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…
Carolyn,
First of all, this is ironic - I *just* watched this (fantastic) movie this weekend!
Second, I’m so glad you wrote about this. It’s funny, as I was watching it, I had a “holier than thou” expression. “Blogspot, really?”
But you’re absolutely right - those 3 things are really what gave her such success even without much usability or any design!
Thanks for reminding me content really is king!
I know! I loved the movie… at 45 I think I still haven’t started my “life’s work” yet so I found it inspiring. Meryl Streep is SO amazing!!!
I know, the biggest tragedy about the blog is not being able to find her posts related to a particular recipe… It would be fun for people cooking from Julia’s book to find out what Julie’s experience was with the process, but nope. WEIRD!
I’ve been listening to Christmas carols again, which pretty much took the edge off any churlish response I may have. I think that your prescription is good for people like you, who are generally bubbly and extroverted. A lot of people though are naturally dispassionate, or have personalities that
need to be overlooked to see the real person underneath, and because of the limits of the printed word they come off like curmudgeons when they write. Maybe that stilted business language is best for them?
And a lot of people, and that includes small business owners, are plodders. That’s not wrong or less, it’s just who they are. Plodders make the world go ’round, they may not be inspirational, but they are dependable. I certainly hope not many truly creative people are in the carpet cleaning business, for instance, as necessary as that may be. What, really, are they going to talk about in their blog? “Wine stains I have known”? It’s a job, they do it, they’re good at it, but it doesn’t make for good copy, nor is there something to say about it for every news cycle. Which is why I think blogging is oversold, or at least suitable for businesses only in those industries that have some creative component to them. And even then there’s the danger of running out of content and having to repackage old posts in order to “feed the beast”. Most people have something to say to one person. Some people have something to say to two or three people. Very, very few people have anything to say to the entire world.
Dr. J. I agree with all you said. For those who blog, and wish to be successful at it and develop a following, though, those three things are a must. Churlish curmudgeon that you are, your supreme personality really comes to the fore when you write. I think some plodding business owners can still do well with a blog if they think of what their customers need, like giving a few “tips” now and again. It really helps the search engine ranking if they do and so I encourage it, knowing full well that it most likely ain’t gonna happen!