What Makes a Good Blog?
With the growing presence of technology in our everyday lives, blogs and other digital writing are becoming our main source for news and opinions. Along with the growing need for digital information the volume of information is increasing. With all the information available to us the tactics bloggers use to draw our attention are very important towards the success of the blog.
A great strategy on how to create a successful blog from Brain Carrol in Writing for Digital Media is to carve out a niche. He mentions focusing on a narrow topic and using your own expertise in a subject to write about. Barstool Sports is a great example of finding a niche in the market and exploiting it. Barstool’s edgy coverage of sports and pop culture are stark contrast to the dry sports media.
Another great strategy towards creating a successful blog is having great design. Lance Hosey in his article Why We Love Beautiful Things cites a study that states our ability to read things faster when in the form of a golden rectangle. Not only does the golden rectangle improve our ability to read but it draws us towards it. From my personal experience, I will leave a website if the text and pictures are visually unappealing. An example of a site the has excellent layout is Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed uses pictures to draw readers in. Not only is the layout good for that article but the surrounding advertisements for other articles on the side. I often find myself lost in a wormhole of articles.
The ability to form a community is another aspect in making a good blog. Brain Carrol writes “Blogging is an exercise of expression, making one’s views public. Increasingly, though, blogging is also an expression of community, allowing individuals to communicate and congregate.” This sense of an online community resonates with me. There are many good places to communicate with one another but I believe Reddit is one of the best. In Reddit there is a thing called a subreddit. A subreddit is a place for you to post about a specific topic to a community of other people interested in that same topic. Not only can these people view your article but they can voice their opinion on the same topic.
There are many different strategies towards creating a good blog but I chose these three. Feel free to let me know which ones I missed out on in the comments below.