What type of blogger are you?
As part of a business blogging strategy, there are a couple of ways that you can choose how to write. Whilst as publishers we are all unique, there are some similarities in style of blogging than can be drawn.
Each methodology has its own benefits, and can be combined in your overall blogging strategy to add additional value to your site.
I’m going to highlight the alternative ways that you can choose to provide content for your visitors, and a few prolific bloggers who use each method. This is my take on the different types of blogger on the web today. Which type of blogger are you?
Discoverers
If you find yourself finding new content, and then publishing it for others to see you are most likely the type of person who prides themselves on making great on and offline discoveries. If you are good at finding the diamond in the rough – and enjoy sharing this with people, you are probably a discovery blogger. By definition tumbleloggers are discoverers as they frequently post the stuff they find as they come across it during the day.
Discovery bloggers are very much similar to teachers, except they typically go to great lengths to dig up stuff that no-one knows about, or is so obscure, you’d never come across it naturally. This type of blogger can make a great niche for him / herself – assuming that it isn’t tooo small. Everyone enjoys sharing content that is fresh or that others haven’t seen before.
Notable examples: SwissMiss, Engadget, FFFFound, Boing Boing, Neatorama, Found Magazine, The Cool Hunter
Collectors
Do you find yourself gathering similar information on your site? Have you focused on a micro-niche and stuck to it? If so you may fit into the collector zone. With the web being so vast, there is value in pulling together similar stuff, and making it easily found and a one-stop resource.
Collectors are often discoverers, but tend to put the brakes on, and organise the discoveries into different categories and logical posts before sharing with the world. Collectors often bring offline material online. I know many collectors who enjoy tagging stuff with services such as delicious, later returning to the tags to find the bits and bobs they’ve found whilst browsing – and creating a blog post from that collection of links.
Notable examples: Print & Pattern, Infothetics, Weird Things, Post Secret
News Nicher
Out of all the types of blogs, news niche’s are the hardest to get into. Unless you have contacts within the niche that you plan on writing about, or can be extremely quick to jump on a story, you are pretty much always going to be second best to the people who are contacted privately by PR folk. That said, there is a huge traffic opportunity to be gained from becoming news worthy and getting a scoop.
Not to mention the secondary knock on effect of many incoming links from offline sources such as the Guardian etc. It’s pretty much futile to chase the tech news sector – but if you have a smaller niche, it is one possible topic to explore.
Notable examples: Techcrunch, Mashable, Jalopnik, Ars Technica, Mac Rumours
Reviewers
Reviewers are those bloggers you love to hate. They’ve found fame and fortune by reviewing products or services and often manage to persuade companies to part with their products for free! Parenting and so-called “mommy-bloggers” tend to chase after this format, and some have made a decent living from doing it. Best of all some of the content may even get written for them via the marketing department of the company.
Review blogs do fill a need on the web, and in the age of consumer 2.0 – those who are trusted for their opinions and who pass along information on what products, services and ideas are the best are inherently valuable.
The downside is that sometimes impartiality gets lost along the way when reviewing a product with the end goal of exposure for the contributing company, especially if there is something to be gained by the blogger writing the review.
Notable examples: Playgrounder, Killer Startups, Geek
Teachers
Teachers are the folks who are putting together information that others can learn from. This sort of information is useful when you are learning a new skill, or need to find out something. I have a great respect for the people who shared their knowledge and expertease openly and freely. There isn’t much you can’t learn online if you are a self starter and want to understand something. Even MIT have opened up online learning material by publishing their lectures freely.
In order for your blog to educate, you need to start with a skill in the first instance, but then, everyone knows a little about something, and the beauty of the web is that there will always be someone reading your stuff who learns something they didn’t already know. Tutorial websites and blogs do really well online for this reason.
Notable examples: Tutorialized, PSD Tuts, Lifehacker, Build, Jquery for designers
Ranters / Opinion Fiends
Enjoy a bit of healthy debate? Use your blog to vent? If so, you are probably an opinion or rant blogger. Many people find that they write at their very best when they are angry or passionate about a subject. Ranters tend to combine both of these to create compelling content for their audience. Problem with this technique is that if over-used, it can paint a negative picture of the blogger in question.
Notable examples: Perez Hilton, Travel Rants, Grandad
Personal Bloggers
Personal bloggers are the folks I respect the most. They blog simply for the love of it, the self-expression and the honing of their writing skills. Some of the best writing that I’ve read has been from personal bloggers, who take the art of writing that bit more serious than the rest of us.
If you choose to go down the personal route, you simply *have* to be a good writer. Whilst you can build an audience from a personal online diary, or personal posts generally, it takes longer to do so. Not many people are going to want to link to a post about your annual bus trip – unless you can supplement it with either an amazing slant, or amazing photos / video.
Notable examples: Daring Fireball, Coding Horror, Seth, Dooce
Impact Monkeys
There are plenty of blogs on the web that chase traffic via social media, myself included. Here’s the formula. Create lists of impact – in other words be either comprehensive, or amazing, and then publish in the right places. You are pretty much guaranteed a wad of quick fire social media traffic within your niche with this approach.
There’s no guarantee that this traffic will stick around, read or subscribe – but visitors are visitors and pageviews are pageviews. As these blogs are designed for rapid quick consumption (list posts are easily digested, and frequently shared) – sometimes the reader may come away with a certain empty feeling surrounding the content.
Notable examples: Smashing Mag, Speckyboy, Abduzeedo
Which method works?
The short answer is that you should use all of the above mentioned techniques and styles until you find a comfort zone. There is no right and wrong way to blog, but being aware of the techniques and styles others use for traffic purposes is helpful, particularly if you are a newcomer. Mixing different styles can help to keep readers interested and coming back for more.
I plan on doing a follow up post categorising the technorati top 100 into each of these categories – just to let you see what the top bloggers techniques are. Stay tuned for that research.
linky
posted:October 8, 2009 10:57 pm
Well explained , Great post . Thanks for sharing this.
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