photo by (F)oxymoron and João Trindade
“It
was one of the best blog posts I’ve ever written, but nobody tweeted it,
nobody shared it, nobody commented on it and it drove no traffic to my
website.”
If you blog with any regularity, I’m willing to bet you’ve witnessed this phenomenon: The great, but unnoticed, blog post.
Sometimes
the posts we expect to set the world on fire never produce a spark --
while those on which we barely bother to light the fuse burn themselves
into the eyeballs of thousands of readers.
Company,
brand and personal blogs are powerful tools we can use to share
information, make announcements and introduce ourselves to new clients
and strategic partners. The question is -- how can we write blog posts
which are optimized for shareability? Is there a method to the madness?
In an
effort to isolate some best practices from within the chaos of the
blogosphere - I asked three consistently great bloggers to share the
secrets of their successful blog posts. Here’s what they told me:
Blogger #1
Erika Napoletano is Head Redhead at Redhead Writing,
a Denver-based online strategies consultancy dedicated to keeping
companies from looking like idiots online. She’s a columnist for @EntMagazine. Her most recent work is The Shattering, written exclusively for ChangeThis. She’s also the author of The Power of Unpopular.
The successful blog post?
My most successful blog post -- with over 16,000 Facebook shares -- has been "Is Facebook Hiding Your Messages?"
Why was it so successful?
It was picked up by some of my readers at Lifehacker and ZDNet and just spread like wildfire!
It was
informative, useful, shared a discovery that I'd made out of sheer
frustration -- plus I added some humor to it. I add humor to everything
-- life and business shouldn't always be so damned serious, y'know?
With the
number of people using Facebook, it's crazy how many of them didn't know
about what I discussed in the post -- I think the information surprised
a lot of them - the same way it surprised me when I discovered it.
That’s part of what motivated so many people to share it.
Blogger #2
Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm. She is the author of the PR and marketing blog Spin Sucks and co-author of the book, Marketing in the Round.
The successful blog post?
It looks like “10 Content Ideas that Generate Comments and Shares” is the most popular of 2012 (so far).
Why was it so successful?
There are a few reasons for this:
- It's highly optimized for search
- it's a list post (10 ideas)
- and it's something people are dying to know…how do I get more comments and shares?
Blogger #3
Shelly Kramer is the founder and CEO of V3 Integrated Marketing, located in Kansas City, Missouri. She has been recognized by Forbes as a writer of one of the Top 20 Best Marketing and Social Media Blogs.
The successful blog post?
One of
the secrets to a successful blog post is to pay attention to - and write
about - things that are trending. For instance, one of my most popular
posts was “Brand Crisis in Process? AAA Tipsy Tow New Year’s Eve Service”.
AAA had a
program targeting New Year's Eve and safe driving that wasn't a
national campaign, but sure did look like one -- and it was being shared
all over the Internet.
I
immediately saw what a nightmare it could become, dove in, did some
research and wrote and published an informative post about it. And,
since part of what we do, as an agency, is work with brands to prevent
crisis, especially in the social media space, it made sense for us to
cover that and get a conversation started.
Why was it so successful?
It was a
hugely popular post because it was timely, about something that was in
the news and that people care about, and it was also not a stretch for
us to cover it (or ridiculous linkbait) ... it really was about a
subject matter that we know, and care, a lot about.
What have we learned?
Let’s try to sum it all up:
Make sure your blog posts provide timely, coveted and useful
information that you’re knowledgeable about -- presented with a touch of
humor and an element of surprise. Lean on trending topics. Structure
the ideas so they’re easy to read -- and never underestimate the power
of SEO.
It all sounds like some great advice to consider as we begin writing our next blog posts - but something's telling me we haven’t fully cracked the code yet - we need to hear from more bloggers!
