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August 05, 2004
Secrets of Blog Success
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
The secret to turning a blog into a financial success lies in the word community.
Community is what lets a blog scale from one person spouting off into a true online service, with enough traffic to pay the bills with advertising.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (left, from his site) revealed this today on his site, Daily Kos, but I am NOT making a political point here. The most successful conservative sites, from FreeRepublic to Lucianne.Com to Andrew Sullivan, all do the exact same things.
What do they do?
As proof that I'm not making a political point here, that's Lucianne Goldberg, in a photo from ABC.
- First they set a direction. I'm about this, we're going to be about this.
- Second, they enable crosstalk. Not feedback -- feedback doesn't scale. But crosstalk, notes from User A to User B, that scales.
- This seems to contradict the first point, but the next thing these sites do is let go. As the community develops around them they let it have its head. Kos went out on vacation a few months ago and the site kept running.
- They pay attention to the technology, with users' needs in mind. The key to Kos' success post-Dean was his switch to Scoop, which not only supported deeper message threads but the creation of individual user "diaries".
- Finally, they listen to the market. Kos didn't think about the diaries when he bought Scoop. He was thinking about messaging. But when the diaries became his growth story, he let it happen.
For a variety of reasons politics has been a hot blogging market. But it's far from the only one. Technology is a hot market, and with sites like Slashdot and TheFeature it's being well-served. I think there's going to be a huge market for these lessons in music and entertainment -- got any examples out there for me? Business sites like RagingBull and Fool.Com understood some of these lessons (albeit not all of them).
There is still a huge market opportunity in blogging, and I think it's very possible that today's leading political sites can have their leads overthrown. But what I have outlined here is the sure path to success. There are too many examples to point to, too many Clues, for it to be otherwise.
Comments (1)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Brad Hutchings on August 5, 2004 08:44 PM writes...
Andrew Sullivan is a bad example of "conservative" site. He would be the last person to try to self-identify as "conservative". And he doesn't have foums.
FreeRepubliic and Lucianne... calling the screwballs who play there "conservative" is like calling the Black Panthers moderately liberal. Those sites are for people who find a conspiracy on a Coke label and want us to build walls around the country. I mean, you gotta keep 'em on board to win an election, but don't let them open their mouths and demonstrate how stucking fupid they are.
Probably the best example of "conservative blog" is The Corner at National Review Online. Again, no comments section. Lots of feedback though, and funny. Lucianne's son Jonah (nationally syndicated columnist and favorite at NRO) is just freakin hilarious, linking to important cultural phenomena like this (click it).
But perhaps the most exciting blog idea I've seen in a long time is from Megan McCardle. Her Unpopular Culture is really a revolutionary idea for blogs. It's a great implementation of a rough idea I had for a friend who wrote a novel a couple years ago. But I don't know that I'd have figured out to go blog with it.
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