What is good, of course, is a matter of opinion. However, I’ve been on Teh Internets a long time — hell, I remember when Amazon.com had a river in its logo and a gray background — and I’ve a pretty good idea of what I like. In this post, I’ll share some of the traits that my favorite motorcycle blogs have in common.
Provide a Full-Text RSS Feed
Great blogs provide an RSS feed of the full text of their content, not just an excerpt. Excerpts pretty much waste my time as a reader. For example, this is what I see in my feed reader when a blog doesn’t take advantage of full text:
If you’re only giving me excerpts, every single one of your posts better begin with the best damn opening sentence ever — or I’m going to skip them by. I know, I know, a full text feed feels like you’re giving your content away. You want the visits. You want the hits. Oh, the humanity!
Think for a moment why you’re blogging in the first place. Are you in it to make money? Are you in it to share your experiences? To provide useful information? If readers are your goal, it doesn’t matter how you present the content, and you definitely don’t want to make your readers jump through hoops to read your stuff. And your stuff is awesome, right?
Here’s a great article on the impact that switching to full-text RSS feeds had on Daring Fireball, a major tech blog: Attention is the Real Resource
Post Regularly
You don’t have to post multiple times a day, or even every day. In fact, I suggest that you don’t post every day unless your blog is focused on providing news and time-sensitive events. I feel this way for two reasons: one, writer’s block and burnout are very real (and the #1 reason why great blogs die) and two, spacing your posts out gives folks a chance to read and comment on them.
Early in this blog’s lifetime, I experimented with posting new content every day. It didn’t take long before I saw the downsides. It’s hard to generate thousands of words on a daily basis in order to keep up with a rigorous posting schedule, which led directly to the worst thing of all: the quality of my content started to suffer. Even my sucky content didn’t keep the die-hard commenters from doing their thing (you guys are troopers!), but I noticed that I didn’t get many comments on the posts made quickly in succession.
After some stat analysis, I learned that I get most of my comments during two time periods: early in the morning (starting at 7am EST) and early in the evening (around 5 or 6 EST). Imagine that!
That’s when I switched to a roughly Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule. This schedule provides a full 24 hour period between posts and gives readers plenty of opportunity to let their thoughts be heard while helping me keep my sanity. Everybody wins!
If M-W-F is still too intimidating, try for a weekly or every-other-week posting schedule. The more regular your schedule, the better your chances of having visitors come back to your blog. Keep them coming back enough times and they’ll become regulars, and best of all, subscribers.
Be Unique
How are you different than the thousands of other moto-bloggers out there? And yes, there are thousands of moto-blogs now, with more being created every day.
Here’s an example of something different:
By now it was 8pm, and the piers were beginning to wind up for the night. I threw my leg over “Fireballs” and buttoned up my mesh armor. I was about to turn the key, when a voice that sounded like hot honey on a pancake said, “What kind of bike is that?”
The source of the voice was a stunningly beautiful hottie who had the kind of ass that I would wear as a hat for any occasion. And she was accompanied by another bucket of glowing rivets, who had the kind of smile that could illuminate the dark side of the moon. — Jack Riepe, Riding To The Ocean… And Dancing With The Painted Whore
Jack Riepe has one of the most unique voices in the entire blogosphere. His work is instantly recognizable, extremely memorable, and incredibly entertaining. It certainly helps that he’s one hell of a writer. But you don’t have to be a professional writer in order to have a unique blog.
Dom Chang is known for his photo-heavy posts, often combining current pictures with historical photos. Here’s an example of a classic “Dom” post:
Look how small I had to shrink that screenshot of his photolicious post in order to keep the size reasonable! I’m sure it helps that he happens to live in one of the most photogenic parts of the US, and I’m in awe of his ability to keep cranking out lengthy posts with alarming regularity. But you don’t have to take hundreds of photos to be unique, either.
Fuzz from fuzzygalore.com proudly embraces being a girlie girl who just so happens to ride a bad-ass Speed Triple. She also has a thing for taking pictures of her bike parked in front of giant objects like this:
Now that’s something I don’t see every day! Fuzz’s sense of humor and joy of discovery shines in every one of her posts. But you don’t have to live near a gigantic wiener to be unique…
What these three blogs have in common is that they’re reflections of the people behind the keyboards, people who love riding motorcycles who are also being themselves.
Stay On Topic
It’s very tempting to start straying from one’s motorcycling roots once you have a regular audience of readers. Of course, if it’s your blog, you can post whatever you like on it. Just be aware that every off-topic post is playing with fire: you might gain a few readers, but you might lose a bunch too.
I used to read a blog written by a rider who was rather conservative. Now, I’m about the last person who could be called a social conservative, but I enjoy reading about different people and different perspectives. I considered the occasional jibes at “those damn liberals” as the price of admission to get to his good stuff, namely his ride reports and pictures. Perhaps it was the election, perhaps he got cut off by a cager flying an Obama sticker, but one day his blog started to be less about motorcycling and more about political ranting. After yet another inflammatory post about gay marriage, I had had enough. This wasn’t the same blog I had enjoyed before, and it was time for me to say good-bye.
If the focus of your blog is motorcycling, try to keep the off-topic posts to a minimum. If you’re posting off-topic content more than 25% of the time, it might be a hint that your focus is beginning to shift, and that you need to re-evaluate what you’re trying to convey with your blog.
Which leads me to my final point…
Cultivate a Community
I want readers who are the kind of people I’d like to have a beer with. In fact, the readers of this blog have an open invitation to share a beer with me if they happen to pass through Corvallis. Some of them have even taken me up on it!
After three years of writing this blog, I’ve found that the way to attract awesome readers is to talk with them, not at them. Comments are the lifeblood of your blog, and they need to be tended like a garden. Plant the seeds in your posts, weed out the spam and the trolls, and water the shoots of conversation by responding to those who leave comments.
I may not have thousands of subscribers like those big motorcycle news blogs, but I have great readers, many of whom contribute insightful (and witty, and humorous, and informative) comments to the ongoing dialogue. They’re the kind of folks I could share a beer with. I like that.
{ 8 comments }
Popular Posts
The Latest From Twitter...