Remarkablogger

You can learn a lot about how to blog from Boing Boing, one of the most popular and long-running blogs on the web. Boing Boing is one of my daily must-reads. They never write about how to blog, but if you look at what they do, you can learn a lot about what makes a great blog great. You can learn from their example.

Write blog posts like they’re news

Write your posts like they’re news stories: pay attention to your headlines and leads like a reporter would. Each Boing Boing post reads like a news story, not like a “here’s what my cat ate today” blog. One of Boing Boing’s bloggers, Cory Doctorow, says to write your blog posts like they’re news wire stories.

Credit your source

Always credit your source or inspiration for a story. The internet may be built out of html and links, but it’s “made” of people, and people deserve credit for what they’ve done, just as you would want to receive credit. Boing Boing always gives credit to the source of a link (which usually results in that site getting slammed by insane amounts of traffic, the subject of the blog post that inspired this one).

Cultivate sources

Maintain good relationships with others who are the sources of the information that’s in your blog posts. These people are your pipeline of excellent material for your blog. Boing Boing has a veritable army of content scouts constantly submitting links that become posts on the blog.

Think demographics, not niche

Boing Boing doesn’t have a niche. Which I find really interesting, because nearly all of the blogging advice you ever read says thou must haveth thy niche as though it were a commandment, or something. But Boing Boing isn’t in a niche. Boing Boing appeals to a certain type of person: tech savvy, pop-culture aware, liberal, biased towards open source, sexually active, pro human rights, and anti-DRM (digital rights management). That’s not a niche… it’s a demographic, which is a much broader marketing category.

Do something worth writing about

All of the boingers lead interesting lives: they are involved in stuff that matters to them, such as internet freedom, artistic expression, and open source software. From these activities comes a lot of their background knowledge that informs what they post on the blog. They are blogging about what they’re doing.

This is where a lot of bloggers fall short: other than writing on a blog, they’re not doing anything interesting or worth blogging about. This is especially true of “make money” blogs.

Champion your peculiar tastes

So many blogs are the same! I can’t stand it. One way to stand out is to champion your peculiar tastes. Each of the boingers has some interesting and different likes and dislikes, and their personalities come through on the blog. For two examples out of the group, Cory loves robots, art, and open source freedom. David has a taste for cryptozoology. All together, you have quite an eclectic topic list that flies in the face of conventional blog niche advice.

Team blogs require the right mix

One thing you don’t want on a team blog is too much similarity between the team bloggers. You want each one to offer something strong and unique, so that collectively as a team, the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Keep rockin’ and don’t stop

One of the reasons for Boing Boing’s success is simply its longevity. It has been around for a while, compared to many other blogs. They have never stopped. They have never quit. They have never given up. Because they are a team blog, one of them can go on vacation and the others will still blog.

Also, Boing Boing’s output is like a firehose. It’s one of the few blogs where there may be twenty posts in a single day. In fact, some people don’t care for it because they produce so much content that you can’t read it all. I’m used to it — I just skip over things that aren’t immediately interesting to me.

In Summary

To sum up:

• Write blog posts like they’re news
• Credit your source
• Cultivate sources
• Think demographics, not niche
• Do something worth writing about
• Champion your peculiar tastes
• Team blogs require the right mix
• Keep rockin’ and don’t stop

You don’t have to learn about blogging just from blogs about blogging. You can learn a lot from successful blogs by observing their example. Boing Boing has quite a bit to teach any blogger who wants to succeed. If any of the above strikes a chord with you or if you have another example that I didn’t think of, I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.