Do You Need Talent To Grow A Successful Blog?
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I was reading a post over at DoshDosh where Maki notes his RSS readership broke the 10,000 subscriber mark and what he did (or really, what he didn’t do) to realize that result. Here’s his post -
Dosh Dosh Reaches 10,000 Subscribers (and the Reason Why People Subscribe to a Blog)
I have to admit to feeling slightly irritated reading the post, or really, wanting to add more to the topic raised by Maki to clarify what I see as a keep point, something top bloggers sometimes forget about, so here goes…
Maki Has Talent
Maki is a great blogger (and writer), everyone knows this and his blog has grown into one of the top in the industry as a result. In his post he outlines a list of what I would call “traditional advice” about what it takes to grow a successful blog and how he didn’t do any of it, including -
- Not displaying his feedcount as a social proof tool until after he broke 10,000 subscribers
- Not submitting guest posts to other blogs
- Not running contents
- No paid advertising to promote his blog
- Not writing a blog post every day
…and the list goes on.
Maki has not done any major promotions with a free report, or video or podcasting either. Essentially he has sat down and week after week put out solid written content, responded to comments and emails from his readers and not been very proactive beyond that to grow his traffic. I don’t think he has an active comment marketing strategy either – in that I mean he’s not commenting on other blogs to bring traffic to his in a strategic and focused manner.
Basically, he has pretty much bucked the trend and not done anything I recommend in Blog Mastermind or countless other bloggers suggest as good practice to grow a successful blog (things even Maki recommends to other bloggers).
So do we have it all wrong? Should we follow in Maki’s footsteps and put out solid content week after week as the only marketing strategy we need to grow a top blog?
Yes and no.
Yes we should follow in his footsteps and put out solid content week after week. That’s always been the foundation and heart of a good blog, no one can argue with that.
Unfortunately most bloggers, if they did just that, would not replicate Maki’s results. They would not have 10,000 readers after a year of blogging with very little marketing.
You see, Maki is an anomaly. Maki has a gift, a talent, something that naturally places him above the herd as a leader. The quality of his content, his writing style and his knowledge is top class. Many, but not all, successful bloggers have a little “magic” like Maki does and in his case he has relied solely on that to take him to where he is.
If I knew more about Maki’s background I could speculate on why he knows as much as he does about Internet marketing and why he is a good writer, but true to his credo, he hasn’t written much about himself on his blog and focuses 100% on his readers. I can only assume he’s either very good at research or running a lot of Internet marketing tests/projects that he experiments with and uses as stimulation for blog posts. Or maybe he’s just a deep thinker, a guy who has insights simply by observation – maybe it’s all of these things.
I’d love to find out more about him in a podcast interview, but he didn’t respond to my request I sent many months ago, so I presume he is too shy or doesn’t see the point or never received my email (Maki?).
Maki’s philosophy about blogging reminds me a lot of Brian Clark of Copyblogger, another blog that grew essentially off the back of great content (although Brian did release free reports to market his blog and was active early on soliciting links/attention from other top bloggers). These two guys are similar in that they don’t like to talk about themselves on their blogs and focus all effort on helping readers, clearly a method that works given their blogs are at the top of the food chain.
What If You Have No Talent?
What if you don’t have an exceptional talent or above average experience to draw upon when producing content for your blog?
How can the everyman or woman, the normal blogger, hope to stand out from the crowd and grow a successful blog if the strength of your writing alone isn’t enough to get you there?
That’s a tough question, and a complex one.
Variables like what topic you write about, the number of existing blogs and websites in the market and your own skill level (not talent, skills, for example – do you know what format makes for a good article? …a skill can be learned) impact how your blog will grow.
I like to think that any person who is diligent can build a successful blog regardless of talent, but following one person’s system or technique is not going to produce exactly the same result for someone else. Maki explained how he grew his blog and his core message is a sound one, yet I doubt many people can blog like Maki.
If Maki’s system is minimalist, my own is a bit more, ahh, complicated, probably closer to what the average blogger does.
I marketed my blog like crazy, especially during the first year. Although I do believe it was the strength of my content, like Maki states, that built my blog, I did enough other things too. I focused on comment marketing, blog carnivals and forums, and the more labor intensive techniques, like podcasts, guest writing and creating PDF reports.
