The 7 Traits Of Highly Successful Bloggers

What makes a blogger successful? What are the common traits of highly effective bloggers? If you’ve even remotely tried to launch your own blog, that question surely popped into your head at some point. And I bet it was rather sooner than later.

I have more than a year of blogging as a pro. And before starting to blog for a living I was an avid consumer of other blogs. I think I have in my RSS reader feeds I read for more than 5 years now. Gradually, I developed my own set of blog appreciation rules. And of course, if you’ve carefully read the title of this post, those rules are no more than 7. In today’s article I’ll write about what I think is the recipe for being a successful blogger.

1. Authority

This is what makes a blogger believable.

Authority creates trust. And trust makes you spend your precious time on that specific blog instead of doing something else. Because you know it’s worth doing it. You know you’re in for something. You’ve been there before and you weren’t disappointed. Your expectations were met again and again.

Have you ever wondered what makes you click the links of a popular blog? What makes you follow that advice or buy that product? What makes a blogger believable?  It’s not his identity, nor his persistence, although both are part of the success mix, but his authority. You believe a blogger because you trust him.

Without authority a blog will be floating. It may jump every now and then if it touches some hot topics but if it doesn’t build a significant level of authority, it will drift away, at the mercy of fashion.

I think one of the most respected blogs in the marketing niche, for instance, is Seth Godin’s blog. Seth’s authority was previously built by his books but it somehow spread over his blog. The person vouches for the blog in this case.

2. Authenticity

This is what makes a blogger accepted.

Being honest. Being human. Being able to make mistakes and accept them publicly. Blogging is such a fantastic media revolution not because it created a super hero, like cinema, but because it made the normal, average, human guy able to openly express his intentions, dreams, challenges. And made those opinions instantly available.

Authority without authenticity won’t build a successful blog. It may create a solid corporation, but not a sustainable blog. With any interaction, people are unconsciously trying to find themselves in the other guy. It’s a human need, called validation, we all need that. If, as a blogger, you don’t reach out openly, without being afraid, you’re in the wrong business.

One of the most famous examples of  authenticity is, at least for me, Steve Pavlina’s blog. If you read it just for a few minutes you couldn’t but notice that vibe of authenticity which makes Steve so popular even when he’s allegedly “deluding” in some of the not-so-mainstream explorations like polyamory or, recently, BDSM or alike.

3. Accessibility

This is what makes a blogger palatable.

Accessibility makes a blog available, ready to be consumed. It’s the way you write, the way you wrap up your message, the package by which you deliver your goods. If you want to be popular as a blogger, keep in mind that your audience is extremely diverse. It takes much more work than you think to write in an accessible way.

This quality is often overlooked in almost all bloggers rankings I saw. Usually, authority and authenticity are the main criteria, but there’s no point in being an authority if you can’t deliver a readable, straightforward message to your readers. Regardless of your expertise, a clear, accessible blog will always increase your chances to a broader audience.

The most brilliant example of an accessible blog is Brian Clark’s Copyblogger.com. It amazes me how Brian writes in such an easy to understand way about really complicated topics, like the art of persuasion. Copyblogger.com is popular because it provides easy to understand access to incredibly complicated issues, not the other way around.

4. Persistence

This is what makes a blogger wanted.

Persistence creates demand. Showing up constantly and doing what you have to do will build a sense of expectation among your readers. They will know you’re there for them. They will wait for you, call for you or ask things from you. Constantly broadcasting your message will create a certain frequency in your readers minds. They will just tune in.

Now, try to imagine a blog with only one article per month. How would this feel to you? Like a joke, I know. Or imagine a series of 5-6 fantastic articles in a week and then several months of silence. No way. Being there is fundamental, can’t be avoided or faked. They say showing up is 80% of success. I doubt it will be exactly 80% but it’s without a doubt compulsory to show up persistently in order to build a successful blog.

Few people know that several years ago, when he started Problogger.net, one of the most visited blogs on the planet, Darren Rowse only wanted an increase of 10% in traffic from month to month. That tells a lot about how far he was ready to go with it. Problogger.net may not be the most spectacular blog on this planet, but it surely is one of the most constant, reliable and respected. And the persistence of the author plays a big role in that.

5. Connectivity

This is what makes a blogger available.

Connectivity creates links. All kind of links, from plain HTML, PR-juice enabled links, up to human contacts. One of the fundamental characteristics of a successful blogger is his ability to be broadcast as far as possible. And here’s where connectivity plays a fundamental part. All A-listers are virals, without exception.

Have you ever wondered how many interactions a successful bloggers has in a normal day? My wild guess is that this number is at least 10 times higher than the average. Just imagine reading dozens of comments (and perhaps responding each of them), interacting on Twitter, or Facebook or Digg. You can’t really do that if you’re socially impaired.

