The Art Of Creating A Successful Blog – Tips From The Pros

Writing is such a personal, private thing. On the other hand, the act of blogging is such a public and transparent thing. When you put the two together, you have this highly visceral, raw act of casting ideas out into the Internet. It’s hard to imagine that those ideas could ever grow into something highly successful, popular and dare you hope – profitable?

m ake use o f co m http://www.makeuseo f.co m/tag/the-art-o f-creating-a-successful-blo g-tips-fro m-the-pro s/

The Art Of Creating A Successful Blog – Tips From The Pros [Feature]

Ryan Dube

In an effort to understand the magic ingredients that make up the recipe of creating a successful blog, I went out

in search of successful bloggers that have formed popular, profitable websites The fruits of that search turned up two big names in the blogosphere – Vitaly

Friedman of Smashing Magazine, and Joshua Topolsky

of The Verge.

Writing is such a personal, private thing On the other

hand, the act of blogging is such a public and

transparent thing When you put the two together, you

have this highly visceral, raw act of casting ideas out

into the Internet

It’s hard to imagine that those ideas could ever grow

into something highly successf ul, popular and dare you

hope – prof itable?

There are a lot of very cool stories out there about how some of the world’s most popular blogs and websites got started Look at the story of Arianna Huf f ington She began her online writing career with a website called Resignation.com, where she burst onto the scene calling f or the resignation of President Bill Clinton From the f ounding of The Huf f ington Post in May of 2005 to its acquisition by AOL on

February 7, 2011, Arianna and her team of journalists established one of the most popular news blogs

on the Internet

Then you’ve got a site like the Daily Beast, f ounded in 2008 by Tina Brown and Barry Diller It eventually grew and merged with Newsweek to become the “online home” of Newsweek Magazine Then there’s the story of Darren Rowse, one of my f avorite bloggers, who quit his job working as a laborer to try and earn a living through blogging He f ounded b5media in 2005 with f ellow bloggers, he f ounded the

extremely popular site ProBlogger, and openly admits that today he comf ortably earns a six-f igure

income through blogging

It doesn’t end there You’ve got Gizmodo, Gawker, TechCrunch, Mashable, SmashingMagazine, TMZ, The Verge…the list goes on, and I’m sure many readers here have their own personal f avorites

So, what’s the secret to creating a successf ul blog? How do certain sites do so well, while so many others f all by the wayside?

Why I Turned to Blogging

According to WordPress.com, there are over 60.6 million WordPress.com hosted blogs across the entire world That’s right Million There are over 100,000 new WordPress sites created every single day It’s dif f icult to get an accurate picture of just how many websites are created on the Internet every day, but if

just the WordPress stats are any indication, the number is massive.

Much like Darren Rowse, I turned to blogging more out of necessity than anything else We were due to have our f irst child, my wif e would no longer be working, so we needed income I attempted to buy and sell antiques on Ebay to make extra income That ef f ort was moderately successf ul – I did manage to establish a Powerseller status with 100% positive ratings – but the work was enormous and the resulting prof it was miniscule

So, I turned to a passion that I’ve had since I was just a kid – writing I’ve always had an overwhelming love f or the written word, and the joy created by a well-craf ted sentence At the time in 2006, I didn’t think

it was possible to really earn anything by writing, but I started doing it online just f or the joy of it I loved craf ting articles, and if I could earn a f ew pennies in the process, all the better

My story was a long road of countless late nights writing blog entries and articles f or peanuts, and an endless search f or newer, better-paying clients Of course, there was also lots and lots of cof f ee Probably too much cof f ee

Fast f orward to 2012 I now write f or one of the top technology blogs on the Internet, I am an editor and writer f or an educational technology site, and in 2009, I f ounded by own blog called TopSecretWriters –

my f irst endeavor independently publishing my own work, which would provide no immediate income in return at the start

No – TopSecretWriters was dif f erent It wasn’t work It was less about making money, and more about having lof ty goals and ideas to share that I am passionate about It was my way of tossing my message

in a bottle into the vast ocean of the Internet, hoping that someone would eventually read those words, and that it might inspire them to bring f riends

Today, I would consider myself to be a moderately successf ul blogger I earn a comf ortable income writing f or others, and my own site is what I would consider to be an on-the-rise new blog, on the cusp

of breaking through into that magical area of f inancial self -suf f iciency It’s an exciting time

Considering that I’m about half way up this mountain that so many bef ore me have climbed, I decided to take a breather and take a closer look at those explorers that have come bef ore – co-f ounders of their own websites that are wildly popular today Both of these writers are passionate about the work they do, and they both lead websites that nearly everyone reading this article will recognize

I am speaking of none other than Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine, and Joshua Topolsky of The Verge

Both of them have agreed to give us a little bit of insight – and dare I say some inspiration – into what it takes to create and grow popular and extremely successf ul websites on the Internet today

takes to create and grow popular and extremely successf ul websites on the Internet today.