Will someone have a better chance of success replicating what I did or just following the “all you need is solid content” format? Again, I can’t answer that because we are all in unique situations.
If nothing else, you certainly are not lacking options when it comes to opinion and models to follow to build a great blog. It’s up to you to take action and see what works in your situation.
There is certainly one clear message that holds true for Maki, me and every other blogger out there – it takes consistent work to achieve results.
There isn’t a successful blog in existence today that doesn’t have a very hard working blogger behind it, who stuck to a process – what they found worked for their unique situation – day in and day out for a considerably long time. Successful bloggers work much longer and harder than the average blogger, who fails to build a successful blog because of giving up early or working sporadically (assuming we determine success by looking at traffic and readership of course).
Is This A Different Situation?
Caroline Middlebrook recently posted her blog Stats & Analysis for January 2008. Her blog is growing at a super fast pace, which is even more impressive when you consider the niche she blogs about (effectively the same as mine – chronicling her journey to Internet profits), a very competitive area with countless similar blogs.
Her RSS readership is growing much faster than mine did during the same period. In fact, she has achieved more RSS readers than I did my entire first year of blogging in the space of about 5 months. Will she reach Maki’s levels by the end of the year? Probably not, but she’s definitely way above average and her income growth is coming along very nicely too.
How has she done this?
By doing everything Maki didn’t do. Well almost everything.
Caroline and Maki have the same underlying strength, a talent for authentic and valuable writing, but that’s were the similarities end.
Caroline’s biggest traffic boosts came from releasing a free report and writing what I call a pillar series, in this case a series of blog posts on how to leverage Twitter. She didn’t just post the content to her blog and let the traffic come based on the value presented, she relentlessly marketed the resources through email, by contacting other bloggers and requesting they post about her content.
Her campaigning worked wonders, with top guns like Shoemoney, Lifehacker, Techipedia and Search Engine Journal all linking to her blog.
I’ve never had links from any of these blogs and I’ve contacted a couple of them. Shoemoney doesn’t respond to my email or the messages never reach him (I swear my name “yaro” is an automatic spam filter for some email servers). Lifehacker hasn’t posted any of my productivity posts that I have submitted to them. The other blogs I’ve never approached, but as Caroline demonstrates, perhaps sometimes just a tap on the shoulder and a friendly request to check out your resource is enough to get a response and a link – if your content is good enough.
Still, that’s not something Maki needed to do.
It’s Easier To Grow A Successful Blog Today
It’s interesting to watch how good blogs grow and as a blog trainer I’m particularly interested in what other bloggers do that results in their rise above the crowd into the top 1% of bloggers in their niche.
Maki and Caroline have two different approaches. Caroline does everything I recommend – in fact she’s like a textbook Blog Mastermind student and I only wish all my students were as proactive as she is. Maki on the other hand paved his own way off the back of hard writing solid post after solid post – nothing he wrote was half-hearted – every article was a pillar.
Both of them grew their blogs a lot quicker than I did during the early months and I think there is a reason why. Some might not agree with me, but I think it is easier to grow a blog in today’s blogosphere than three years ago when I started. Here are some of the advantages you have today -
- There are more blogs all receiving more traffic. With a greater number of overall readers, everyone benefits and it also means new bloggers have a larger variety of traffic sources (other blogs) to draw from.
- When I started it was pretty much Darren Rowse writing about blogging, or at least he was the only guy with a profile in his niche – and he had 3,000 readers at the time. A link from Problogger today drives a lot more traffic than it did back then, plus now we have a plethora of similar high traffic blogs (Copyblogger didn’t exist back then, neither did Shoemoney or John Chow).
- There’s a lot more advice and training available on how to blog today, not something that was available in great quantity three years ago. There certainly was not any specific training programs like Blog Mastermind, nor did we have so many great blogs to model.
- The idea of professional blogging was only just surfacing, thanks in particular to Darren and his exposure on sites like Slashdot (remember the slashdot effect?), though bloggers were certainly making good money, they just weren’t talking about it like they do today (it was also the AdSense heyday, when people were making hundreds of made-for-adsense sites before Google dropped them from search results – the same was going on with “spam blogs”).
