I read a comment on LinkedIn recently where someone was asking what they needed to do in order to make their blog more enjoyable, and how to maintain the readership of the blog. My first reaction was a stream of consciousness about what bloggers needed to do in order to achieve this but I suddenly realized that in reality I was just spouting the same old lines which many trot out when giving bloggers advice. I reined things in and went back to basics and in truth, there are just 3 key treats of success blogs and that is focus, passion and originality. 

Focus

I would hedge a bet that the place where most people fall down in creating a blog is that they lose focus, which is easy to do when the traffic figures are pretty low. The focus you need is both personal focus to keep on pushing with your blog and investing the time which is required, and also you need to hone in on a subject and don’t let it go. If I hit your blog for the first time Iw ant to know exactly what it is about in a matter of seconds, if I don’t get that there is a good chance I’ll be on my way. 

Passion 

The only surefire way that are going to be able to sustain your blog and the posting of high quality content is if you are passionate about the topic which you are discussing. First of all if you are not passionate then those who are will find you out in a heartbeat, and that will throw into question your believability and see you lose traffic as quickly as you get it. You also need to be passionate in terms of constantly putting content out there, you simply cannot keep the bar high if you don’t really care about what it is that you are discussing. This is key both in terms of any success which you may have and in terms of your own sanity, after all what is the point in spending time on something like this if you don’t really care about it!

Originality

 You cannot do what others before you have done, at least not specifically, not only will you be deemed as a cheap fake, but you will also lose potential traffic because you aren’t doing anything to separate yourself from the crowd. Take travel blogging as an example, if you simply start a page talking about the places you are going to then you are unlikely going to be able to really garner much of an audience, there has to be something different, something more specific which people can get behind and really support about you. Creating a travel blog is fine if thats’ what you want to do, but you are going to have to think up an original way to frame it if you want to find success.