The Verge – Editor in Chief Joshua Topolsky

The Verge is listed around the web as one of the top

10 technology blogs out there It is unique in that it

covers not just tech news, but f ocuses holistically on

the entire culture of technology and science in the

world today Its rise to f ame has been astonishingly

quick – the site was only f ounded in 2011 and began

making it on the top 10 lists shortly thereaf ter

Joshua Topolsky, co-f ounder and editor-in-chief of

The Verge, agreed to sit down and chat with us about

the f ounding of the Verge, and what he f elt gave it the

ability to grow so quickly, so f ast

Of course, my f irst question was exactly that – what

made the site so popular? His response – repeated

throughout the interview – was actually rather simple

His secret to success is teamwork

“The two people that founded the site were myself and

Marty Moe We kind of cooked up the idea and

co-founded the site, but we have a group Even though

we’re the founders, there’s a group of editors that were

here from the very beginning that built the site into what it is.”

That’s f antastic, however, your about page also mentioned a partnership with Vox Media, was that f rom day one as well?

“It was originally a site called SB Nation, which is a network of sports blogs When Marty and I brought the idea for Verge to them, we sort of decided that we needed to form a new company That new company became Vox, and now Vox is The Verge, SB Nation, and then Polygon, which is a games site that we

launched in the middle of 2012.”

Joshua told me that Jim Bankof f , the CEO of SB Nation, decided to f und the f ounding of The Verge, and

in collaboration with him and Marty, they f ounded the site while also creating a new company called Vox Media

Getting a Seed Investment Will Propel Growth

Of course, in my search f or elements in the f ounding of The Verge that could have contributed to the rapid success of the site, my next question seemed obvious

I asked whether the support of SB Nation meant he and Marty had outside investors seeding The Verge

“That’s right, in the sense that SB Nation is a privately funded – venture capital funded business, and now that has grown into Vox Media So we are privately funded by venture capital.”

Do you think that contributed to the speed that the Verge grew and become popular so quickly?

“There’s certainly no question that having an established platform and having money is always good, but we obviously had a great editorial team to start with, and we broke a lot of news early on.

A lot of these editors came from Engadget, where I was editor-in-chief Most of the senior staff left there to start a new site So, we had a following to start with, and it was actually kind of surprising that when we started the first site This Is My Next, we got a little bit of a groundswell from that No money, no advertising –

it was pretty much a WordPress site, very basic We started to see pretty huge traffic on it That was our first indication that we were on the right track, just doing something independent and on our own.

I think we brought a bit of an audience who knew us from our previous work And, you know, I think we came out of the gate really big, and that’s thanks to the platform and the investment, and the team.

From the start, my thinking was, it’s very hard now just to start a small blog with a couple of people working

at it In our sphere, in the world of technology culture, there’s a lot of competition It’s very hard to start something small and grow it very big in a short amount of time.”

I asked Joshua whether The Verge is intentionally very news-f ocused

“Very news focused, and very culture focused You look at our front page right now, we’ve got this in-depth exclusive piece on the design of Google; we have a piece on how scientists found this giant squid that the Discovery Channel is doing a documentary on If you look at everything at the top of our site right now, it’s a real mixture of culture coverage, science coverage, and tech coverage So, that’s right where we wanted to

be from the get go It was kind of like biting off a lot We knew that we couldn’t do that if we were just starting

a WordPress site and having just a few people writing for it It would be very difficult to capture everything

we wanted to capture.”

So, how did you manage to make the linkup that you needed with venture capital at the beginning?

“We knew the CEO of SB Nation He’s a guy named Jim Bankoff, who used to be at AOL Jim was actually the guy who was responsible for bringing weblogs [Weblogs Inc.], which Engadget was part of, to AOL when

he was there He had been working on SB Nation, and he was the CEO.

He actually reached out early on when he heard that some other people and I were leaving Essentially, we had a conversation and we decided that this was a partnership that we wanted to get into It was just a good fit He understood where we were coming from, and he knew the troubles that we had had – trying to make something work at AOL, because he had been there.”

