Successful Blogs

What makes a “successful” blog? My company’s looking at starting a corporate blog, so the topic recently came up.

Plenty of folks have written articles and books on the topic. But, if you subscribe to the notion that customers know what they want and those that listen to them can build winning businesses, then you and I know a lot about building a good blog.

Here’s what gets me to add a blog to my reader:

• Relevance: If what you’re talking about matters to me, I might want to hear more from you.
• References: If I’ve followed an interesting reference or link to your blog a few times, or the same article was referenced by multiple bloggers, then I’ll probably just go ahead and add it to hear directly from you next time.
• Regularity: Are you going to offer me something interesting on a regular basis? If so, then it’s worth getting to know you.

But I’ve only got so many hours in a day. It takes time to scan headlines and decide what’s worth reading. If you’re blogging on topics that are old, dead-ends, or just plain wrong, then you’re really wasting my time. Blogging is a free market, and the supply of my time is less than the demand of all the blogs in the world.

So, when I need to weed out the blogs, I keep a few things in mind:

• Noise: If you’re posting irrelevant information, or your postings are too random, I’m probably going to drop you. I don’t know what I’ll get next.
• Rants: If you’re opinionated beyond reason, I don’t have time for you. I have plenty of my own opinions .

As I reflect on these benchmarks, it strikes me that they’re personal. But I suspect they’re not far off from much of the population.

Do I do these things? Not really. I’d probably never add myself to my blog reader! Some of that’s intentional. For instance, I’ve avoided making my blog public because I wanted to build some good habits before establishing a public presence.

So maybe the first step in building a winning blog is to be regular about posting. Perhaps I can carve out about 30 minutes a day to dump my latest thoughts. The first step to building a winning blog? Maybe. Stay tuned…