- Social marketing didn’t exist. There was no mybloglog, or blogcatalog, no Digg, no StumbleUpon, no Twitter, no Facebook or MySpace – nothing. If you got traffic it came from a website or a blog run by one person or one company, not a socially driven Web 2.0 site. So many of today’s successful blogs were built off the back of social marketing.
All of these advantages make it easier for people to drive traffic to their blog and become successful quickly. It’s also made for a more crowded and competitive blogosphere and, due to the extensive variety of traffic sources and the skill and time required to harvest from them (think about building a stumble or twitter profile, or spending all day making friends in facebook), it’s a challenge just to keep up with all your options.
Information overload wasn’t as big a problem back then as it is today, that’s for sure.
Maybe it’s not “easier” today to build a blog, but thanks to the variety of traffic sources, it can happen quickly and on a grander scale.
Do all these new ways to drive traffic negate the need for talent? No, probably not. Do they make it easier for hard working, but not as talented bloggers to stand out? Yes, I think it does, especially because of niche marketing. Nearly every niche today has more people online in it than previously, thus you can enjoy success by differentiation – a mandatory requirement in today’s blogosphere.
The underlying principle of a successful blog never changes and Maki is the best pure example I know of in the make money niche – he used content to become king. Other bloggers with less talent will need to look beyond the DoshDosh model if they want success, but there is certainly no shortage of options, if you are willing to study, implement, rinse and repeat.
Yaro Starak
Oldschool Blogger
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I wouldn’t say Maki’s blog became popular “because” of what he didn’t do, but in spite of it. As you point out Yaro, he writes excellent content. But that isn’t to say his blog wouldn’t have grown even faster and possibly larger if he had done more of the traditional marketing.
On the other end of the spectrum there are bloggers who do marketing until the cows come home. It’s just too bad the content of their blogs doesn’t always warrant the effort.
Just so we’re clear, you’re not claiming that you have no talent, right Yaro?
I’ve just read The Long Tail. One of the things the book points out is that blog niches tend to be dominated by a few at the top (like Hollywood stars or sports), there are then a few second rank and then the also-rans. To make big money means getting up into the top in your niche or at least second-rank. This has to be the aim.
My guess is that blogging is very new and the rules aren’t really established yet. Also people’s ego probably doesn’t allow them to say, “Well, actually ,I was just lucky”. Darren Rowse is a noble exception. Lots of different things will work, some of it will just being in the right place at the right time. People aren’t necessarily successful because they think they are. Many think there success is due to their excellence, with some I agree, with others I suggest you look at their content and decide for yourself.
It helps to be early in a niche.
I don’t see how anyone can hope to survive, let alone thrive online without focused and persistent marketing. Great content is essential, but then so is promoting it at all times.
Amen brother! Great article. I do agree with Yasmin to some degree. Some amount of marketing is essential, especially in competitive niches, like make-money-blogs. However, I am so sick and tired of all the contests everywhere you look! Every once in a while I can understand doing something fun and original. But it seems everyone does the same thing! Maki (and you too Yaro) is so refreshing because you know you’ll always get something interesting to read.
Jeff
Wow, an excellent post comparing the success of DoshDosh to the tried and true practices of other bloggers. I completely agree with Terry’s comment that Maki is successful “in spite of” his lake of traditional marketing.
It really shows that content is the most important feature of any blogging success. Yeah, great marketing can make an average blog successful. But no amount of marketing can fix poor content. The ideal combination is great content AND great marketing.
I think everyone can have their own writing style and still write good content AND market their blog like the best of them. Blogging isn’t what it used to be. Since Blogging became popular, its all about the SEO and Niche this and that.
I think if a particular topic interests someone and they choose to write about it AND it becomes successful, then there really isn’t a question whether or not you need talent to be a successful blogger.
Blogging also doesn’t need to be based on some skill or level, not everyone blogs for the same reason, nor wants to be what you think they want to be. JMO.
Jackie
Yaro, nice post, lot of food for thought.
In many ways, it’s like the concept of ‘making money online’. There are oh-so-many ways to do it – and some will fit you better than others. And there will always be the one maverick (or few) who bucks the trend, yet is massively outperforming the rest.
