What a good question! Why would someone dedicate hours of their free time to writing for (usually) no profit? Blogging can be extremely time-consuming, as I've recently found out, and kind of a hassle. You probably won't get very many views, and maybe it's just been my experience, but you will get made fun of constantly for blogging.
Constantly.
So why do almost 200 million people around the world do it? There are actually quite a few reasons someone might blog. The most obvious answer is "to have a voice." People are becoming more and more me-oriented these days, and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. People want to be heard, they want their thoughts and opinions to be out there, and they want the opportunity to build an audience. Blogging offers a way to escape the anonymity of market research and offer an opinion, any opinion, about any product or topic, in any way, and put a face behind it. People want to be able to communicate with the people they WANT to communicate with, people they agree with or people they disagree with, and they want to be able to do it from behind the safety of a computer screen and a gravitar (for better or worse). People want to be heard.
Some bloggers are professional bloggers; Perez Hilton, for example, has turned a fascination with celebrities and seminal fluid into not just a career as a blogger, but now as a television personality himself. Arianna Huffington and her crew have created a media empire blogging, using the blog platform to infuse some small journalistic credibility into the blogosphere.
Some bloggers are professional something-elsers, using blogs to either complement their work outside of the internet, as in the case of photographer Patrick Smith, or to merely document/discuss it, as with every asshole celebrity with a laptop.
Some bloggers are even using blogs to become professional something-elsers. A blog is a good way to build up a portfolio quickly and easily, post it for employers to see, and hope for the best. Music blogger Dillon Nestadt, for example, hopes to turn his mediocre blog into a career at a music magazine, and leave behind the cutthroat world of blogging. Brian Stelter of TVNewser has successfully parlayed hours of blogging into a job with the New York Times, proving that it can be done if you're willing to sacrifice the time.
Some bloggers are taking classes in new media, and are blogging as homework assignments, as with all of these people. Some may continue blogging afterwards, some may not.
The Secrets of Great Blogs
There is not a science to blogging, no specific way to make your blog great. In fact, even if your blog WAS great, there is absolutely no guarantee that people would read it; conversely, most blogs out there, even the popular blogs out there, are utter shit. However, having a good blog is probably the first step to building an audience, or at least in the first six or seven steps.
Maybe top ten.
However, great blogs do have a few things in common, a few requisites to making them truly great. Great blogs can not only build an audience, but maintain the audience. They foster a sense of community, and a sense of communication; in fact, some blogs are more notable for their discussion boards than the original posts, such as 4chan, which is almost entirely community-driven. While not all blogs embrace community, the most successful ones certainly do, and now it is standard for most non-blog websites to have a community aspect, even if it's only an afterthought.
Great blogs are noteworthy because they approach topics that the author(s) are passionate about, and the passion shows through. Even if they aren't necessarily experts in their field, the blogger has an obvious love for their topic, which is good because not only does it attract readership, but frankly, it is HARD to write about something you don't care about, especially if you're not getting a specific benefit from the writing (blogging don't pay no bills!).
A great blog is well-written, but that's not always the case: sometimes the content speaks for itself, as with Patrick Smith's photoblog, where his poor writing is ultimately meant as just a bonus insight into the photo of the day. However, having a unique voice is a huge draw, and may be why Perez Hilton is so successful. A good writing style is gravy, a chocolate-covered strawberry on top, but there are countless blogs where the author has no real writing chops, and it shows in the lazy writing style. However, both voice and skill are important.
Another fairly important aspect of a good blog, but not necessarily necessary, is a good blog layout. As with anything else, a professional looking site will increase the value of the blog. Just as with restaurants, presentation is key. A good banner, well designed sidebars, the occasional page background, and a clear and attractive format will make a reader give you a chance when otherwise they might not. If you're using blogspot's default template, everyone's going to know you don't care.
I know you want me to mention 'tribes,' but y'know what? I'm done with this topic.
