One Thing All Successful Blogs have in Common

Glen Allsopp / 14 Comments / July 1st, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

When you focus on trying to make something a success online, it’s common for you to look at other similar ideas that are doing well and try to work out why that is. However, it can seem that there are so many different variables which will been replicating or bettering success will be seemingly impossible.

Due to their being over 200 million blogs and hundreds of thousands started daily, it may surprise you that there is one common factor to all successful blogs that I’m going to share with you today.

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Is it having a famous author? Is it writing on a daily basis? Is it having a unique blog design in order to stand out? No. Although those don’t hurt, it’s something a lot different than that, and something you can do to help build a blog that achieves your goals.

The one commonality between all successful blogs is that they offer value to the reader. And this doesn’t just occur in blogs, it occurs in our everyday lives. Our minds are constantly looking for sources of value in order to help us achieve positive emotions and in order to help us succeed.

Real Examples

With most things, it helps to show real life examples that people can relate too in order to get a point across:

1. Have you ever noticed how you want to surround yourself with your friends who offer value, this can be in terms of making you laugh, being a shoulder to cry on or even just someone successful that you would like to mirror yourself after.

This is unlike the people you know who seem to be constantly negative and ‘draining’ when you spend time with them. In essence, they are taking value from you and you are not getting anything in return for spending time with them on a basic level.

2. Take a look at the sites you use on a regular basis. I use Gmail over Hotmail as the customisation potential and the speed offer more value over a slower service that is often buggy.

This is similar to people using Google over Yahoo. The simple reason is that Google has more relevant results and can fetch them very quickly, thus you pertain more value to the service as you don’t waste time and you get what you are looking for.

How this Relates to Blogs

Once you understand how value works and start noticing it in everyday life, it comes as no surprise that this can relate heavily to blogging. When I first started writing over 2 years ago, I created pages just to get more search engine traffic even though they were full of basic and repetitive information.

As soon as I focused less on keyword rankings and started writing content that people could get something out of to help them succeed, things started to improve. To rephrase that, as soon as I started offering value, people started to take it and the site began to grow.

Blogs give people value in different forms:

• It could be a site that helps you in the health side of your life which has obvious benefits
• It could be value in the form of personal development and helping you achieve your goals
• It could even be value in simply offering quality content on a regular basis that doesn’t ask anything of the site visitor but does give them a reason to keep coming back.

How Successful Blogs offer Value and others Take it

Successful blogs give people something they didn’t have before reading them, and often have people subscribe to their feed because they don’t want to miss out on any future information, the need is too great.

They offer content that spikes reader emotions and fills a need, whether it be in offering new ways to drive website traffic or help readers in other areas of their lives.

Unsuccessful blogs will always try to take value from the reader without giving much back. This can include the likes of:

• Writing unoriginal content and simply taking ideas from others
• Authors that are clearly only in it for the money and will try and make a quick buck at all opportunities with things like paid reviews and sly affiliate links

This leads me to clarify: Humans are drawn to things that offer value, and ignore things that try to take it. We are likely to walk past a beggar in the street without even acknowledging their presence but we will watch a magicians street show. Although they are both going for the same outcome (money), one is more likely to get it as one offers value.

Start offering value to your blog visitors by:

• Writing content from your own experiences that is original and can help them
• Keep up a regular posting schedule so people know how often to come back
• Be accessible and try to communicate with readers on some level whether it’s via email or simply in the blog comments
• Link to other sources of value rather than assuming you have everything they need to know as the chances of this are slim
• Being a role model; if you are teaching how to make money online, then be sure you are making money online. If you are teaching how to lose weight then don’t keep skipping the gym and making excuses.

How much value are you offering to your readers?

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