5 Blogs Deconstructed
Blogs are websites on which an individual or group use to record opinions, information etc. on a regular basis.
There are 5 types of blogs:
- News
- Professional/Semi-Professional
- Recreational
- Aggregator/Link Sharing
- Group
This week we will take a look at 5 blogs and closely examine what makes them a successful blog.
We will begin with my all-time favorite blog, 27b/6.
27bslash6 is semi-professional blog filled with the satirical ramblings of David Thorne, a writer and graphic designer. It features a collection of humorous emails and article’s of his life. 27bslash6 is only for entertainment purposes and it is rarely updated. Semi-professional blogs tend to be one-man show, and this case Thorne is the face of the blog. It is important to mention that this blogger has had books on his blog collections. The first book, The Internet is a Playground, debuted at #4 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His blog is not necessarily revenue based, because having bought the book; I know that most of what is found on the book can be read on the blog.
Thorne’s blog gained publicity when in 2008 a blog about an email exchange was spread virally vie email and social networking sites.
In an interview with News.com.au Thorne says his blog was never promoted and the front page was not invited or navigational.
“To be honest, it was originally constructed purely to annoy, as a support to trolling people on Facebook and other social networking sties under the pseudonym Tabitha Gnillort, the girl on the entry page of my site. The site has gone from receiving a hundred hits a week from a small and consistent group of people, to gaining a larger mainstream audience – a few thousand hits a day – when the monkey page was listed on the Bored At Work website. Following the spider drawing page being posted by someone on Digg last week, the response was astonishing and the server crashed and burned when it was hit by hundreds of thousands of people. I would ideally love to be adding content to the site weekly but get very little spare time due to work and other commitments and I do not make any money from the site.”
There are only two advertisements on his blog and they are of his two books. Thorne also has a Friends of 27b/6 section that links to other blogs.
I believe the blog is great the way it is. Thorne meant for it to be simple and hard to find but he does not leave out links to Twitter and Facebook. One suggestion I would have would be to have share button at the end of each post because they are not easily shareable.
Reddit is an aggregator type of blog. It is more formally known as a social bookmarking website owned by Conde Nast. It has over 1 billion page views monthly and has more than 600 thousand registered users. Obviously this aggregator is successful even Ad Age has called it mainstream media. It is multi-channeled website where almost everything that can be talked about has its own channel or subreddit.
Reddit is place where people gather to discuss content that they found on the Internet. The content is sometimes original but most of the time they are reposts of previous material that has been shared. According to 1webdesigner, Reddit gained users when Digg changed their site design.
Business Insider states that Reddit keeps the site so engaging because it doesn’t tell its users what to care about. It lets users customize their front page with whatever topics they want. If the topic isn’t available it is easy for users to create a topic page, or subreddit.
Reddit also uses a system of votes to push content that people enjoy up and the content that people don’t want down.
Reddit also has a social media platform but it does not pull its audience from it, instead it just a way of having a more personal connection with its audience. Reddit has 69.9 million monthly users and only 389,000 Facebook fans. Like 247b/6 I think Reddit should have a better sharing of content option. As of this time if a user wants to share content found on Reddit, he or she needs to copy and paste the link onto wherever they are sharing.
Silly Grrl, is a hybrid of a recreational blog and semi-professional blog. Sarah who is a freelance designer, blogger, coder, and circus performer writes it. This blog seems to be updated daily and has fairly low engagement. This blog like 247b/6 does not seem to be revenue-orientated but it does have links to her blog template shop and a link where you can buy her ebook.
Sarah runs this one-man show by writing blogs about her passions: design, freelancing, motivation, and the circus. Her website is also very beautifully designed with social media sharing options on her front page and on all blog posts. She makes sure to stay connected with her readers by also giving her readers the option of subscribing to her mailing list.
Looking at Alexa’s site info on Silly Grrl , it shows that this blog site only has 1.70 daily page views per visit. The site has great content for a select niche but does not have a big following. Sarah has 1,106 Twitter followers and 312 Facebook fans. I would like to see more in depth where her traffic is coming from.
The only advice I would have for Sarah is to tag her blog posts better. Looking at the page source she is using a plugin that is not giving her great metadata.
PetaPixel is a professional blog of high standards that produces content several times a day that focuses heavily on photography news and features. It was establish in May of 2009 and claims to be the leading blog covering photography. Their goal is to inform, educate, and inspire in all things photography-related.
PetaPixel has several editors, writers, columnists and reviewers.
Advertisement appears to be a driving force for this blog. They even have a section of why someone should advertise with them. PetaPixel states that they reach a tech-savvy audience that’s passionate about photography, including a large number of influential journalists and professional photographers.
They have:
And with demographics of:
I found PetaPixel when a BorrowLenses, an ecommerce site, shared a blog post from PetaPixel. This blog has great sharing options that allow its readers to share content. I believe most of their traffic is pulled form their social media site. They post content several times a day through their social media accounts. If I could offer any advice it would be to do a redesign of the page. The advertisements stand out too much and are very distraction to the reader.
BuzzFeed is a hybrid of a news blog, link sharing, and professional blog. This site claims to be the leading media company for social news and entertainment, intensely focused on delivering high-quality original reporting, insight, and viral content across a rapidly expanding array of subject areas. BuzzFeed has been my go to place after Reddit for entertainment. They have several authors and Twitter and Facebook play an integral role in the distribution and sharing of the news blog content. BuzzFeed like Reddit also works in a voting systm. You can vote what in what category the article falls under. Buzzfeed also has shares links to interesting content found around the web.
BuzzFeed powers the social distribution of content, detects what is trending on the web, and connects people in realtime with the hottest content of the moment.
They have close to 60 million monthly unique visitors.
BuzzFeed also relies on advertisement. In their advertising page they state that advertising on BuzzFeed can give you access to an audience of SuperSharing users. In a recent study they discovered that 75% of users visiting the site specifically looks for content to share. I have observed this on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Recently there has been a spike of BuzzFeed links from friends.
BuzzFeed constantly delivers successful social distribution for branded content. On average, for every 100,000 views generated through paid media to advertiser content, and extra 30,000 views were generated from sharing activity.
All of these 5 blogs are successful because of their great content, publicity, and social sharing options. I hope this blog post inspires someone to create the next best blog!
Happy Blogging!