The thing is, when it comes to TEACHING someone how to do stuff – make money online, or create a successful blog, or get a top search engine rank – you cannot recommend an ‘out-lier’ technique, tactic or strategy. You must teach a ’system’ that is duplicatable and reasonably repeatable.
Entrepreneurs will try to replicate Maki’s style – but without the talent and ability that Maki has in heaps, the same result may be elusive, if not impossible. On the other hand, any blogger setting out with a dream and following a consistent marketing plan WILL achieve middling success, even if not super-stardom in every case.
Why are there so many ’systems’? Because people are unique, play to their strengths, and certain approaches work better (or worse) for them.
Which ’system’ to follow? Any one is fine. Yet, for a student, the best chance of success comes from going through a system devised by an already successful teacher – rather than follow an explicit, elaborate (or even simple) idea put forth by someone who isn’t yet successful (yet, by all accounts, SHOULD have been just by following his/her own plan!).
That’s the tough part. Picking a teacher to follow and emulate. Then comes studying their process, learning relevant lessons (both from successes and mistakes), and then implementing the best practices into your own system.
It often isn’t possible to do that without more extensive mentoring or apprenticeship when it comes to nuances and complex bits – though the broad principles are often visible for anyone to study and copy just from observation.
And because I’ve been fascinated about the role ‘influence’ has in blogging, and building a blog with influence, I changed the focus of mine to write about this topic. From the look of it, there’s a lot of interest about it. My blog growth trend, though not as impressive as Caroline’s, is certainly encouraging enough to keep the experiment going.
My own approach was to mix both Maki’s and the more ‘conventional’ ones – create great content, and then tell the world about it (or at least as much as I can get through to telling!)
All success
Dr.Mani
[ramble]
Something that I haven’t seen widely discussed is how different niches react very differently to traffic building initiatives.
If you are blogging to bloggers, then you can expect them to be RSS aware and subscribe to feeds. You can expect them to be into social media and you can expect them to behave in a web savvy way, consistent with all of the standard marketing tricks. The same applies to tech blogs and several other niches.
However, the rules and the measurements of success are probably very different elsewhere. I write mostly about environmental issues – where fewer readers are into RSS and social media etc.
Most readers read my stuff in the office where they can’t watch videos etc. The techniques that apply and the measurement of success is very different.
So personally I didn’t get very excited by claims of 10,000 subscribers since that would never be possible in my niche anyway. I guess what I am trying to say is that it would be good if blog tutorial’s sometimes focused a bit more on wider issues. Perhaps they do, but I don’t get that impression right now.
[/ramble]
But great post by the way – enjoyed it.
Hi Yaro, thanks for another plug
People are always asking me this kind of question – do you need talent, do you need to be a great writer and so on. I think to be successful you need *something* but I’m not sure that talent is the right word.
I don’t consider myself to be talented, many of the projects I have started and blogged about were failures! Yes there is obviously something that people like. In my case, I think it’s my honesty in the way that I write and the content of my blog is very very different to Maki’s.
With regards to promotion though, Maki does do a lot of self promotion but in a different way. He uses social media. He is a massive user of sites like Sphinn, Digg, StumbleUpon. He doesn’t comment much but he does use email marketing – he’s talked about that several times in posts about pitching to people and so on.
One thing I really agree on with your post is that it is easier to grow a blog now, especially in a big niche like money making simply because of all those big sites. This is something I alluded to recently – the vast majority of my traffic comes from other sites that link to me so if my blog was in a tiny niche I wouldn’t enjoy anywhere near that much exposure.
And by the way your comment about “Yaro” being used as a flag for spam filters made me laugh out loud
Yaro,
Thanks for the mention and all the kind words.
As I’ve mentioned in the post, blog marketing is very necessary for growth… It’s important to get your stuff in front of people, and its far easier for them to pick it up and recommend it when it’s good content.
So in a way it all comes down to having strong content and consistent hard work as a foundation, as you’ve mentioned so accurately.
My little one year experiment was probably just to show myself how I far I’ll go with a minimalist approach. It was refreshing in a way because I only had to churn out articles and network with people via social media.