What this f eedback f rom Joshua made clear is that there is a lot to be said f or how much investment you have up f ront when starting a blog While there are lots of things that can lead to success – like a great editorial team, brilliant content ideas and a beautif ul layout – ultimately the principle of “money talks” still holds true in the world of blogging

At the very least, it can dramatically improve your odds of success in a shorter period of time

The Importance of Telling a Good Story

Still, when you look at The Verge, it’s obvious that the team there really has an edge up on the

competition The stories jump out at you, the layout pops, and the writing is high-quality and clearly caref ully done News articles are caref ully researched, and the technology updates are quick and timely

It was obvious to me, just f rom exploring the site, that there was a lot more to the success of the site than just a bunch of venture capital

I asked Joshua, what, if anything, he f elt were the top one or two things that helped The Verge stay above the competition? Joshua said that f unding was important, but it became more apparent during the course of our phone conversation that what lies at the heart of The Verge’s success is a close-knit, highly prof essional team of editors

“I think the investment and the great editorial team is the number one thing I mean, we’ve done a lot of things that are different and new in terms of our site design, the way we wanted to do features and the way

we wanted to do reviews That all comes from a huge collaboration among editors In my opinion, you’re only as good as the team that you have My goal, and the goal of every editor here was, let’s bring the best people together to collaborate.

And so, the number one thing that I am thankful for and that I think we did right is we found great people to work together We pushed them, and they pushed us and collectively we came up with big stories and scoops and really good stuff that we put in front of an audience.”

That actually brings up a good point Do you think that it could have been those big stories you hit on early that might have sky-rocketed your growth?

“I’m going to say that it was a combination of factors You start to tell a story when you make something for yourself and when you put it out into the world There’s a narrative that’s created And I think there was a narrative about us, and people were like, ‘Hey, what’s going on with these guys? It might be interesting to find out what they’re doing.’

But then, not only having that, but actually delivering on stuff that is interesting is very important.”

Are there any early stories that really stand out in your memory as, “Hey this is the f irst big story that we hit on and it was huge?”

Joshua laughed a bit bef ore answering Af ter he recovered a little, he explained:

“We had a big appetite for doing long-form stories, with big layouts and a big video component – really dutifully produced video One of our first big features was called ‘Condo at the End of the World’, which was

a piece about these people building survival condominiums in the middle of the desert And, you know, the reaction to that was huge People really got it, and the video was really intense.

That was the first week we launched I think, and when I saw the reaction to that – people saying ‘Woah, look

at this layout and look at this story’, and it was shared in all kind of places It’s then that I thought that our idea, what we had, was really going to work and that people got it, immediately.”

Long Form is the New Form

One of the long-standing “rules of thumb” in the world of blogging is that people are not interested in sitting at the computer and reading through a long blog post The general rule was that the perf ect length f or an article was an average of 600 to 1200 words, and any longer than that you would lose the reader

What you’ll f ind at The Verge is that while there are certainly plenty of short and quick news entries or blog updates, you’ll also f ind a great many long-f orm f eatures of well over 2,000 words Many of them also f eature huge, beautif ul photos or well-created video clips

It’s clear that – true to its name – The Verge is staying right on the verge of the next big thing in

blogging

Joshua explained this change in strategy – going against the grain of the “old way” of blogging.

“Before that, before we started publishing these long-form, investment pieces, there was this sense that people didn’t want to read big stories, or that they wouldn’t want to read long stories, or that they weren’t interested in spending the time.

In the summer of 2011 when we launched, it was really a strong sentiment People want it fast, cheap and dirty, right? But when we started publishing this stuff, there was an immediate, clear appetite for it That was

a big indicator to me that things were actually going to work.”

Are there any moments that you would have done dif f erently – something that today you would consider

to be an amateur mistake?

“The hardest thing has been allowing ourselves to break old habits, and let ourselves experiment more, and let ourselves get into uncomfortable places in the sense that, ‘Hey maybe this will work and maybe it won’t, but we’re gonna give it a shot because we believe in it.’ That’s one of those things that takes a little while when you’re coming from a world of, ‘Hey, you gotta crank out a post every twenty minutes.’

When you come from that world, your brain just works a little bit differently So, something we work on every day is trying to break all those old bad habits of just straight blogging, and instead thinking about the bigger picture and the bigger story.”

What if You Could Do Anything You Want?

One unique f eature of The Verge is that it utilizes its own custom platf orm It isn’t WordPress-based I asked Joshua whether that was actually limiting at all in any way, since there weren’t the library of ready-made tools available to “add-on” to the base platf orm

Joshua didn’t hesitate to point out that the Vox platf orm was an advantage, not a disadvantage,

because it allows The Verge team to create in ways that were previously not possible in the f ormer old-style “blog” f ormat

“I think the platform is just a blank page I think our platform now is just a big, open book The trick is figuring out how to draw on the page, you know? When you start to remove the limitations, when you say well I used

to only be able to do this single column blog post but now I can do these big, beautiful features; when I have

a video team and I can do these sort of mini-documentaries; or I want to put a new show on our site and crank up a new podcast or crank up a new weekly or monthly video show – you start to go, man I can kinda

do whatever I want.

