Swingin' for the Fences: Writing Content That Spreads

Without a doubt, the biggest difference I see when I compare non-food blogs to food blogs is this: non-food bloggers write less frequent, more thought-out posts, with the hope that they'll go viral. That is, that they'll be linked to, Dugg, tweeted, Stumbled, and anything else that has the potential to bring hundreds or thousands of new readers to the blog in a matter of hours.

This is what I call the homerun post.  But instead of focusing on writing homeruns, we food bloggers tend to take an easy way out: "What I Did/Ate Today."

Now, don't get me wrong.  "What I Did/Ate Today" is useful, and we're lucky to have it as a fallback.  It's what many readers expect, day in and day out. Even some of the most successful blogs in our niche use this food-journal format.

But with a lot of great blogs (Eat Live Run, for example, one of the best) already doing it, this is a hard road for new bloggers to take.  Maybe a few people care about "What I Did/Ate Today," but hardly anyone's going to be struck by the irresistible urge to tell everyone they know about it.

I'm here to suggest another way, one that I've found far more rewarding and incredibly exciting, one that actually strikes people with that urge.

Once every week or two, put your heart and soul into writing a homerun post.

That's it.  Every other day of the week, you can write "What I Did/Ate Today," and your readers who have come to expect that from you will be happy.  But on that one special day (or over the course of several days, for your best efforts), put much more into your blog.

Provide something of value that takes a lot of thought: a how-to, a fun list, an interview, a rant, or a response to another blogger's post, taking the opposite side.  Even just some thoughts that others will find motivating can make for an extremely successful post.

My blog has been around for six months.  But my numbers of subscribers and pageviews have doubled since I started swinging for the fences, only three weeks ago. And I can attribute every bit of that to three posts I've written in that time period.

The purpose of this blog isn't to promote my other blog, nor is it to pretend like I'm an expert at writing homeruns.  Look around the blogosphere and you'll find plenty of examples, from people who are experts.  But in case you're interested to see the posts I'm referring to, I'm linking to them here.

When I wrote these posts, I was getting 550-600 pageviews on a normal day. My Brendan Brazier interview was retweeted on Twitter a bunch of times (this was the first time I had ever asked for retweets, and it worked). 1300 views that day. A motivating post I wrote about changes was linked by a few bloggers, including Caitlin, one of the best in our niche, something I'm endlessly grateful for. 3900 views that day. And my list of 10 favorite running songs has brought in around 100 new readers from Google searches every day.  And since my search engine traffic averages 1.74 pages per visit (hooray for Google Analytics!), this is 174 new views per day. Not the mention the affiliate commissions from iTunes, which are small, but they add up.

The best thing about these numbers is not the one-day traffic spikes.  It's that on each of these days, hundreds of NEW, interested readers found my blog.  And since many of them kept coming back, each of these posts took my blog to a new, permanently higher level of readership.

I'm a very modest guy, and this feels uncomfortably like bragging to me.  That's not my intention.  I'm sure that to some of you, even my best-day numbers seem miniscule.  My point is to demonstrate the tremendous difference between these results and the ones I was getting when I was always writing "What I Did/Ate Today."

A word of warning: Many, even most, of your homerun attempts won't do anything special for you.  At the risk of killing this baseball analogy, you'll strike out a lot of the time.  But even if they don't go viral the day you post them, you'll be building a collection of posts you can call your "Best of" that you can link to and that might start to pull in searches once you improve your blog's search engine visibility.

This post is getting far too long, so rather than talk about strategies for writing a homerun post today, I'll leave you with a link to a great article about getting links and tweets.

To sum up, if your writing is extremely compelling and you can inject tons of personality (and personal topics) into your writing, then you can probably slowly build a following doing the same old thing, in the journal format.  One by one, new readers will find you, and hopefully they'll stick around for a while.  But if you want to shortcut the process, and have a lot of fun stepping outside your boundaries, then swinging for the fences is the way to go.

I really hope some of you give it a try.  If you do, leave a link to your post in the comments; I'd love to see it.  Who knows, maybe some fellow homerun swingers among us will help you out with a link or a tweet.