Light Cue 23

I do a fair amount of reading about blogs. The structure of blogs, blog writing style, how to have a successful blog, and so on. I think anyone who has been blogging for any length of time, I’m going on 5 years now (more than 3 in this current incarnation), would like to see their work widely read by thousands of adoring fans. I certainly would.

Having gone out and done extensive research through reading successful blogs, to reading articles about successful blogs, I think I have uncovered the key. Not having much interest in radically transforming my style from where it currently is I decided to use my own blog as a negative example to illustrate the five keys to a successful blog.

1. Broad Topic Area
   American theater is a good broad topic area to bring in a wide array of readers. You have many elements to touch upon that could resonate with theater makers and theater goers alike as well as the casual observer. My blog not only limits its discussions to design elements, it further concerns itself with lighting design alone. While that alone still provides a broad enough area as designers, technicians, and appreciators of light might enjoy the blog, my readership is further constricted through an approach that looks at the philosophic underpinnings of the aesthetic concerns in a certain flavor of design.

   There is the occasional deviation from this. The most popular post on my blog from web searches shows pictures from a production of Wizard of Oz that I lit. That and my semi-regular posts about money management and the business of freelancing are quite popular. The rest of it is rooted in an analytic tradition borne from my early exposure to, and love of, late modern continental philosophy.

   Not only should the ideal reader of my blog have a love of lighting design for live performance, they should also have a love of continental philosophy. The combination makes it too theatery for the philosophers and too philosophic for the theater types.

2. Accessible Language
   Derived from the first point, this blog is written in a formal academic style. Not as extreme as some blogs out there, but it is far more to that end of the spectrum than it is rooted in colloquial English. Simple words, unless the blog is about linguistics, help to boost popularity. I prefer larger or more obscure words in an effort to be precise. Thus there is an inherent structural impediment to this blog’s success and popularity. The casual reader does not want to work for their information. They would prefer their information presented simply and easily even to the point of not being precise, accurate or true. Lists with an arbitrary number of steps to achieve a goal are a wonderful way to meet this desire.

   This simplicity plays right into the anti-intellectualism that runs rampant in American culture. Experts are shunned for folksy folk who are just like us. The irony that we would not trust ourselves to do whatever task we are entrusting this non-expert to do is largely missed. Their down-home, just like me, style implies that anyone can do what they do. Perhaps if they are just like me they are an expert, because, well, I know stuff.

3. Write about your Mistakes
   I write about perfection or at least the attempt to attain it. Warts and all blogging brings with it an anti-intellectual ideology that anyone who can sign up with blogspot can become an expert on kitten pictures or international finance with no experience or qualifications. People with less than a year experience write about freelancing. Only recently do I feel on the verge of qualified to talk about such things. I have been freelancing for five years.

   Writing as an expert about a topic for which you are not an expert gives you room to make mistakes. Those mistakes become the basis of new blog posts about how you will do better in the future. My personal favorites are financial advisory blogs that get the math wrong or frugality blogs whose authors continually fall off the wagon and spend their money on unnecessary wasteful expenses.

4. Use Humor
   With the exception of this post, and even here it is dry sarcasm (really more sardonic than sarcastic) rather than humor, I would prefer to stick with a clear and rigorous discussion of the topic at hand. Joking about is a great tactic to endear your readers to you and bring them back. With this blog I have chosen to engage in some rather severe critical thinking about topics of interest to me and projects I am working on. I leave the humor to Facebook.
5. Light Colored inviting design
   No.

Employing a tactic of many successful bloggers I will close with a few questions, thus inviting you to join in the discussion in comments. Was this useful? What is your experience with blogging?