You have to start to get into the mindset of how do you sculpt that? If you could do anything you want, it can

be very chaotic when you don’t know exactly what you want to do or how you want to do it I think a lot of our past year of launch has been building our structure and how to make each page really beautiful and valuable.”

Joshua’s approach is actually very unique in today’s “search-f ocused” world of blogging, where bloggers are constantly tracking their page stats and looking f or ways to boost those stats Joshua says that he decided to throw that whole mindset out the window, and return to what many would view as the old-school magazine-editing approach of , if you build something interesting and beautif ul, the readers will come

“From day one, my number one mandate to everyone has been, don’t chase page views Don’t chase what you think people will like, chase the stuff that you think is really cool Go after that We’ve trusted our instinct

a lot, and our instinct has been right a lot That gives me a tremendous sense of excitement about going forward.

I’ve just found that if you have a team that you trust, and everybody is working together, you can make assumptions, you can make calls where you might be nervous in other situations You can say, hey lets go with our gut on this If you think it’s good, let’s run it Let’s tell the story That’s been really great for us.”

One key message I kept hearing f rom talking with Joshua was the importance of thinking big and

stepping outside of the box – going outside the comf ort zone It’s certainly easy f or bloggers to get into the daily routine of making posts and sticking to a site design that everyone says is “right”, but Joshua’s message is about being dif f erent

It’s about standing out and doing things that make people look at you and say, “Wow, check out what this blogger’s up to.” That’s when the magic happens

Smashing Magazine – Editor-in-Chief Vitaly Friedman

I was very excited to have an opportunity to chat with

Vitaly Friedman, the editor-in-chief and co-f ounder of

the ever-popular technology blog – in f act one of the

leading web-design blogs on the Internet – Smashing

Magazine

The rise of Smashing Magazine wasn’t quite as f ast as

The Verge It was f ounded in 2006 by Sven Lennartz

and Vitaly Friedman The site has been a f avorite f or

web designers f rom the very start, but it also does

f ocus on other areas of technology like sof tware and

web tool reviews

Much like MakeUseOf , Smashing Magazine has a staf f

that spans the globe and comes f rom many dif f erent

nationalities and religions The site has been ranked

across the Internet as one of the top 10 tech blogs,

and easily one of the top 10 web design blogs in the

world

So, it was a real honor to talk with Vitaly Friedman about what he f elt made Smashing Magazine such a smashing success

Growing a Site from Scratch

I started the interview asking Vitaly about the f irst year that he and Sven f ounded Smashing Magazine, and what their hopes and dreams were f or the site

and what their hopes and dreams were f or the site.

“To be honest, we didn’t have any big plans or ambitions when we launched the site back in 2006 It was all

a random experiment We hadn’t really planned anything at that point I didn’t have any hopes or dreams or fears about the site, it just felt like something we did on the side Something that didn’t really matter much.

I still love this feeling of creating things that aren’t perfect, aren’t quite right, aren’t permanent It gives me a reason to go and change them, optimize them, improve them, make them different I used to be a

perfectionist, but I don’t strive for perfection any longer — it’s meaningless.”

Smashing Magazine was f ounded in September of 2006, and three years later in 2009, WebDesignDev voted Smashing as one of the top 30 web-design blogs, and in 2012 Daily Tekk listed Smashing as one

of the top 10 f or creativity and design IncomeDiary listed it as the 5th best income-earning blog on the Internet

From that f irst day, to the success of 2012, what would you say went as expected, and what turned out completely dif f erent than you had imagined?

“Well, since we didn’t have any expectations, things ran quite smoothly, to be honest We had ups and downs of course, but it was a matter of doing the right thing properly It has always been very important for

me to create something tangible and valuable for designers and developers to use Just like I learned so much from the numerous blog posts back in 2002-2004, I wanted to give back, and I wanted to create something that would help me in my daily work as a freelancing designer as well.

What I didn’t know is that at some point we’d take a very different editorial route, moving from ‘pop/masses’ articles like ‘50 Fantastic Grungy Wallpapers’, to a respectable, professional publication in which every article goes through a number of reviews to make sure that it meets the high quality standards that we set for our publication It surprises me how things have changed over the years, and I am truly proud of this change.”

If You Build It, They Will Come…Eventually

Was there a lot of up-f ront investment and loss required to get that early growth started? Can you share

at what point that Smashing Magazine became prof itable, and what that f elt like?

