his experiments with apartment block gardening. Both are amazing. As Benjamin Franklin once said: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
2. Keep going. Great new blogs get started all the time. Unfortunately for the world they fizzle out after the first few months.
3. Define success on your own terms. Just what the hell does a madly successful blog mean anyway? Millions of readers a day? Billions of sales revenue? It’s hard to work towards a goal when you have no idea what the goal is. Who do you write for, and what would you continue writing for if neither money nor fame was an issue?
It’s never been easier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly successful one?
To cobble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in ourselves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remarkable insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Without either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.
To ask how to gain a unique voice and remarkable insight is missing the boat: If there was a step-by-step formula anyone could follow, the end result would be a crowd neither unique nor remarkable. To have both requires personal thought and experience at the very least, both of which you can neither skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of expertise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the context of creativity:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Or as Benjamin Franklin succinctly summed up: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Having some fun looking through what I wrote in 21 for the year of 2009. There aren’t a lot of posts, 44 in total for the entire 12 months (posting frequency was an issue, heh) but there are some in here that I’m pretty happy with.
Traces of Life Coaches Blog remained, with personal growth posts like The 3 Decluttering Boxes in January. I ventured into more poetic and personal writing like East Coast Night in February, which was something I wanted to do more of. I’m proud of the Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure post I published in March, I spent a lot of time making it as good as I could and it encapsulates a lot of what I think about martial arts and self-defense training today.
The 2 Ultimate Secrets to Blogging Like a Rock Star (Hint: it’s Not What You Want to Hear) in April was awesome, if I do say so myself. This was another post I spent a lot of time crafting, and I love how it combines snark with some serious thoughts about blogging well.
Lessons Learned at 30 was written in May, the month of my birthday in the year I turned the big three-oh. It was written in a rather reflective mood, imagining what advice I would give if I had the chance to speak to a younger me. I look forward to writing Lessons Learned at 40 a decade later, I wonder what I’ll have to say then.
I’ve been writing here in 21 for about a year before I discovered a direction I’m comfortable with going for the next year or so, and that’s about living the creative life.
It seems obvious in retrospect – I’m a full-time writer who’s also been a full-time 3D artist, who studied digital media design in school and loves creative arts like graphic design and photography. Big duh.
But I always thought of them as separate things (well, they are). Subdued by the belief that only people who specialize are serious professionals, I thought of myself as a wannabe Jack-of-all-trades goofball, instead of realizing that the one denominator that links all of them up is the act of creativity.
So there it is. I dig the creative act and I want to write more about it. Thing is, I don’t think I would have been able to figure that far out if I hadn’t been writing about random topics at 21. The act of writing, thinking and looking back at what I’ve written has been as much a journey of self-discovery as it has been an act of self-expression.
And that’s one unfortunate aspect, I think, of some of the blogs out there that are trying to make it too hard, too fast. They specialize too early and then lock themselves in, without allowing themselves the chance to grow, explore and change.