Ask HN: What makes a blog great? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What makes a blog great?

13 pointsdradu21 comments

I will get right to the point: what do you think is the recipe for a great blog? What makes for a great blog? What's your secret?

I'm sure most of the people will say: QUALITY of the blog. But what is quality without exposure. If you have exposure but no QUALITY then you're certainly doomed to fail. There are a lot of examples like this.

So to recap: What do you think makes a great blog, starting small and ending big?

Thanks, Daniel

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Before I got started, I reviewed a bunch of popular blogs. There's basically two ways to build a successful blog - the first is to only produce extremely high quality content. This means writing less frequently and throwing away your pieces that aren't incredibly polished and don't come out just right.

This is the model that Paul Graham and Derek Sivers follow, for instance. This model requires you to let pretty-good-but-not-excellent blog posts/essays die on the vine, so the signal:noise ratio remains incredibly high.

The other way is to post every single day. I did a little surveying of the landscape, and it seems like going from 4x per week to every single day produces a few massive jumps - more consistent visitors, a faster finding and evolving of your core topics of any given time, and faster evolution in your writing ability.

If you've already got practice in writing, a well-defined theme, and have launched enough projects or writing or marketing materials that you can recognize when you've got a winner on your hands, then the high-quality-only model can work well. For the rest of us, every single day is far more likely to lead to improvement and successes.

How do you rate your own writing? What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

> How do you rate your own writing?

You can do it objectively or subjectively. Objectively you'd use some metrics or measurements. I do a little of that, but mostly it's a subjective "feel" thing.

> What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

I thought about this for a while, and I'm not sure how to answer it... I don't really benchmark myself against Graham or Sivers.

Yeah, I'm not really sure how to answer this. In a good month, I'll write between 1 and 6 pieces where everything comes together at the height of my current ability... but I'm still developing my skill, so even a couple months later I'll see a number of improvements I could make to a pretty good post.

> If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

Easier said than done! I'm not good at predicting what'll be popular yet. For instance, I wrote an analysis of why Walmart failed in Korea that I thought was particularly interesting, but it didn't take off. Then there's been some offhand casual posts I've made that do take off. Go figure, eh?

In my opinion: 1) Frequent updates 2) Some nice (but not big) images 3) Using LinkedIn groups as "loudspeakers" - especially if your blog is business-oriented or technical

The single most important article ever written on blogging: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writebetter/

A: Display useful, entertaining, and enduring insight and expertise.

Signal over noise. If you update too often (especially with uninteresting stuff), I'm actually less likely to read, since I don't want it junking up my RSS reader.

Probably the "great" blogs are ones which are "art". To me, art is some means to convey something deeply meaningful about our inner world (and that inner world can include personal expertise on some subject), regardless of the medium. I suspect if you do that, people will flock to it (if they can find it).

I think writing stuff that makes people either think or change their habits. At least that's my experience with my blog.

Additional question: do you use any methods of promotion for your blog (twitter, facebook?, etc) ?

If someone would please review ZacharyBurt.com (any one of the 3 most recent entries would be ideal) and tell me how to improve it, that would be very much appreciated..

I found the diagram "Diagram illustrating relationship between Users, UX, Product Manager, Engineering" in your latest post very simple and useful. Summarising big ideas from a book makes for a good blog post. The only thing I didn't like was that it got too long. Long posts are good but only if there's more of a narrative. Lists are better when they are short.

Maybe I'm not the right audience, but I see your recent posts are quite abstract and almost academic-sounding. Do you think you can convey your thoughts through stories instead? Perhaps thoughts on emotions may be better explored and expressed through writing which evokes emotion.

This is amazing and very useful feedback. Thank you very much. I will work harder to convey my thoughts through stories instead.

while you are at it, you may visit blog.lifeasparesh.in. I do have some visitors from different organic sources but the problem is nobody comments.

You might try putting your email address prominently on the site instead of burying it in your profile. I generally make it a habit of making my email address readily available on every page of any website I own. I haven't read through the comments carefully recently, but I have gotten tons and tons of spam on my blogs and no real comments but people email and talk to me about stuff I am doing and that is valuable feedback, as well as a valuable human connection.

So basically I should like put it in the side bar or something? I made a contact me tab which lists all the ways of reaching me.

That's what I typically do. I used to have it in the footer until someone indicated they couldn't find my email address on the site. They thought I didn't have one on the site at all. So I made it more prominent.

I am going to just hack up some dirty HTML for this. Any suggested widgets?

If you are using Wordpress, it has a "text" box. You can put your dirty html in there. That's what I did on several sites recently. If you want to mung the address, feel free to borrow the javascript from any of my sites (assuming you dont already know how -- you might know lots more than me, if so: nevermind).

I have some eyesight issues and other issues that can interfere with ability to focus at times. The black text on a white background with nothing to really break up the space or clearly delineate anything makes it difficult for me to even read the site. There are lots and lots of other people in the world with similar challenges. A smidgeon of design work to help set the body of the writing apart from the title and sidebar might help. (EDIT: Oh, and try to cut down on the glare factor. It doesn't take much. HN is much, much easier for me to read. Subtle grey background cuts down on the glare and helps delineate the body. It makes a big difference without being very obvious that anything was done at all.)

I'm not a big fan of the "myname.com" address. If I don't already know you, it tells me nothing about the blog. If someone is already famous, okay, it makes sense, people will look for them under their name. Otherwise, I don't see any real value in it as a positioning thing. But if you want to go with "myname.com", at least give some descriptor of what you talk about/who you are/what the blog is about in the title. "myname.com" followed by "My Name's Blog" -- uh, there's no there there. Wait until you are world famous to go with "My Name's Blog". Until then, you need to do a little more packaging to get across why I should be interested in reading this stuff.

HTH and good luck.

Thanks for the feedback. I have significantly updated the blog's design pursuant to your feedback. What do you think now, how should I adjust?

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