“To be honest, we didn’t have any investment at all apart from the time investment for writing the articles and publishing them online We started out without advertising, because we had no idea that someone would be interested in what we did But then, as we saw more and more traffic coming in, we added Google AdSense ads to at least cover the traffic costs It worked pretty well quite quickly.

Because we had no huge costs and worked as a two-and-a-half-people-team, everything was quite

straightforward It was only in late 2009 that we finally founded a company and hired people to work on our Smashing Books and eBooks Smashing Magazine itself became profitable around 8-12 months after it went live.”

Here, Vitaly describes a completely dif f erent path to success, not much unlike that of MakeUseOf , in

f act No major external investment, just a couple of guys working had at building the site f rom the ground

up This is almost a direct example of the scenario Joshua described above as a “very hard” task

What the story of Smashing Magazine reveals is that the job isn’t impossible – it just takes longer, and it requires a big dose of drive, motivation and perseverance

Is there anything you would have changed about how you managed the website through the years? Were there lessons learned that you would love to go back and do better?

“I don’t regret my decisions, and I think that growing traffic in the very beginning was the absolute right decision to make We did have a very weird and unpleasant reputation for a while due to that Quality

control, proofreading and the editorial guidelines weren’t quite developed yet, which caused a quite strange phase in the evolution of the site With the history of the site and the poor level of grammar, the articles did feel a bit… personal and humane, but it didn’t help us in building a good reputation, so I might want to revise that phase in our history.

I would also not take too many projects at once, and would prefer to work on just a few projects to make sure that they are done/built properly It’s really very important Also, make sure that you learn how to give

up full control over your work At some point, you’ll realize that you

can’t do it all alone, and you have to learn to communicate your

values and your philosophy It’s not as easy as one might think.”

Are you able to of f er start-up bloggers out there some tips and

advice about what it really takes to build a successf ul website like

Smashing Magazine on the Internet today?

“There is no magic recipe for that I believe it’s often a matter of

writing about something that’s important to a group of people at the

right point in time If you are an expert in your field, you already have

something to say, so this could be your niche to write for Don’t be

afraid to go niche, that’s a fantastic opportunity to start something small that can then grow into something bigger.

And don’t think about actually building something huge and successful Care deeply about your little

creation, let it flourish and grow slowly, curate it, and you will see that it will reap fruits that you could only hope for You just have to care and put your heart into your creation But, the chances are that it won’t work

at all if you see it as a job or as work You have to be personal, honest, authentic, transparent, and write about what you love doing Then people will find you, and they will come back to you.”

The Secret Recipe of Success

Smashing Magazine and The Verge are two of the best success stories on the Internet over the last f ew years What I love about these two successes is that their paths to get there are so dif f erent

In the one case, you have a site that grew to f ame in less than three years, with strong f inancial backing and a crack editorial team In the other case, you have a website started out by two guys as a labor of love, that eventually grew to become rated as one of the highest-income tech sites online

Two widely dif f erent paths to a place of success that countless bloggers and website owners out there are envious of So what are the common ingredients in the recipe of blogging success? What are those key elements that brought more and more readers to both Smashing Magazine and The Verge?

When you’re talking success, and just taking these two success stories into account, it looks like there are three major f actors

The f irst is writing about what you love The Verge editors lef t one place to launch a new site in a f ormat and style that they loved Vitaly and Sven f ocused on a niche that they loved to write about

The second is quality Joshua explained that The Verge had an expert team of editors f rom day one –

of f ering a major advantage in quality f rom day one Vitaly described evolving Smashing Magazine through

an awkward stage of growth into a place where published pieces that go through several stages of review

Finally, the third element is f inding a way to be unique and new Vitaly describes the value of getting a

f oothold into a niche of your own and then growing your position there Joshua describes the

importance of getting away f rom the “old way” of doing things, and instead allowing yourself to get into uncomf ortable places, to experiment with new things

Both of these stories – that of The Verge and of Smashing Magazine – are success stories, but what’s important to remember is that they are also very dif f erent stories They reveal that regardless of the path you take, success comes to those that – in Vitaly’s words – write about something that’s important

to a group of people at the right point in time

Now is always the right point in time The only question is what you believe is important enough to write about, and then make it happen

Abstract Earth via Shuttersto ck,Lapto p and Cup o f Co ffee via Shuttersto ck

Want to write a long-form feature for MakeUseOf? Email Erez.

More articles about:

blogging tips

web development

18 Comments

Ryan Dube

Ryan Dube is a f reelance writer and Electrical Engineer and SEO expert His writing f ocuses

on science and tech investigations Visit him at TopSecretWriters.com or on Google Plus +