Grabbing Readers
How does one grab readers? If I knew, I'd be Perez Hilton, and I wouldn't be churning this crap out (I'd be churning out even crappier crap).
But I do have a few ideas.
Much reader-grabbing comes from the previous section, "Great Blogs," so I'll only mention these briefly: attractive format, interesting writing style, engaging community. Other than those, there are still some useful hints.
People like pictures. Preferably pictures of boobs (there's a reason Rob Curley listed Porn as one of his top 5 blogging secrets!), but any cool pictures or videos will help. This goes with attractive format, but it's important enough to mention specifically. Almost all great blogs have a fair text-to-picture ratio, be they entertainment blogs, news blogs, tech blogs, music blogs...even photo blogs throw in the occasional photograph. This isn't to pad the page, but to draw the reader's eye and attention to pages or articles they otherwise might not be interested in.
Links are a nice way to get people's attention, as well as a good way of building relationships with other blogs. If a blog consistently has links that interest me, they'll become a regular bookmark for me. In fact, some of the most succesful blogs offer no content of their own, and are merely aggregators of cool shit. FARK is one of my favorite sites, and all it ever posts is a funny headline, a link, and user comments (that I rarely read). But author Drew Curtis spends hours trolling the web for interesting articles, and I have to admit that I paused writing this for about 15 minutes to read a few links.
As police interviewed Belviso and Skupien, a passenger still in the rear seat of the car, Steven Carney, 17, opened another beer. When Palermo asked Carney what he was doing, he told him, "If I'm going to jail, I might as well be (expletive) juiced."
Gold.
Finally, something that will bring a reader back time and time again is quality content. While this may not be the number one priority for many blogs, it should be! A blog that offers good information or useful news will get repeat readers. Gizmodo and LifeHacker are good examples of this. Both offer practical information in their given fields, quality information that is hard to find elsewhere in such an easy-to-read and interesting format. Further, they utilize pictures, links, involved communities, and charming writing styles to maintain readership. These sites are poster children for what a blog can, and should, be.
Harnessing the POWER of Social Media
It is scary how powerful social media can be.
With Facebook growing at an exponential rate, and Twitter growing at a rate of some sort also, social media is taking over the world. Almost every brand worth a damn, including bands and even politicians, is now utilizing social media to build their community and their name. Barack Obama made headlines during his 2008 campaign by utilizing Facebook, and look where it got him! Using social media networks to build your brand is almost a necessity these days; you'd be hard pressed to find a company still resisting the new wave.
There are many ways to ride this wave.
Many brands will start a Facebook or Twitter page and leave it at that, and that is a pretty decent way to go...but hopefully it's just a first step. Many brands have started their own blogs, which is of course pretty much a given considering this whole thing is about blogging...but it's still important to note. When talking about your blog as brand in question, how can you use social media to build your audience, past making a fan page?
As mentioned above, linking is a good start. It can create conversations with other bloggers, who will link to the conversations...or at the very least, there's always the tit-for-tat theory: you link my back, I'll link yours. It's a good way to expand your fan base, by milking someone else's.
One method I had great success with was starting a conversation on another website, and linking back to my own site. In this case, I went to a band's forum and said something along the lines of "I wrote about this band, what do you think?" I immediately got about 60 hits. Free hits. I've also gotten hits by commenting on another blog entry, without even specifically linking to my blog, instead relying on people clicking my name.
Twittering and Facebooking are nice and simple ways to get some attention, but for the most part, it doesn't get you any attention you didn't already have; it just reminds people about you. When I post on Facebook, the only people seeing it are people following me; at least with Twitter, you'll get the occassional tweet-searcher. Of course, seeing your name on another person's page will serve as free advertising, and that's something we could all use.
There are blog aggregation sites, too. Technorati, Wordpress, BlogCarnival, even Blogtimore will all post your blogs up, easy peasy pie. There are probably specific aggregators for your particular topic. Find them. Exploit them. In music blogs, for example, Hype Machine is the king.
