What the Big Players Are Doing Right
If you want to learn how to play the piano, you go to a musician. If you want to learn how to build a wall, you go to a brick or stonemason. If you want to learn calculus, you go to a mathematician. It makes sense, then, that if you want to learn how to be a better blogger, you go to the biggest blogs on the Internet and learn from them.
That’s our focus for today: emulating the best habits and practices of the biggest and most successful blogs.
One thing about a good blog is that it only becomes more popular as time goes by. What are the Web’s three biggest names in blogging up to that makes them so successful? Let’s have a look.
The three blogs I’m looking at are, in order of popularity, Huffington Post, TMZ, and Business Insider. This is based on the eBiz List – an agency that collates data from U.S. Traffic Bank, Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete. Now, while these are full-blown websites, they are also blogs. A blog can be bigger than you think, and these three prove it. The only difference between these blogs and yours is in the number of contributors and the sheer deluge of content.
Huffington Post – Doing It Better Than the Rest
HuffPost gets an estimated 110 million unique visitors every month. Its entire business is based on a single, very powerful content curation strategy: news aggregation. It publishes articles that can be found on other sites and collects them into one place. Yes, HuffPost does produce its own content and uses every conceivable type of media to do it, but much of its own material uses existing content as a springboard. This is the essence of content curation, and no site on the Web does it better.
So why just curate content that can be found elsewhere? Simple. It doesn’t matter who printed it first. If it’s found on your site, people will share it from your site. Sites the size of Huffington Post actually help smaller news outlets gain momentum for stories that might otherwise stay buried on local news websites. Through the miracle of social media, those small but interesting stories almost immediately go viral when they get the attention of blogs like HuffPost.
Just as an example, the biggest and most shared story on HuffPost over the past year was one that originated on a much smaller blog. It was called “5 Reasons You Should Have Sex With Your Husband Every Night,” and it put Meg Conley’s blog on the map. HuffPost has become masters of niche blogging by simply wrangling every conceivable niche into one place and marketing the content better than the original authors.
TMZ – What Killed the Cat Makes for Great Blogging
At 30 million unique visitors per month, TMZ may seem like it’s a bit behind HuffPost, but it works from an angle that is completely different. So, in its own right, it is the leader in its style of blogging.
TMZ is all about celebrity gossip. It is what People magazine was in the 1980s only done WAY better. Why is it so popular? I think Keith O’Brien, head of social media activation at Horizon Media, put it way better than I can, so here’s his take:
“I think TMZ and gossip sites are popular of course because of the culture we live in – where celebrities’ lives are spectator sports and where pieces of content – rumors, snippets of video, Instagram photos, insensitive Tweets – can easily power the stream…”
(source: forbes.com)
The thing that makes people keep coming back to TMZ is because its content feeds and fuels the one thing that every marketer is counting on to earn those clicks: curiosity. We like looking at celebrities. We like watching their lives. We watch because we’re curious (some would say, “nosy”).
Curiosity is our biggest motivator as people. We want to know everything. More, we want to know everything about everyone. That’s why TMZ works so well: It has mastered the art of piquing curiosity. Its staff writes headlines that are downright salacious, and that kind of thing gets clicks.
I’m not saying transform your blog into a tabloid. I’m saying that learning how to emulate this strategy on your own and in a way that is appropriate for your blog can net some very favorable results. The proof is right in front of us. Building a blog on curiosity is a solid foundation with great potential for success.
Business Insider – The Ultimate (and Unabashed) Time-Waster
I’m not always sure of what to make of Business Insider. It’s another blog that takes the curated content angle to the extreme. What separates it from HuffPost, though, is its target demo. Business Insider appeals primarily to a specific group of readers: young, affluent males who are bored at their Wall Street jobs so they’re trolling for stimulating content at work.
You got it – Business Insider exists to thwart workplace productivity. The staff knows you’re going to be surfing anyway, so they make it easy to find something interesting to land on.
The best part about this blog is that it defies the concept of niches. In that way, it’s kind of like the Anti-HuffPost. They pull stories that will make for good conversation over the water cooler or during lunch with colleagues or clients. How they get away with it is that they know their audience. They aren’t trying to be all things to all people, but they are trying to be all things to the specific people they want to reach, and that approach works almost alarmingly well.
As a parting shot, I just want to mention that this is, overall, a very simplistic look at why these blogs are so successful. I wanted to zero in on these three things – digging for interesting curated content, driving curiosity, and knowing your audience – because together they compose the framework for a wildly successful blog. I hope you’ll take these lessons from a seasoned copywriting company owner and go out and make your mark!