One of the bloggers who could always be studied in schools for that is, in my opinion, Chris Brogan. I’ve been following closely his work in the last few years and his growth was literally explosive. I think he directly interacts with more than 500 persons each day. Guess what? Those persons are also the broadcasters for his message. How many persons are broadcasters for your message?

6. Creativity

This is what makes a blogger valuable.

Creativity triggers admiration. We admire a blogger not because of his authority or authenticity, but because of what he brings new and beautiful in this world. For his capacity to innovate, to re-create his environment, to embellish and refine. Many successful bloggers actually created their niche from the scratch, they built something out of nothing.

This ability to re-organize the Universe in a new form, to create value and to touch others is by far my favorite trait from all 7. Without this ability a blogger would offer no more than a Wikipedia entry, valuable advice but flat, with no human touch, no improvement, no spark.

My favorite creative blogger right now is Gary Vaynerchuk. For a guy who makes a living by drinking wine (joking, of course) he’s unbelievably creative: he re-invented  video blogging and he wrote a book not about Chardonnay, but about how to follow your passion! That’s creativity, that’s building something where there was nothing before.

7. Identity

This is what makes a blogger recognizable.

I chose the word identity because “personal branding” would have been a little bit too precious. But personal branding is what I meant by it. Identity is what makes you unique. It’s that centimeter you own in your readers’ cortex, the same way you could own some real estate. It’s the exact connection they make between a certain niche and your name as a blogger.

Did you observed how many times we actually use the name of a successful blogger to identify a niche? In blogging, the capacity to build a unique, easily recognizable identity (or brand, for what matters) is the difference between two identical copies of a newspaper. You may talk about the same things, have the same level of authority and the same creativity as other bloggers, but what makes you different is your brand. Your personal brand.

For instance, Leo Babauta identity would be tied up in my brain with the following concept: “minimalist productivity”. Whenever this concept pops out in a conversation, the first person I think about is Leo Babauta, creator of ZenHabits.net. That’s his identity. His brand. I’m sure there are a lot of other bloggers writing about minimalism, but their identity may not be as strongest as his.

***

Of course, all the aforementioned bloggers are sharing all the 7 traits, I just had to chose which one was the most representative for each.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any examples of successful bloggers where you can identify one, two or all of these traits? Do you, as a blogger, have all of them? Would love to hear your comments.

I Can Be Better?

If you’re serious about personal development you’ll soon face a challenge: the tension between who you are and who you want to be. Between your current development level and the next one. Between your present and your future status. One of the most interesting challenges of personal development is the approach to the question “I can be better?”.

Keeping Your Identity

I guess every personal development technique will teach you to accept yourself. I don’t think I found any serious self improvement material teaching me to reject myself. Accepting yourself is normal, is one of the fundamental keys to a balanced performance in every area of your life: relationships, career or money.

But if you want to be “better”, you’ll automatically reject your current being in favor of a future one. Or at least this is how it’s happening. Being better than you are today means ditching who you are today. Am I the only one seeing a serious logical conflict here?

How can you be better than you are and not lose your identity? How can you create a better version of yourself, but keep all your features? How can you upgrade your inner operating system but keep all your filesystem intact? This was on my mind for quite some time.

When I first tried to explain this to myself, I came up with this model: you’re not actually changing yourself, you’re getting closer to your real nature. You are born a beautiful person, but somehow, during your life, you get derailed and you spend all your life regaining your initial heavenly innocence. So, becoming better, means in fact becoming more “you”.

But this model couldn’t explain why we experience new stuff in our lives. If our existence will be only a path to our initial point, then how we define novelty? How can we learn? How can we evolve? At this point I confess I had a headache. Trying to explain this logical conflict proved to be much more difficult than I thought.

I had to stop for a while and try a different perspective. Seeing myself as a perfect human being, compromised by some mistakes and then trying to regain my perfection just felt wrong. It was something static. No movement, no excitement. Still as a stone. But stones are dead. And I’m not.

The Comfort Zone

So, after a while, I realized this model was based on something called “comfort zone”. There was this idea of a perfect place for which you should aim and in which you should live. A place with a perfect proportion, with no challenges and no dramas. A place of equilibrium and perpetual happiness. The comfort zone.

But the comfort zone lacks some of the fundamental ingredients of what I call a fulfilled life: enthusiasm, excitement and surprise. Of course, it has security, stability and predictability. The comfort zone is safe. Life isn’t. The comfort zone has lots of achievements, rules to be respected and, as the name says, comfort . But it has no fun. Staying there for too long couldn’t be something somebody would die for. Because, of course, he would be already dead inside.

So, instead of taking the destination as the cornerstone of my model, I switched and tried to find the model within the traveler. It was not the destination which was important all of a sudden, but the desire of the man who wanted to reach there. So, what was the real trigger for being better? What is that thing which can make somebody leave the comfort zone? Again and again?