Building Traffic/Search Engine Optimization
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself a little bit...I'm starting to see alot of overlap amongst these headlines. Since these two topics go hand-in-hand, I'll address them simultaneously.
There are a million ways of building traffic, and the best ones haven't been thought up yet. As soon as a good idea comes along, it gets done to death, and no one pays attention anymore. But marketing moping aside, there are still many good, reliable ways to get hits.
As mentioned above, harnessing social media is a good way to get reliable hits: linking, commenting, conversing, tweeting, blog aggregators, etc. Moving on.
Try get on digg or del.icio.us. I don't know how, but if you can figure it out, you're a champion.
Write the right tags! Besides being a useful tool for categorizing and searching in-site, these are often how a search engine finds your page. Make sure to cover every angle when tagging, include alternate, thesaurical words, and if you really want to nail it, consider commonly misspelled words (there's a reason Google bought gogle.com). If I'm writing about a concert, for example, I'll tag the name of the band, the venue, the genre, maybe a hit song, maybe an album, maybe the singer's name...anything that someone might look for when thinking about the band. "What's that band that does the song xxxxx?" "What's xxxxxx's new band called?" I'll also include the tags 'concert' and 'music,' you never know. I personally try to under- rather than over-tag, but that's only because I'm a coward, and I'm hesitant to look like a tag-spammer. But that's silly. I'll stop. I get it now.
Cover topics that haven't been covered yet, or have been undercovered. One of my most popular pages is about an obscure band at an obscure venue, and the lack of information about them online means that when you google them, I'm one of the top hits. There may only be 1000 people in the world looking for information about that concert, but all 1000 will come to me. Of course, the opposite is also true: if you cover a topic a million people are looking for, even if less than 1% find you, that's still a huge number of hits! Try both approaches, see what happens. Write about Metallica, and write about your neighbor's kid's shitty metal band. You never know.
As for search engine optimization (SEO), one reading that I found infinitely helpful was Google's own starter guide to SEO. It contained a ton of useful tidbits that even an experienced SEO-er might find interesting. SEO is one of those tools that cannot be stressed enough, or over-utilized. There are so many facets and tricks for SEO, and people are always finding ways to trick out their optimizations.
A few tidbits that might help:
As above, tags are awesome. Next.
Use relevant post titles. If someone's on your page and they see a post, they might understand what it's about better than someone who stumbled across it on Google, where it might come off as weird. I don't know if most of your viewership is coming from links or from direct traffic (typing in your URL), but remember that it will be coming from both sides. You'll need to write for both audiences. That goes for content as well as titles, but titles are more important in this case.
Don't be afraid to look at your site through Google's eyes, to see how a searcher will see it. Google yourself. This is what someone else sees when they're looking for a page. If it looks bad, change it! That is one of the most important things you can do!
There are ways to find the best keywords for your particular topic; in fact, Google has provided some extremely good ideas in their Keyword Tool, Google Trends, and their News Categories page. Mess around with those for a little while, and besides figuring out the best keywords to use, you'll also get a really good sense for what works and what doesn't. Google is algorithmic, and people are predictable: patterns emerge. Find them. Use them.
Once you know the keywords to use, figure out the best way to use them! Throw 'em in your headline, drop 'em into the text of your post, don't forget tags, make the keywords your core. I don't condone writing posts based around the keywords, however! Write a headline that's good. Write a post that's good. But if you can slip one in, awesome. If you can use the word "fashion" instead of "style" at a certain time, do so. If your headline makes sense, let it, but keep keywords in mind, because they are your best street team.
Of course, all these tricks are designed to bring traffic to your site...not to keep it there. You're on your own there, fella. I hope your site warrants repeat views, I hope someone reads the previous article you wrote, or even better, the next article you write, but that's all talent. Do you have talent?
