No design, no search, no category navigation, no subscribe button. Awesome readership, huge success.
If you haven’t heard of the movie Julie & Julia, it’s about a 30-year-old woman who hasn’t achieved what she’d hoped while her friends are doing multi-million dollar deals and in despair, turns her love of cooking into a really hot blog project. She decides to cook all of Julia Childs recipes, 500+ recipes, in a year and blog daily about the process.
Her husband put up her blog on blogspot in just a few minutes, there was no thought to navigation or anything we always consider when designing blogs for our clients…
But she had three things that are absolutely VITAL to successful blogging:
- Focus - it was a project, it was about cooking Julia Childs and very little else.
- Commitment - she wrote every day, original content
- Personality - she had fun with it, was a fantastic writer, her quirky personality really came shining through.
These are really good things to remember!
At the close of the project, she had lots of proposed book and movie deals.
We can’t all be educated at Amherst College, and we don’t all have the luxury to start this kind of project. But we can think about our niche and really stick to content that is related, we can look at our commitment to writing (ouch, I just really gave myself a good slap for even saying that) and we can put a stop to the stilted business-y language and let our personalities shine through a litle more. I am planning to start this myself! Maybe when my kids are out of high school… in 15 years…