“6 keys to The Ten Thousand Dollar Blog Post”

It’s something that we all chase, that one post that sends us over the top. It’s the post that gets the attention of the big shot bloggers, the post that generates the massive traffic and with that the very respectable revenue. We all seek it out, but very few ever manage to craft such a post. Fortunately we are able to live vicariously through those bloggers who have managed to cobble such a post together.

What good does that do us though? It’s great that someone else has figured it out, but all the rest of us want to figure it out as well. After some serious research and observation as well as talking to various people in the blogging community I’ve come up with a few rules of writing a (potentially) Ten Thousand Dollar Blog Post.

The post must be short

We have incredibly short attention spans as humans. With effort we can concentrate on something for hours, but our blog reading experience shouldn’t require effort. It should be an enjoyable intake of information. The exception to this rule is the ability to write incredible posts that although long will keep the reader engaged. One example I can think of is Maki over at Dosh Dosh who writes incredibly long posts and yet you won’t get bored reading them.

The title must catch your attention

This is a nearly timeless trick of the writing profession. A great book with a poor title will not sell, but a poor book with a great title will sell off the shelves (at least until the reviews catch up with it). Same holds true in the blogging world. Make your title catchy.

Write about what you know

Some say to write what you are passionate about, but the fact is that you can be passionate about something and yet not know a thing about it. Your readers will sense this from the beginning and abandon you at the drop of a hat the first opportunity they get. It doesn’t hurt to be passionate about the subject, but it’s better to be lukewarm and knowledgable than piping hot and a dunce.

Use short lists

The majority of blog readers like lists better than paragraphs. This makes sense as a list is much easier to absorb and process compared to a more traditional paragraph based writing style that marks other printed media such as books and magazines.

Highlight the key points

If you have key points you want to be sure to highlight them in some manner that seperates them from the rest of the content. Doing this ensures that the reader will get the overall idea even if they don’t bother to read deeper and gett the down and dirty details.

Focus on your content

If you have everything else, but lack content your post will crash and burn. It might not crash and burn initially but once people actually start to read it and find that your content is lacking they will leave. Everything else is the icing, but the content is the flour and eggs which make up the cake batter. Without content you might as well not even bother to post.

Notice in all of the key points above I never once mentioned monetization. That’s because I’ve come to realize that monetization should really be a secondardy concern. Not because we shouldn’t want to make money blogging, but because a blog with all of the above will attract readers which will in turn attract revenue from various sources.

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