And then it hit me. Simple and yet so complicated. The only reason somebody will leave the comfort zone is dreaming. Yes, dreaming, that ability of seeing things which are not yet reality. The capacity to first create a new version of yourself in your mind, and then acting to become like that version. Imagination. Creativity. Play.

No Risk It, No Biscuit

But dreaming without action is just… well, just dreaming, It’s nothing but a mental projection. In order to make things happening, you have to take risks. And that was the second ingredient of my model: the ability to take risks. The ability to engage in new activities, without knowing from the beginning the outcome. The ability to not play safe.

When you mix together dreaming and risk something beautiful happens in your life. First, your comfort zone is turned upside down. Second, you’re in the middle of a new world, most of the time completely new, trying to build a better version of yourself. And third, you’re actually living. Of course, if you’re taking too many risks, your face may hit some punches every now and then. Part of the game, I suppose.

Risking your current status in order to reach your dream is what makes you better. Not the next level, which you may or may not reach. You can’t always fulfill all your dreams. But you’re becoming better because you tried. There was some lesson in the process which made you experience something new. It’s not so much about your identity as it is about your life experience. Maybe your identity is just an illusion, and all you got in the end is just the thrill of trying something new with your life.

Reaching There

Making dream reality is one of the best things you can do with your life. Dreaming big and then putting those dreams into real life is what makes you alive. Not the comfort zone. Not shyness or social complacency. Not postponing. Not avoiding. It’s amazing how much energy people are spending just to avoid what they really want..

So, back to the first questions: is it possible to keep your identity and still be better? Well, the answer is a little bit complicated. You can keep your identity but you will lose some features. You will reach a new version, but some incompatibilities may appear. And you know why? Because your dream are sometimes incompatible with other people dreams. You’re dreaming your own life and some of the places you dream about are outside the others reach.

Let me give you a very simple example and hopefully you’ll have a better understanding of this. Suppose you’re dreaming about a new financial status for yourself and for your family. In plain English, you want more money. You take some risks, you engage in some new activities, forget about security and safety and, after a while, your dream is becoming reality. You do have more money.

But what happened in the process is that you lost some of your old friends, or connections or places you use to hang out. They’re now incompatible with your new dream. They’re not good or bad, just incompatible. They’re from another dream.

Getting better will always have that effect on you. Your dream will always be different and you’re going to lose some features in the upgrade process. But you know what? That’s the beauty of it. That’s the thrill. That’s excitement and fun and evolution.

You Can Be Better?

Do you  have a dream? Are you ready to take some serious risks in your life?  Are you prepared to mix that dream with the necessary risks to make it happen?

Social Networking Versus Real Life Relationships

We live as cells of a giant body: the society. We have rules to manage this body, rules we learn very young. The whole giant structure is sustained by an invisible yet so powerful web of rules about when, how and why we interact with each other. Relationships.

I think the first rules of real life relationships are learned around the age of 3. After that age we know how to act and react in order to integrate in the society at the very basic level. Of course, after that comes school, job and other social interaction games that we learn along the way. But the core is learned at a very young age and so we act almost unconsciously when it comes to real life relationships.

But the last 10 years of history created another layer of relationships, on top of the traditional way of interacting, a layer powered by the online revolution. Right now most of our relationships have a strong online component. Either we met somebody online, either we keep interacting with somebody exclusively online, fact is a larger part of our relationships pool is now over the web. World Wide Web.

My approach with what we call social networking was a little slower. Although I had my share of enthusiasm and hype toward every major social networking service, I haven’t had the time, nor the curiosity to go deeper. I only started to immerse myself deeply in this new web only several months ago. And what I found there really surprised me. In this post I’ll share with you the differences I found between social networking (as in digital social networking) and real life relationships.

Consistency

One of the first differences I noticed was the higher degree of consistency needed in  social networking. One must be very strict about his identity and message in order to gain some attention. If you present yourself with an image of a blogger, you should closely stick to this identity. If you chose to be a environmental activist, by all means, stick to it.

If your presence is not consistently reinforced your identity will weaken. The only thing by which you are known is what you say and do about yourself. That will also ignite what others are saying about you, but the first spark is always you. If you change course just a little bit, your identity will be skewed.

In the real life you don’t have to do that. As long as you correctly channel your change, people will know about you. For instance, if you change your job and announce all your friends, they’ll know you’re doing something different now, but it is still you. You don’t lose identity if you change your message. The real life rules are strong enough to keep your identity solid.

Social networking is still a fragile medium, the rules are to a minimum level. This is why this medium is still so vulnerable to various infectious factors, like identity theft. In a space with loose rules you have to be the strong factor, hence consistently push your identity until you create what you want. (more…)