
Ask HN: What makes a blog great? - dradu
I will get right to the point: what do you think is the recipe for a great blog? What makes for a great blog? What's your secret?<p>I'm sure most of the people will say: QUALITY of the blog. But what is quality without exposure. If you have exposure but no QUALITY then you're certainly doomed to fail. There are a lot of examples like this.<p>So to recap: What do you think makes a great blog, starting small and ending big?<p>Thanks,
Daniel
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lionhearted
Before I got started, I reviewed a bunch of popular blogs. There's basically
two ways to build a successful blog - the first is to only produce _extremely_
high quality content. This means writing less frequently and throwing away
your pieces that aren't incredibly polished and don't come out just right.

This is the model that Paul Graham and Derek Sivers follow, for instance. This
model requires you to let pretty-good-but-not-excellent blog posts/essays die
on the vine, so the signal:noise ratio remains incredibly high.

The other way is to post every single day. I did a little surveying of the
landscape, and it seems like going from 4x per week to every single day
produces a few massive jumps - more consistent visitors, a faster finding and
evolving of your core topics of any given time, and faster evolution in your
writing ability.

If you've already got practice in writing, a well-defined theme, and have
launched enough projects or writing or marketing materials that you can
recognize when you've got a winner on your hands, then the high-quality-only
model can work well. For the rest of us, every single day is far more likely
to lead to improvement and successes.

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revorad
How do you rate your own writing? What percentage of your posts make the
extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output
reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

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lionhearted
> How do you rate your own writing?

You can do it objectively or subjectively. Objectively you'd use some metrics
or measurements. I do a little of that, but mostly it's a subjective "feel"
thing.

> What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark
> that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

I thought about this for a while, and I'm not sure how to answer it... I don't
really benchmark myself against Graham or Sivers.

Yeah, I'm not really sure how to answer this. In a good month, I'll write
between 1 and 6 pieces where everything comes together at the height of my
current ability... but I'm still developing my skill, so even a couple months
later I'll see a number of improvements I could make to a pretty good post.

> If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output
> reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

Easier said than done! I'm not good at predicting what'll be popular yet. For
instance, I wrote an analysis of why Walmart failed in Korea that I thought
was particularly interesting, but it didn't take off. Then there's been some
offhand casual posts I've made that do take off. Go figure, eh?

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andycav
In my opinion: 1) Frequent updates 2) Some nice (but not big) images 3) Using
LinkedIn groups as "loudspeakers" - especially if your blog is business-
oriented or technical

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rohitarondekar
The single most important article ever written on blogging:
<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writebetter/>

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jcr
A: Display useful, entertaining, and enduring insight and expertise.

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jokermatt999
Signal over noise. If you update too often (especially with uninteresting
stuff), I'm actually less likely to read, since I don't want it junking up my
RSS reader.

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Mz
Probably the "great" blogs are ones which are "art". To me, art is some means
to convey something deeply meaningful about our inner world (and that inner
world can include personal expertise on some subject), regardless of the
medium. I suspect if you do that, people will flock to it (if they can find
it).

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oscardelben
I think writing stuff that makes people either think or change their habits.
At least that's my experience with my blog.

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dradu
Additional question: do you use any methods of promotion for your blog
(twitter, facebook?, etc) ?

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zackattack
If someone would please review ZacharyBurt.com (any one of the 3 most recent
entries would be ideal) and tell me how to improve it, that would be very much
appreciated..

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revorad
I found the diagram "Diagram illustrating relationship between Users, UX,
Product Manager, Engineering" in your latest post very simple and useful.
Summarising big ideas from a book makes for a good blog post. The only thing I
didn't like was that it got too long. Long posts are good but only if there's
more of a narrative. Lists are better when they are short.

Maybe I'm not the right audience, but I see your recent posts are quite
abstract and almost academic-sounding. Do you think you can convey your
thoughts through stories instead? Perhaps thoughts on emotions may be better
explored and expressed through writing which evokes emotion.

~~~
zackattack
This is amazing and very useful feedback. Thank you very much. I will work
harder to convey my thoughts through stories instead.