Is this method for everyone? Probably not. The main reason why I framed my post by using negatives (what I didn’t do) is because I think the emphasis on having solid content/writing cannot be stated enough.
Talent/ability is really subjective.. I will say though that good writing skills are vital for most online ventures.. blogging or not. It helps to be persuasive in copy for social media, direct response marketing and email networking.
@ Brian – Nah, no talent, just lucky – right place, right time
@Evan – Early mover advantage is definitely real.
@Caroline (and Maki) – I was under the impression that Maki might write about a lot of different marketing techniques on his blog, but doesn’t necessarily do them himself. So I presume social media is one area he spends a lot of time, which is definitely a form of marketing.
@Maki – Thanks for dropping by. So can we do that podcast interview now? Your audience wants to know the man behind the blog
Thanks everyone else for the lengthy comments too.
It does not matter to much as long as you get your point over. Content is king without doubt. as ultimately you will use that in your marketing. I believe Seth Godin does not do any marketing, and probably will never have to. This due to people like you and me spreading the word because the content is good. Having said that I have seen some very flaky blogs with little written content, selling niche marketing toys and doing very well. So in conclusion you need to do one or the other it just depends which you enjoy the most.
persistance and hard work are the only tricks you need to know! you have to have a system and follow through with it! Incredible post Yaro…you are really old school!
We are all looking for that magic formula but different things work for different people. If something you try leads to a little success you will automatically follow that path. And a little luck doesn’t hurt either!
Speaking about the success of Maki, I think I agree with what Yaro said on Maki’s content:
“nothing he wrote was half-hearted – every article was a pillar.”
I think that is the key, if we have a great content we don’t have to fully rely on wild marketing efforts (even it is still needed), people will look for your great content because they need it.
Average bloggers will mostly think on how to post as many as content as possible within a specified time span but sometimes forgetting the quality of the content – a common mistake – if I am allowed to say that way.
I am a great fan of both Yaro and Maki, if we can combine Yaro’s marketing strategy and the way Maki write his contents, it’s going to be a great way to blog I guess
Hi Yaro,
I enjoyed this thoughtful appraisal of Maki’s (and other’s) ‘Blogger’ chemistry.
It’s funny that I read your blog, Brian’s, DoshDosh, and Caroline’s faithfully. (And Dr. Mani’s
)
And Maki, yes, we wouldn’t mind that interview.
No one would consider self-promotional or egotistical at all.
It’s clear your like the athlete who says very little and instead, let’s his play dictate his caliber. All while focused on ‘the team’.
So if a dialogue between two ‘experts’ like Yaro and Maki would edify students of the game, lets have at it!
(And Yaro, you’ve obviously got the formula!)
-Ed
Interesting! I read your Blueprint (or acctually listned to it while out walking) and I like all of your strategies and was thrilled to find a name of the content that I want to produce: pillar content!
Though I think you should do a post about writing, and having a passion for writing. I think that too is very essential in keeping a blog, don’t you? Maybe THE most important. Because you can absolutley love your subject/them of the blog but if your writing sucks – who will stand to read it? hehe. just a suggestion.
have a great weekend Yaro
Hi Yaro.
A very informative and thought provoking article to say the least. To be quite honest, I was aware of the blogging phenomenon for at least a year or more, but just did not bother to take a real hard look at it. Now, just being a novice blogger with just a bit more than a year under my belt, I can say that I’m still a novice blogger.
I have noticed that I have seen jumps in hits to my blog when I post certain pics of Anime figures I will have for sale in my store ( the sexier the better it would seem ) but I still have a long way to go, and in what direction I take the blog itself in the future, but I do agree with you , that content is king, and I have to say that even in a niche market, you won’t be a superstar blogger overnight. Consistant effort is the key I think, and sometimes a bit of experimentation and luck helps.
I believe its important to have great content as then the search engines will find you. Promotion helps a lot though in social bookmarking, link building, etc.
Great article you have here.
-Scott
To tell the truth I myself have decided to create a anime blog and I know it might not look like a anime blog or look to good.
But I have always had a poor education.I know I know my writing sucks and its hard to fallow and understand that’s most of the reason why no one stays on my blog but I’m still new and learning…
*****(After all practice makes perfect.)*****
That’s what I believe…